The total number of coronavirus positive cases in India jumped further to 166 on Thursday. With Maharashtra registering the highest number cases (45), Mumbai’s civic body, Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, is preparing to quarantine 26,000 Indians who will land between March 19 and 31 from different places.
A man tested positive for the disease in Chennai on Wednesday, taking Tamil Nadu’s tally to two. He had come from Delhi and did not travel abroad, raising suspicion of community transmission.
Two more positive cases emerged from the Delhi-NCR region, taking the total number of Covid-19 positive cases in the region to 19. One of the suspects, meanwhile, died after allegedly jumping from the seventh floor of the Safdarjung Hospital where he was quarantined immediately upon his arrival from Sydney on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday chaired a high-level meeting to review the efforts to contain Covid-19 outbreak. He will address the nation at 8 pm on Thursday.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that VIP status will not be tolerated as she referred to an 18-year-old who did not report to the hospital after returning from the UK. His mother is a bureaucrat.
A new study by scientists at Chennai’s Institute of Mathematical Sciences has claimed that every infected person in India is infecting another 1.7 people on an average. This is remarkably lower than what has been observed in other countries, the study said.
“We have never lived through anything like this,” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told a nearly empty chamber of country’s Parliament on Wednesday.
The government in Italy, which has become the coronavirus hotspot, is mulling ban on all outdoor exercise to contain the spread of Covid-19. The country on Wednesday reported nearly 500 new deaths from the novel coronavirus, the highest one-day official toll of any nation.
Stocks fell in Tokyo, Sydney and Seoul in early trading on Thursday. Markets have been skidding as fears of a prolonged coronavirus-induced recession take hold.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 1,300 points, or 6.3 per cent on Tuesday. It has now given up nearly all of its gains since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
With the number of global coronavirus infections shooting past 200,000, governments announced new containment measures and the US Congress approved a $100 billion emergency relief package. Trump declared himself as ‘war president’.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday called the new coronavirus an “enemy against humanity”, as worldwide fatalities topped 8,000. “This coronavirus is presenting us with an unprecedented threat,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in a virtual news conference on Wednesday.
He also said WHO was launching a “solidarity trial” of five proposed treatments for the virus across 10 countries to figure out which was most effective.
Meanwhile, China on Thursday reported zero new local infection of the novel coronavirus in the past 24 hours, for the first time since the Covid-19 crisis broke out, a turning point in Beijing’s fight against the outbreak.