India breaks records with new Covid-19 cases

 

India recorded 314,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday, surpassing global records and reaching a positive test rate as high as 30 percent in Delhi. While a Covid-19 resurgence was all but inevitable after India’s strict lockdown ended last year, the size and scope of new cases in recent weeks has been blamed in part on government inaction. [CNN / Jessie Yeung and Vedika Sud] Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has continued to tour the country and hold rallies for his 2022 reelection campaign, on Saturday held a maskless, outdoor rally in West Bengal. That same day, 234,000 cases were recorded in India. It's a number that's only risen since. [The Guardian / Hannah Ellis-Petersen] India has now recorded 16 million Covid-19 cases, the second-highest total in the world, and has only vaccinated a tiny portion of its population despite being home to the Serum Institute, the world’s top vaccine producer by quantity. India’s 184,000 Covid related deaths are behind only the US, Mexico, and Brazil. [Bloomberg / Bhuma Shrivastava and Upmanyu Trivedi] But all these counts are likely the tip of the iceberg. Epidemiologists believe the real case count could be 10 to 30 times higher than observed counts, because of weak testing apparatuses outside India's largest cities. A December serological survey found 21 percent of Indians were carrying Covid-19 antibodies. [The Economist] It’s a bit of a mystery. Scientists believed new Covid-19 waves in Indian cities would be partially slowed by immunity among those previously infected. [Scientific American / Smriti Mallapaty]

‘Worst Is Over,’ Cuomo Says as States Snub Trump on Restarting Economy. UPDATES

Northeastern governors ally to plan for lifting virus restrictions, and Western states also announce they will work together to plan for the future.


With the number of new deaths and rate of hospitalizations falling in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday that “the worst is over” in the coronavirus pandemic, and he announced an alliance with six other Northeastern governors to explore how to eventually lift restrictions — a move that appeared to be an implicit rebuke to President Trump.

The governors from New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts and Rhode Island said they would begin to draw up a plan for when to reopen businesses and schools, and how quickly to allow people to return to work safely, although the timeline for such a plan remained unclear.


“If you do it wrong, it can backfire, and we’ve seen that with other places in the globe,” Mr. Cuomo said. “What the art form is going to be here is doing that smartly and doing that in a coordinated way.”


India extends nationwide lockdown, ordering more than 1 billion people to remain at home.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India extended a nationwide lockdown on Tuesday for nearly three more weeks, preventing more than 1 billion from leaving their homes.

He lauded  the country for acting aggressively against the coronavirus and urged Indians not to “let our guard down.”

In an address to the nation, Mr. Modi said extending the existing 21-day lockdown until May 3 was necessary to prevent a spike in cases and that tougher restrictions could follow. He applauded Indians for following the measures “like a dedicated soldier.”

“If you look at it only economically, it has been expensive,” Mr. Modi said of the lockdown. “But you can’t put a price on the lives of Indians.”

Mr. Modi said some relaxations to the lockdown could be implemented after April 20 in certain areas if they showed strict observance of the rules. But for now he urged all 1.3 billion Indians to wear masks, stay inside, respect health care workers and help older people.

India has a relatively low number of confirmed infections, with about 10,000 cases, 339 deaths and a doubling rate of about six days. But a rapid spread could be devastating. Health care facilities are poor, and hundreds of millions of Indians live in dense urban areas, making it difficult to follow social distancing.

Thousands of migrant workers were initially trapped in big cities, far from their home villages. Some embarked on hundred-mile journeys by foot to reach their homes.

“If we have patience, we will defeat the coronavirus,” he said.



Cuomo: ‘The worst is over’ if New Yorkers remain resolute.

“I believe the worst is over if we continue to be smart,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily briefing. “I believe we can start on the path to normalcy.”

But the governor wavered on the pronouncement several times. Asked a follow-up question at the briefing about whether he was confident the worst was indeed over, Mr. Cuomo said he was not. He repeated that the state was experiencing plateaus in key categories, but that if New Yorkers did not continue to follow the current restrictions, the situation would worsen.

He said the number of deaths, while “basically flat,” was “basically flat at a horrific level of pain and grief and sorrow.”

Still, despite there being more than 5,000 virus-related deaths in the state in the past week and nearly 19,000 people still in hospitals, Mr. Cuomo noted that most of the main measures of the outbreak’s severity were either leveling off or decreasing:

The state’s one-day toll of 671 deaths, while still “horrific,” Mr. Cuomo said, was the lowest it had been in a week. The total has been below last week’s peak, 799, for the past four days.

