作者： bharat.cn

This one executive decision was deemed at first to be a no-brainer. Perhaps a faint dread preceded it, blended with a resigned sense of inevitability—as if for an elemental event beyond our control, the way we may anticipate news of a solar eclipse sweeping the land that would offer no clear promise of when the sun would shine again. Still, for a country blessed with frighteningly fractious opinions on everything, there had been near-unanimity on this. No political party, no social segment, no corporate lobby, nor even any healthcare expert had offered a serious objection. Stunningly simple at one level, it was also profound in the way it straitened our primary conditions of living. Poets, historians and sociologists will have their say another day. But the immediate, practical question is: did it work? As Week 9, 10 and 11 of the lockdown saw public transport and air travel thaw out messily from a freeze—as India daily counts a new crest in numbers, and balks at counting the social and economic costs of internal migration on a never-before scale—one prediction can be safely made. This question will be hotly debated even months from now, in ever-new forms. Questions proper to governance in the socio-economic realm cannot really be delinked from the growth path of an epidemic—they are connected inextricably. But they are also subject to opinions beyond the scope of medicine proper. The original question still stands: was the lockdown effective in controlling the India story of COVID-19?

Health department officials of Ladakh are saying that the region is witnessing a sharp rise in Covid-19 positive cases due to an inflow of people coming back from different parts of the country as lockdown eases.

A health department official said 104 people tested positive for Covid-19 in Ladakh on Friday, with 36 from Leh and 69 are from Kargil. With this, the number of Covid-19 active cases in Ladakh has gone up to 176, comprising 74 in Leh and 102 in Kargil district.

Even on June 3, there were only 33 active cases of Covid-19 in Ladakh.

“There is an inflow of stranded people back to Ladakh. Most of them are elderly. They are not tested in Delhi as a large number of them cannot afford testing in Delhi and other places, and we see the rise in the Covid-19 cases because of them,” said the official. He said many students have also returned.

Health department officials, however, say all 176 active cases of Covid-19 in the Ladakh region are stable. They said 57 samples were sent to NCDC New Delhi for testing on Friday.

On June 8, a Joint Deputy Director of the ITBF and his five-year-old child tested positive for COVID-19 in Leh. According to officials, the sample of the child was collected after he complained of fever. The family members of the officer had reached Leh on May 30 by an Air India flight from Delhi and later they had visited different places and had met the senior functionaries of the government. The district magistrate Leh, Sachin Kumar Vaishya on June 9 placed the ITBF officer’s mess near the main market in Leh under containment.

The DM’s order says, “the objective of this cluster containment is to stop transmission, morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19.”

“Further, for the purpose of active surveillance, the whole of the containment zone shall be supervised by their own medical officers and staff nurses. All the relaxations ordered by the Ministry of Home Affairs shall not be applicable to the containment zone,” the order says.

“Joint Deputy Director, ITBF, Leh shall ensure strict home quarantine of all the contact officers, officials during the office work and meeting hours,” it adds.

Earlier in April and May Ladakh had managed to control Covid-19. The region had witnessed its first Covid-19 positive patient on February 28. It was a 68-year-old-man from Chuchot village, around 20 km from Leh. The man had returned from Iran on February 26 and developed few symptoms of COVID-19. He had started coughing and had developed high fever. He was admitted at Sonam Norboo Memorial Hospital (SNM), Leh, where his samples were taken for Covid-19 and then, he was declared the first Covid-19 positive case in the region. Later, his son, who had no travel history, had contracted the virus from his father.

Coronavirus cases have crossed the 3,00,000 threshold in India after new numbers from Maharashtra and other states came in today. The official number of total coronavirus cases, however, remains at 2.97 lakh as the Union Health Ministry’s data dashboard is updated in the morning.

The first Covid-19 case in India was reported on January 30 in Kerala. It took India more than 100 days to reach the 1 lakh-mark on May 18. The 2 lakh-mark was breached a fortnight later on June 2. The total number of Covid-19 cases in the country crossed 3 lakh in just 10 days.

In Delhi, a record number of 2,137 new cases were detected to take its tally to 36,824, while its death toll rose to 1,214, authorities said.

Maharashtra, the worst-hit state, saw its own tally cross the 1-lakh mark after 3,493 new cases were reported to take its total to 1,01,141, while its death toll rose to 3,717.

The state also reported a large number of recoveries. As many as 126 cancer patients, who had tested Covid-19 positive, have also recovered in Mumbai itself.

In Tamil Nadu, another badly hit state, the tally saw a record one-day jump of 1,982 cases to cross the 40,000-mark, while the toll reached 367.

Gujarat reported 495 new cases and 31 more fatalities, taking its case count to 22,562 and the death toll to 1,416.

Uttar Pradesh reported 20 more Covid-19 deaths and 528 fresh cases, the biggest single-day spike so far for the state. This took the state’s death toll to 365 and the case count to 12,616. However, more than 7,600 people have recovered already, giving a recovery rate of over 60 per cent.