Category: National

The Quint

An 80-year-old man was tied to a hospital bed with rope in Madhya Pradesh’s Shajapur allegedly over non-payment of the hospital bills.

Taking stock of the shocking incident, the District Collector said, “We’ve sent a team to hospital to investigate the matter. The police probe is on. Report is awaited. Action will be taken accordingly,” ANI reported.

In images shared by ANI, the old man can be seen tied to the bed with rope on his leg and hand. His daughter said,

“We had deposited a bill of Rs 5,000 at the time of admission but when the treatment took a few more days, we did not have the money to pay the bill.”

The hospital, however, has claimed that the man was having convulsions and he was tied so that he could not hurt himself, NDTV reported.

MP CM Takes Note of the Situation

Chief Minister of the state, Shivraj Singh Chouhan has promised to take strict action against the the Shajapur-based hospital.

शाजापुर के एक अस्पताल में वरिष्ठ नागरिक के साथ क्रूरतम व्यवहार का मामला संज्ञान में आया है। दोषियों को बख्शा नहीं जायेगा, सख्त से सख्त कार्रवाई की जायेगी।

— Shivraj Singh Chouhan (@ChouhanShivraj) June 6, 2020

(With inputs from ANI & NDTV)

Only demarcation is the solution: Konchok Stanzin

Leh: Konchok Stanzin Executive Councilor of Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Sunday said that the standoff between China and India will continue till Coronavirus pandemic doesn’t come to an end. He said whole world is blaming China for the spread of this lethal disease and this country is under severe pressure and coming under sharp criticism, and to divert the attention of world, it is showing aggressiveness in Ladakh.

Konchok Stanzin admitted that Chinese Army has entered into Indian Territory and it is not retreating. He said there is lot of tension among border villagers who are unable to graze their cattle due to presence of Chinese Army at Finger Four.

The commander level talks between the two armies of China and India took place yesterday in Chushul, Ladakh. Stanzin represents the same Chushul in LAHDC (Ladakh Autonouous Hill Development Council) as Executive Councillor.

He expressed his concern about the winter grazing pastures of the Line of Control at the ‘Finger Four’ of Pangong and Galvan valley of ladakh.

“There is army build-up from both sides and it is a matter of great concern. Nomads are worst sufferers as they are unable to graze their cattle. Their movement has come to a standstill,” Stazin told news agency KNT adding that most of the villagers are nomads in the region rearing Pashmina goats and grazing cattle is the life-line.

While responding to a question, Konchok Stanzin Executive Councilor of Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development said that around seven villages which are on the Line of Actual Control have become a buffer zone. He said Chinese army is not showing any sign of retreating from the region and are present at Finger Four. “There is hardly any civilian movement in Galvan valley or the Finger Four area after the build up as the entire region is cut off, he said.

He said only proper demarcation of boundary is the solution of present crisis and the solution will come out through talks. “There is no demarcation line between the two countries in Ladakh region. The claim over the grazing pastures on the border keeps changing.”

He said that though people living in town are not feeling any heat of the conflict, but border people are very anxious and want the solution of the stand-off. (KNT)

PTI

Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad on Sunday arrested an alleged arms supplier to Khalistani militants, a senior officer said.

Additional Director General of the ATS, Dhruva Kant Thakur, said, “The UP ATS has arrested Javed, an arms supplier to Khalistani militants, from Hapur. Javed is a resident of the Kithore area of Meerut. His interrogation is on and the Punjab Police has been informed about the arrest.”

Thakur said Javed has also supplied illegal arms to criminals in Amritsar.

He was arrested following an input from the state special cell, Amritsar, the ADG said.

ATS officials said a number of pro-Khalistan militants have been caught in western UP and the Punjab Police was searching Javed for quite some time.

In May, in a joint operation by the Uttar Pradesh ATS and the Special Operation Group of the Punjab Police, Tirath Singh, a suspected militant owing allegiance to the Khalistan movement was arrested from Thapar Nagar in Meerut.

He was handed over to the Punjab Police after interrogation.

New Delhi: When will the coronavirus pandemic end in India? There is no definite answer yet, but senior officials of the Health Ministry predict that the pandemic in India may go in mid-September this year.

According to Dr Anil Kumar, Deputy Director General (Public Health), Directorate General of Health Services of the Ministry of Health and Family welfare, the pandemic in India will be over in mid-September.