The number of intubated patients — most of whom, he said, would never recover — had dropped in two of the past three days.

The number of newly hospitalized patients, 1,958, was the lowest it had been in two weeks.

The three-day average increase in the number of hospitalized patients dropped to 85, the smallest increase to date.

The number of people who tested positive for the virus on Sunday, 6,337, was the lowest it has been in almost three weeks. The state has 195,031 confirmed virus cases, 106,673 of them in New York City.

Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have emphasized for the past several days that any return to a semblance of normal life in the city and state will proceed in phases, during which  restrictions will be eased based on measurable progress against the virus.

The governor on Monday said that even if he were correct that the worst had passed, it could easily take 12 to 18 months for the state’s economy to return to normal.

Over 20 N.Y.C. public schoolteachers have died of the virus.

The virus has caused the deaths of at least 50 Education Department employees, including 21 teachers, in New York City, officials said on Monday.

The dead include Sandra Santos-Vizcaino, 54, a third-grade teacher at Public School 9 in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, who died March 31, and Dez-Ann Romain, the principal at Brooklyn Democracy Academy in the Brownsville section. She died on March 23 at 36.

Among the other Education Department employees who have died, 22 were paraprofessionals who provided support for children with disabilities, and two were school administrators. The dead also included a guidance counselor, a member of the food staff, and two employees at the department’s central office.



Virus-related hospital admissions dropped in N.Y.C., the mayor said.

The number of virus patients admitted to hospitals in New York City dropped 17 percent from Saturday to Sunday, Mr. de Blasio said early Monday.

The mayor said that 383 people had been admitted on Sunday, down from 463 the day before.

In other encouraging news, Mr. de Blasio said that the number of people in intensive-care units in the city’s public hospitals had also declined, although only slightly, to 835 from 857.

The developments came as the mayor unveiled a new public effort to track the three measures he has said must move downward consistently and in unison for New York City to lift the restrictions that have shut down the city.

The measure are: the number of people suspected of having the virus who are admitted to hospitals; the number of people suspected of having the virus who are admitted to intensive care units; and the percentage of people who test positive for the virus.

“I’m pleased to report we do see all the important indicators moving in the right direction,” the mayor said. But as he has for several days, he emphasized that any change in the city’s restrictions was also contingent on more widespread testing than was currently available.

Other highlights from the mayor’s morning briefing included:

The suspension of alternate-side parking rules has been extended to April 28.

He called on the Rent Guidelines Board to enact a rent freeze.

He urged the state to let tenants who have lost income because of the virus defer the payment of rent and repay over a 12-month period.


People who see violations of social-distancing rules will soon be able to report them by sending a photograph, along with location information, to 311.

Liberal challenger defeats conservative incumbent in Wisconsin Supreme Court race

A liberal challenger defeated the conservative incumbent for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a key race at the heart of Democratic accusations that Republicans risked voters’ health and safety by going forward with last week’s elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Jill Karofsky beat Daniel Kelly, whom then-Gov. Scott Walker (R) appointed to the state’s high court in 2016. Trump endorsed Kelly and on Election Day urged Wisconsin voters “to get out and vote NOW” for the justice.

With 90 percent of returns counted, Karofsky led Kelly by more than 100,000 votes, about seven percentage points.

Heavy mail-in balloting may have upended assumptions about relative advantage; according to statistics issued Monday by the state Elections Commission, nearly 1.1 million Wisconsinites cast ballots that way, nearly as many as total turnout in last year’s Supreme Court race — and more than the total turnout in the court races in each of the previous two years.

GOP maneuvering could ultimately prove to be a miscalculation, especially if a spike in coronavirus infections becomes apparent in the coming days that can be attributed to in-person voting last week.

Republicans entered the election with a 5-2 majority on the state Supreme Court, meaning that a Democratic victory still leaves liberals in the minority until 2023, the next time a conservative justice will face voters.

But an ongoing legal battle over a voter roll purge raised the stakes of this year’s election, with implications for November. Kelly recused himself, and conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn sided with voting rights groups to halt the purge. That left the court deadlocked 3-3 and gave Democrats a shot at stopping the purge, one of their top priorities ahead of the 2020 election.


Trump’s propaganda-laden, off-the-rails coronavirus briefing

Near the start of his daily coronavirus briefing on Monday, President Trump made a statement that betrayed, better than just about anything, how he views the purpose of such briefings.

Before playing a campaign-style video intended to show his decisive action on the virus and to accuse his critics of being the actual culprits on downplaying the threat, Trump cued it up by talking about what he wanted to do after it played.

