巴拉特

作者： bharat.cn

  • The nationwide tally of confirmed Coronavirus cases crossed the 1,000-mark and the death toll reached 29 on Sunday

    The nationwide tally of confirmed Coronavirus cases crossed the 1,000-mark and the death toll reached 29 on Sunday, even as the central government ordered sealing of all state and district borders to check community transmission of the deadly virus by migrant workers and asked those having left already to be quarantined for 14 days.

    The national capital alone reported 23 fresh positive cases, taking its count to 72, while more people tested positive in adjoining Noida as also in Maharashtra and Bihar, among other states.

    2 ARMYMEN TEST POSITIVE

    The new cases included a SpiceJet pilot with no history of international travel and also a doctor and a junior commissioned officer in the Indian Army.

    The Colonel-rank doctor is serving at the Command Hospital in Kolkata while the JCO is posted to an Army base in Dehradun.

    Sources said the Army has traced all those who have come in contact with the two persons and accordingly they were quarantined. The two are understood to have visited an Army facility near the national capital earlier this month.

    The total number of positive cases has increased by 201 in the last 24 hours to reach 1,010 and nine more persons died in this period to take the nationwide toll to 27, according to the latest official figures.

    LOCKDOWN DAY 5: NO END TO MIGRANT EXODUS

    As the 21-day lockdown entered its 5th day, the exodus of migrant workers from big cities continued unabated, desperate to return to their villages after being left jobless and many of them without food or shelter.

    Charitable organisations, volunteers, religious institutions and government bodies including Railway Protection Force fed tens of thousands of people across the nation but many more remained outside the safety net.

     

    POOR FEAR HUNGER MORE THAN VIRUS

    A panic-like situation emerged due to mass exodus of migrant workers from various parts of the country, including the national capital, Maharashtra and Kerala, where a large number of people came out of relief camps and demanded being allowed to go to their homes.

    A migrant worker reportedly died of a heart attack in Uttar Pradesh after walking more than 200 km on way to his hometown in Madhya Pradesh from Delhi.

    “People are talking about the danger of some virus which can kill all of us. I don’t understand all these. As a mother, I am pained when I cannot feed my children. No one is there to help. All are equally worried about their lives,” Savitri, 30, a New Delhi slum dweller, told PTI as she walked along the Mathura Highway carrying her belongings on her head.

    “We will die of hunger before any disease if we stay here,” she said, determined to walk 400 km to her village in Uttar Pradesh’s Kannauj district.

    Hundreds of migrant workers also gathered again near the Anand Vihar terminus near the Delhi-UP border, hoping to board buses to their villages but they were turned back by police. A large number were seen walking in groups on highways and even on railway tracks.

    PM MODI SHARES MANN KI BAAT, APOLOGISES TO COUNTRY

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio broadcast, sought the nation’s forgiveness for the hardships caused by the stringent nationwide lockdown, saying it was necessary because the country was fighting a battle between life and death.

    He, however, expressed confidence that “we will definitely win the battle” against the coronavirus menace and praised the front-line workers in this fight against as well as countless workers delivering the essential services.

    The government announced some more exemptions to the lockdown by allowing movement of all goods, irrespective of those being in essential or non-essential categories.

  • Punjab Police commando patrol in the front of Hall Gate during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the Covid-19 coronavirus in Amritsar on March 26, 2020

    At least 15,000 people who may have caught the coronavirus from a ‘super-spreader’ guru are under strict quarantine in northern India after the Sikh religious leader died of Covid-19.

     

    The 70-year-old guru, Baldev Singh, had returned from a trip to Europe’s virus epicentre Italy and Germany when he went preaching in more than a dozen villages in Punjab state.

     

    It has sparked one of India’s most serious alerts related to the pandemic and special food deliveries are being made to each household under even tighter restrictions than the 21-day nationwide stay-at-home order imposed by the government.

     

    “The first of these 15 villages was sealed on March 18, and we think there are 15,000 to 20,000 people in the sealed villages,” said Gaurav Jain, a senior magistrate for the district of Banga, where Singh lived.

     

    “There are medical teams on standby and regular monitoring,” he told AFP on Friday.

     

    Nineteen people who were in contact with the preacher have already tested positive for the new virus, said Vinay Bublani, a local deputy police commissioner.

     

    Results are being awaited from more than 200 others.

     

    The guru and his two associates — who have also tested positive — ignored self-isolation orders on their return from Europe, and were on their preaching tour until Singh fell ill and died.

     

    The case has stunned India and a popular Punjabi singer based in Canada, Sidhu Moose Wala, released a song about Singh that has been viewed on YouTube more than 2.3 million times in less than two days.

     

    “I passed on the disease… roaming around the village like a shadow of death,” say the lyrics to the song, which Punjab’s police chief Dinkar Gupta has encouraged people to listen to as a warning.

     

    With 873 confirmed coronavirus cases and 19 deaths, India’s toll is lower than other countries afflicted by the pandemic, but experts say many infections have not been detected due to a lack of testing.

  • Indians maintain safe distance as they queue to buy vegetables during a 21-day lockdown

    Indians maintain safe distance as they queue to buy vegetables during a 21-day lockdown

    Indians maintain safe distance as they queue to buy vegetables during a 21-day lockdown

    With its 21-day lockdown, India joined a long list of nations taking extraordinary steps to battle Covid-19 — and its results will determine the future of this worldwide pandemic. Can India help the world avert major catastrophe?
    Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the unprecedented move on Tuesday to put “the entire country on lockdown” for three weeks until April 14. The PM told Indians that saving lives is his “first priority,” requested that people stay inside and reiterated that social distancing is the only way to break the cycle of the infection, which has spread rapidly around the world. “Step outside your house in the next 21 days and you will set the country back by 21 years,” Modi warned.

    This is no exaggeration. Indeed, with a population of over 1.3 billion people, how India responds to this crisis now could determine the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic for the entire world. The future of the outbreak largely depends on what happens in large and densely populated countries like India, according to Dr. Michael J Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme. Dr. Ryan cautioned on Monday that India must continue to take “aggressive action at the public health level and at the level of society to contain, control, suppress this disease and save lives.”

    India’s Covid-19 challenges
    It’s no surprise that India faces several major hurdles in its fight against Covid-19; insufficient healthcare funding, lack of clean water and hygiene facilities in several regions and the aforementioned high-density population, to name a few. It is estimated that around 420 people live on each square kilometer of land in many of the country’s largest cities — a situation which undoubtedly makes “social distancing” and “self-isolation” impossible without a strictly enforced lockdown policy — and even then, it will still be difficult.

    An effective law governing public healthcare is another glaring gap in India’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. While the government has declared the disease a “notified disaster” under the Disaster Management Act – giving certain overriding powers to the central government over states and enabling more funds to be allocated to the crisis — the truth is that India lacks dedicated legislation for a pandemic situation. The primary law it resorts to in governing healthcare emergencies is the 123-year-old colonial-era Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, which was enacted to fight the bubonic plague.

    India’s preparedness to deal with the global pandemic therefore immediately appears inadequate, especially when viewed in the context of how badly developed countries like Italy, Spain, and the United States are faring — even with their relatively lower population densities and more advanced healthcare systems.