In his article published in Epidemiology International Journal, Kumar, along with co-author and Deputy Assistant Director General (Leprosy) of Directorate General of Health Services, Health Ministry, Rupali Roy, have predicted that the pandemic would extinguish in India in mid-September.

Their prediction is based on Bailey’s model where Relative Removal Rate (BMRRR) is considered for reaching a conclusion.

Speaking to IANS, Dr Kumar said, “There is a well-known model called Bailey’s Model. It is based on Relative Removal Rate which means how many cases are entering the pool and how many are going out of the pool. When the number of infected is equal to the number of removed patients, the coefficient will reach 100% threshold, then this pandemic will be over.”

In this model, the removal rate is calculated which is the percentage of removed persons in the infected population. Further, a regression analysis has been done to show the linear relationship between the total infection rate and the total recovery rate.

“This model is applicable on any infectious disease. Whatever you do, you will be reaching 100 per cent one day. The relative removal rate means all those who have got infection will be either cured or dead. when we did the study on May 19, it was 42% but now it is around 50 per cent and in the middle of september, it will be 100 percent,” said Kumar.

According to this mathematical calculation, taking the rate to higher and higher level is reflection of moving forward in the right direction and success of control measures being taken. The linear regression analysis has been used in this study and it is showing that the linear line is reaching 100 in the middle of September, 2020.

“So it may be interpreted that at that point of time, the number of the infected will be equal to the number of removed patients, and that’s why the coefficient will reach 100% threshold,” said the study.

“This is a very good model to support analysis and interpretation of State and District data (whenever the number of cases is high) and it will also help in relevant decision-making in control activities of COVID 19 pandemic,” said the study.

“This will further help the government to take long-term disease prevention and intervention programs,” it said.

However Kumar said all the mathematical models are not absolute and it depends upon the quality of data available.

“All states have different policies in reporting the number of cases. Some are reporting only severe cases, while some are reporting both severe and mild cases. A few states conduct less tests, thus report less cases. Therefore it is very important to report correct data for more accurate results,” said Kumar.

Talking about the implementation of lockdown in the country, Kumar said the lockdown could have yielded even better results.

“We could not achieve what we could have. However the idea of lockdown was very good, but due to various reasons, it was not so effective. Lockdown is more of an administrative decision, but the real measure needs to be taken at community level,” Kumar told IANS. “Otherwise, we can not get benefit of it, he added.

“If you allow transmission to occur and no measures are taken at community level, then it will be very difficult to control the outbreak,” Kumar said.

When asked what percentage of the population will get the infection in India, Kumar said the study does not predict the number of cases in the country. “No one can predict how much the population will get affected — it depends upon so many things such as, from now on, how people are going to maintain distancing and how public health measures will be taken in future.

“It also depends upon how different governments are going to act,” Kumar said, adding it is very much possible to prevent so many corona cases from occurring in the country.

“There should be uniformity in applying public health measures at the community level throughout the country. My model does not suggest the number of cases. I have only predicted when this will be over. The prediction depends upon the surveillance system and quality of data.” (IANS)

The arrest was made after a video footage by cow owner went viral on social media.

PTI

A man was arrested in Bilaspur district near Shimla on Saturday on an allegation by the owner of a pregnant cow that he injured the bovine by feeding her some eatables mixed with explosives, said police.

The incident follows the shocking death of a pregnant elephant who drowned after collapsing in Velliyar river in Palakkad district of Kerala due to starvation and exhaustion. She had been found dead with major injuries in her oral cavities, possibly suffered after eating or having been fed firecrackers-stuffed pineapple.

The arrest was made after a video footage by cow owner Gurdial Singh, accusing his neighbour Nand Lal Dhiman of Dahad village in Bilaspur district, of being behind injuries to the pregnant animal last month, went viral on social media.

Bilaspur Superintendent of Police Dewakar Sharma said Nand Lal was arrested on Saturday from his village Dahad.

Police had visited the crime spot in the village along with a medical team, which examined the cow whose mouth and jaw were found heavily injured, the SP said, adding the cow was given prompt medical aid .

The wounds appeared to have been inflicted by some explosive material that people in rural areas use to deter animals from damaging their crops, said Mr. Sharma, adding the medical team has collected some samples of the cow’s blood and injured skin near the jaw for further forensic tests.