“Most importantly,” he said, “we’re going to get back on to the reason we’re here, which is the success we’re having.”

Trump’s self-promotion, falsehoods and use of dodgy medical advice in these coronavirus briefings have led to a dialogue about whether networks should carry them live. And on Monday, he seemed to be daring all of them to stop, turning the whole thing into a spectacle of government-produced propaganda and even more personal score-settling and grievances.

Most notable was the video that was played. In it, media figures were shown early in the outbreak comparing the virus to the seasonal flu, as Trump has been criticized for doing much later on. Other clips played up the impact of his ban on travel from China, while yet more showed Trump personally making pronouncements about the steps he was taking — even at a time he was repeatedly and much more strongly downplaying the threat of the virus.

Trump was pressed on the production of the video, and he said it was made by White House officials.

Trump proceeded to downplay many complaints about the federal response, going so far as to say that there is no problem with the number of ventilators and other equipment available. The reality is significantly different, according to the states.

Trump also at one point maintained, “Everything we did was right.” When pressed on the claim, he declined to restate it but cast blame on governors for not stockpiling more ventilators.

It was soon noted that the video Trump had cued up left out a significant chunk of time in February — after the China travel ban and before Trump acknowledged the severity of the situation in mid-March — in which he didn’t take significant steps.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has rebuked President Trump's claims that he has blanket authority to order a reopening of the country and cease stay-at-home orders, saying Monday night that the last time he checked the US had 'a constitution...not a king'. In a heated press conference inside the White House on Monday evening, Trump asserted that his office holds 'absolute power' over the shutdowns prompted by the novel coronavirus outbreak, hours after Cuomo and governors from eight other states unveiled their own multi-state pact to co-ordinate their eventual re-openings. 'When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,' Trump told reporters, declining to specify where his authority to overrule states resides when pressed by DailyMail.com. 'The federal government has absolute power.' But Trump's claims of total authority were quickly refuted by Cuomo, who slammed the president's 'abrogation of the Constitution' in an interview on MSNBC.

New York’s virus case count is doubling every three days. UPDATES

Coronavirus is accelerating its spread in New York, with potentially disastrous consequences, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday.

The case count is doubling every three days, and the peak of infection in New York could come as soon as two to three weeks, Mr. Cuomo said, outrunning earlier projections and threatening to put even bigger strain on the health care system than officials had feared.

“We haven’t flattened the curve. And the curve is actually increasing,” Mr. Cuomo said from the Javits Center in Manhattan, a convention complex that the Army Corps of Engineers is turning into a 1,000-bed emergency hospital.

“The apex is higher than we thought and the apex is sooner than we thought. That is a bad combination of facts.”

Mr. Cuomo, who last week adopted a friendly tone toward President Trump, got as close as he has to chastising the federal government, which has so far sent 400 ventilators to New York City.

“You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators,” Mr. Cuomo said. “What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You’re missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude.”

The governor said the state now projects that it may need as many as 140,000 hospital beds to house virus patients, up from the 110,000 projected a few days ago. As of now, only 53,000 are available.

Up to 40,000 intensive-care beds could be needed.

“Those are troubling and astronomical numbers,” Mr. Cuomo said.
As of Tuesday morning, New York State had 25,665 cases, with at least 157 deaths. The state now accounts for nearly 7 percent of global cases tallied by The New York Times.

Some 13 percent of people who have tested positive were hospitalized as of Tuesday with nearly a quarter of those hospitalized in intensive care.

“That’s the problem,” Mr. Cuomo said. “As the number of cases go up, the number of people in hospital beds goes up, the number of people who need an I.C.U. bed and a ventilator goes up, and we cannot address that increasing curve.”

In New York City alone, there have been around 15,000 cases.

Mr. Cuomo said that New York was a harbinger for the rest of the country.

“Look at us today,” he warned. “Where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”

White House: Anyone who has left New York should self-quarantine.

Experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force expressed alarm on Tuesday over infection rates in New York City, and advised  people who have passed through or left the city to place themselves into 14-day quarantine.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, said new infection hot spots on Long Island indicate that people leaving the city are already spreading the virus.

“Everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure the virus doesn’t spread to others no matter where they have gone, whether it’s Florida, North Carolina or out to far reaches of Long Island,” she said.

