Posted on

Number of Cases of Covid19 crosses 1.11 crore across India while the death toll crosses 1.57 lakh

covid-19-coronaviruses

India’s Covid-19 tally surpassed 1.11 crore on Monday with 15,510 new infections, while the active cases registered an increase for the fifth consecutive day and were recorded at 1,68,627, according to the Union Health Ministry data.

The total coronavirus cases reached 1,11,12,241 in the country, while the death toll rose to 1,57,157 with 106 new fatalities, the data updated at 8 am on Monday showed.

Also See: New mutants of Coronavirus

The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 1,07,86,457, which translates to a national Covid recovery rate of 97.07 percent, it stated. The case fatality rate has dropped to 1.41 percent.

Also Read: Two vaccines approved: Other vaccine candidates in India apart from Covishied and Covaxin

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, a total of 21,68,58,774 samples have been tested for coronavirus till February 28, with 6,27,668 samples being tested on Sunday.

The 106 new fatalities include 62 from Maharashtra, 15 from Kerala, seven from Punjab and five from Karnataka.

A total of 1,57,157 deaths have been reported so far in the country, including 52,154 from Maharashtra, 12,496 from Tamil Nadu, 12,331 from Karnataka, 10,910 from Delhi, 10,268 from West Bengal, 8,725 from Uttar Pradesh, and 7,169 from Andhra Pradesh.

 (PTI)

Posted on

Serosurvey in three districts of Telangana reveals a slow transmission rate for Covid-19

The number of Covid-19 cases is on a rise in India. Serosurveys are conducted nationwide to record the number of infected people in a defined population. One such serosurvey was conducted in Telangana for the second time, to test the number of actively infected people in the state on August 26 and August 27, 2020.

This survey was conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research – National Institute of Nutrition (ICMR-NIN) in Kamareddy, Jangaon, and Nalgonda districts. It was declared that the transmission rate of the virus has slowed down.

Thirty people out of 433 people whose samples were collected, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies, making it 0.9% of the total collected samples in Kamareddy district. The first round of serosurvey in this district recorded for 0.25% proportion of infected individuals.

In Jangaon, out of 454 people, only 83 tested positive for the virus. This makes it approximately 18.2% of the total samples collected. This percentage was 0.5% in May 2020, which was during the first round of the serosurvey.

Nalgonda recorded for 11.1% infected people, that is, 47 infected people out of 422. This percentile was 0.25% in May 2020 and seemed to have increased since then.

The survey was conducted following the ICMR guidelines, according to which, 10 wards or villages must be selected in each district or village. For conducting the study, any 16 households were selected randomly by the officials in these 3 districts. Individuals of the age above 10 years were tested for the survey. In total, 1309 such people were studied and tested from these districts in Telangana.

As per the NIN, even if the transmission rate is slow, many people in these districts are still susceptible to Covid-19 infection. Therefore, residents of this area must follow all the preventive measures carefully, such as wearing face masks, covering the mouth and nose while coughing or sneezing, carrying portable hand sanitizers among other steps.

The author is a student member of Amity center of Happiness. 

Posted on

Parliament’s Monsoon session may get pushed to Sept, due to rise in Covid Cases-19

Owing to continued rise in Covid-19 cases in India, the chances of safely starting proceedings for the much-awaited monsoon session of Parliament in August are seem to be less. It is more likely to start in the month of September, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

In order to finalise the dates for the session, India’s top legislative authorities, including Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla, are keeping a close watch on the status of the pandemic in the Capital and elsewhere. Delhi’s improvement in recent weeks gives a glimmer of hope but greater progress in the Capital’s fight against Covid-19, and some measure of control in other parts of the country may be needed to ensure suitable attendance by members, the people cited above indicated.

Parliament has a window till September 23 to start the monsoon session, as under the Indian Constitution, the duration between the end of one session and the start of the next cannot exceed six months, after the budget session ended on March 23, two days before a 68-day national lockdown kicked in.

Officials involved in the planning of the session say they would require at least four weeks to put the arrangements in place, Once the dates are finalised.

The major challenge here is logistic issue because scheduling the session will require special Covid-19 arrangements – from the seating of MPs to ensure social distancing, to the timing of the proceedings in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha, which are likely to work in shifts to avoid crowding.

“There’s not a heavy business to transact. The priority of the government is to clear the ordinances promulgated in the past few months and the Opposition might press for debates on the Covid-19 pandemic and the Indo-China border conflict,” said a second official involved in the preparations.

According to a third official, ”Naidu inform the home ministry that government officials don’t have to isolate themselves after travelling to other places. If they can be exempted from isolation for doing official duty, MPs too travelling on official duty should be given the same exemptions. The home ministry has agreed,” a third official said.

Giant screens to beam parliamentary proceedings, with engineers from the National Informatics Centre on call, and provisions for possible latency — these are among the issues Naidu and Birla and their teams are discussing.