New York City is now being treated the way parts of China and Europe have been viewed, as an epidemiological hot zone. On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida expanded his efforts to quarantine visitors from New York, saying he would sign an order extending a self-isolation requirement to anyone who had traveled from the New York area in the last three weeks. Dr. Birx said that about 60 percent of all the new cases in the country were coming out of the metro New York area.

Trump expresses outrage at having to ‘close the country’ to curb the spread of the virus.


Even as nations from Britain to India declare nationwide economic lockdowns, President Trump said he “would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” less than three weeks away, a goal that top health professionals have called far too quick.

“I think it’s possible, why not?” he said with a shrug.

Participating in a town hall hosted by Fox News on Tuesday, he expressed outrage about having to “close the country” to curb the spread of the coronavirus and indicated that his guidelines on business shutdowns and social distancing would soon be lifted.

“I gave it two weeks,” he said, adding, “We can socially distance ourselves and go to work.”

But at a late afternoon news conference, he softened his tone, saying his priority is the health and safety of the American people.

At the  news conference, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sought to refine Mr. Trump’s Easter timeline, saying it would not pertain to hot spots like New York. There could be “flexibility in different areas” based on data, he said.

”We need to know what’s going on in those areas in the country where there isn’t an obvious outbreak,” Dr. Fauci said. “It’s a flexible situation.”

Other health experts, however, have warned that a patchwork state-by-state approach alone could not contain a virus that doesn’t respect state borders.

Both Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence said that a lockdown had never been under consideration for the United States. Mr. Pence told Fox News viewers that talk of it was misinformation that has circulated online.

“I can tell you that at no point has the White House coronavirus task force discussed a nationwide lockdown,” he said, answering a question from a viewer on the phone.

Mr. Trump fell back on his comparison of the coronavirus to the flu, saying that despite losing thousands of people to the flu, “We don’t turn the country off.”

States including California, Maryland, Illinois and Washington have declared stay-at-home or shutdown orders, but other states have been looking for directives from the Trump administration. And countries in Asia are beginning to see a resurgence of coronavirus after easing up on restrictions.

Democrats near a deal with the White House on the stimulus package.

Top Democrats and Trump administration officials said they were optimistic about finalizing an agreement on Tuesday on a roughly $2 trillion economic stabilization plan to respond to the pandemic, after striking a tentative deal to add oversight requirements for a $500 billion government bailout fund for distressed companies.

“We’re looking forward to closing a bipartisan deal today,” Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, told reporters as he arrived on Capitol Hill for a round of meetings on Tuesday morning.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said there was “real optimism that we could get something done in the next few hours” after Democrats won crucial concessions from the Trump administration.

In an interview on CNBC, she said the emerging deal would include strict oversight over the bailout fund, including installing an inspector general to monitor it, as well as what Ms. Pelosi described as a congressional panel “appointed by us to provide constraint.” The measures are similar to those put in place as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the centerpiece of the Wall Street bailout enacted in 2008 to respond to the financial meltdown.

The New York City police have begun to enforce social distancing rules.

The New York City police have begun a new series of patrols to ensure that  residents are practicing appropriate social distancing.

On Sunday, in the span of three hours, the patrols issued at least 50 warnings to restaurants, bars, supermarkets and salons, as well as people crowding in public spaces, the department said.

“We have to keep people separated,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on “Fox and Friends” Monday morning. “So our men and women of the N.Y.P.D. will be out there spreading the message, telling people to break it up, move along, no lines tight together in a grocery store, no grocery stores full up,”

A White House official is troubled by the ‘attack rate’ in New York.

NY TIMES

The White House’s coronavirus response coordinator offered a grim assessment of the virus’s assault on the New York metropolitan area Monday evening: She said that nearly one in 1,000 people in the region had contracted the virus, an “attack rate” five times that of other areas of the country.

The coordinator, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, said at a White House briefing that the rate of infection showed that the virus must have been spreading for weeks “to have this level of penetrance into the general community.”

She added that 28 percent of tests for the coronavirus in the region were coming up positive, while the rate was less than 8 percent in the rest of the country.

“To all of my friends and colleagues in New York, this is the group that needs to absolutely social distance and self-isolate at this time,” Dr. Birx said.

In epidemiology, the attack rate is the percentage of a population that has a disease. New York State now has an attack rate similar to Italy’s. In New York City itself, the attack rate works out to about one case for every 650 residents.

Losing sense of smell may be a hidden symptom of coronavirus, doctors warn

WASHINGTON POST

While every case is different, the telltale symptoms of the novel coronavirus have been widely agreed upon — a high fever, persistent cough or shortness of breath. In the most severe instances, those afflicted have reported confusion or difficulty breathing, and sometimes, anxiety is the most prevailing symptom of all.

But a team of British ear, nose and throat doctors on Friday raised the possibility of a new indicator of the coronavirus, one they say has been observed globally, even in patients who are otherwise asymptomatic: anosmia, a condition that causes the loss of sense of smell. In a statement, they warned that adults experiencing recent anosmia could be unknown carriers of covid-19, and urged them to consider self-isolation.

“All of this evidence is accumulating very rapidly, but there’s nothing yet robustly in print,” Claire Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, said in an interview. “Since then, I’ve had colleagues from around the world saying: ‘That’s exactly what we’re seeing.’ They’ve been trying [to raise awareness], but it hasn’t been picked up.”

Experts at the World Health Organization say they have not yet confirmed the loss of smell or taste as a symptom of the coronavirus but haven’t ruled it out.

Hopkins, who published the statement along with Nirmal Kumar, the president of ENT UK, a body that represents ear, nose and throat specialists in Britain, said she was driven by recent discussions on rhinological discussion boards related to the coronavirus pandemic. There, she observed ENTs reporting a surge of reported anosmia across their patients, and even among themselves.

In their statement, Hopkins and Kumar cited reports from South Korea, China, Iran and Italy, where, they wrote, “significant numbers of patients with proven covid-19 infection have developed anosmia/hyposmia,” the latter of which signals a reduced ability to detect smells. In Germany, they wrote, more than two-thirds of confirmed coronavirus cases included anosmia. And in South Korea, a country that has seen ample covid-19 testing, “30 percent of patients testing positive have had anosmia as their major presenting symptom in otherwise mild cases.”

India’s prime minister decreed a 21-day lockdown for the country of 1.3 billion.

India, the world’s second-most populous country, will order its 1.3 billion people to stay inside their homes for three weeks to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared on Tuesday.

The extensive lockdown order was declared a day after the authorities there grounded all domestic flights.

Mr. Modi said the decree would take effect at midnight.

“There will be a total ban of coming out of your homes,” Mr. Modi said.

“Every district, every lane, every village will be under lockdown,” he said. “If you can’t handle these 21 days, this country will go back 21 years.”

“The only option is social distancing, to remain away from each other,” he said. “There is no way out to escape from coronavirus besides this.”

Left unclear was how Indians would be able to get food and other needed supplies. Mr. Modi alluded vaguely to the government and civil society groups stepping in to help, but offered no details.

Though India’s number of reported coronavirus cases remains relatively low, around 500, the fear is that if the virus hits as it has in the United States, Europe or China, it could be a disaster far bigger than anywhere else.

As Protests Rage, India Moves Closer to Becoming a Hindu Nation.

Several people have been killed as unrest spreads to new corners of the country. Many see the passage of a new law as anti-Muslim.

NY TIMES

Modi and B.J.P. Make History in India. Gandhi Concedes.

With a commanding lead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party are set to expand their majority. “India wins yet again!” he posted on Twitter.

NY TIMES

INDIAN ARMY: RAPE US

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS   Tariq Ali 8 January 2013

The rape in Delhi has shocked India. Has it really? Or was it the sight of thousands of young students, male and female, demonstrating on the streets and being assaulted by the police for daring to demonstrate that made some Indian citizens think seriously about the problem? As for the Congress government that has, like most of the opposition parties, tolerated this for decades, it was the bad publicity abroad that finally did the trick, but only as far as this case is concerned.
Rape takes place in police stations, in military barracks, in the streets and occasionally in some provincial parliaments. The feminist Communist parliamentarian Brinda Karat, who has long campaigned on the issue, pointed to the assault of a member of the Trinamool assembly by a male oppositionist on 11 December last year. ‘Women were not safe even inside the assembly,’ she said.
Legal activists in Kashmir and Manipur, occupied by the Indian Army, have produced report after report highlighting cases of women raped by soldiers. Response from the top brass: nil. In a country where the culture of rape is so embedded, only a determined effort on every level can change things. This will not happen if this case and others are forgotten.

In 2004, a group of middle-aged mothers were so enraged by the military raping their daughters and sisters that they organised a protest unique in the annals of the women’s movement. They gathered outside the Indian Army barracks, stripped, and held up a banner that read ‘Indian Army Rape Us.’ That image, too, shocked India, but nothing changed. Only a few weeks later another rape scandal erupted in Manipur. If the Indian state is incapable of defending its women, perhaps the world’s largest democracy should seriously consider a change of name. Rapeistan comes to mind.