The SP said the police had registered a case in this regard on May 26 itself in response to cow owner Gurdial Singh’s complaint dated May 25 that his pregnant cow was grazing in a field at a distance of 20 meters from his house at 8.15 p.m. when he heard an explosion.

On reaching the explosion site, he (Mr. Singh) found that his cow’s jaw was injured in the explosion, the SP said separately in a letter, apprising the State police chief of the sensitive incident.

The cow owner had added in his complaint that he suspected his neighbour Nand Lal being behind the mischief, the SP wrote to the Himachal DGP.

On Gurdial Singh’s complaint, also endorsed by deputy chief of Dahad village panchayat, police had registered a case under Indian Penal Code section 429, involving the mischief of maiming or killing cattle, and other relevant sections of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal Act, the SP wrote to the state DGP.

SP Dewakar Sharma also informed the DGP that the cow was given prompt medical aid .

Days after the incident, the cow also gave birth to a baby calf, he wrote to the DGP.

PTI

New Delhi: Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has announced that malls, restaurants and religious places in Delhi would open from Monday after more than two months since the coronavirus lockdown was imposed, but banquets and hotels would remain closed.

At an online briefing on Sunday, Kejriwal said hotels and banquets might be converted into hospitals in the coming days to treat the novel coronavirus patients and, therefore, they would remain shut.

“Malls, restaurants and religious places will be opening from tomorrow in Delhi in accordance with Centre’s guidelines,” he said.

The Delhi government will implement instructions — like maintaining social distancing and wearing masks — that the Centre and its experts have asked to be taken at these places, Kejriwal said.

“In view of the rising number of coronavirus cases, we might attach hotels and banquets with hospitals and convert them into hospitals,” he said. “Hotels and banquet halls will not be opened for now.”

The Centre had said on May 30 that ‘Unlock-1’ would be initiated in the country from June 8 and the coronavirus lockdown would be relaxed to a great extent.

Kejriwal urged the elderly, who are at a higher risk of contracting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), to confine themselves in a room and not to interact with anyone in their families in order to protect themselves.

Delhi has so far registered over 27,500 coronavirus cases, including 761 deaths.

Sonu Sood sent another 200 migrant workers back to their homes in Tamil Nadu and they expressed their gratitude in a traditional way.

Actor Sonu Sood is continuing to send migrant workers and labourers back to their homes amid the coronavirus lockdown in the country. He has now sent 200 idli vendors from Tamil Nadu back to their homes from Mumbai, as per an Instagram post by photographer Viral Bhayani.

Sonu arranged buses for the food vendors to take them home. A few women thanked him by doing an ‘aarti’ of the actor while he accepted their gratitude with joined hands. A video also shows Sonu breaking a coconut in front of the bus for good luck.

Sonu’s fans were in awe of his kindness and hard work. “This is what people with privileges do for others!!! He has all my respect. I wish him more success! The society needs more of him. Bollywood actors should learn something from him,” read a comment. “His deeds look so genuine unlike others who do it for publicity,” read another comment.

Also on Saturday, Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat thanked Sonu for sending migrant workers stuck in Mumbai to their home in Uttarakhand by a chartered flight and invited him to visit the hill state when the coronavirus crisis is over.

Rawat spoke to Sonu on phone to express his gratitude. “Talked to film actor Sonu Sood today on phone to thank him for his humanitarian gesture. He and all religious and social organisations that helped migrants return to their home states have done a commendable job,” Rawat said in a Facebook post.

After hearing from Rawat, the actor on Twitter said he derived more strength from the chief minister’s words of praise. “It was good to hear from you sir. The simplicity and warmth with which you praised my efforts have given me more strength. I will soon come to Uttarakhand for a darshan of Badri-Kedar and pay a visit to you,” the actor tweeted.

With inputs from Hindustan Times

PTI

The rapid shift to teaching and learning activities online prompted by closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic is only a “short-term response” and we need to fundamentally reimagine schools as a resilient system which can function under continuous turbulence, according to Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani.

Classroom should not be the only location, teacher the only facilitator and textbook not the only medium, is the roadmap laid by Nilekani for a “resilient” school system while delivering the keynote address at a virtual conference on ‘Future of Schools: Overcoming COVID-19 challenge and beyond’ organsied by Ashoka University.

“The rapid shift to move everything online, zoom classes, teaching through smart phones, all of this is part of a short-term response which was necessary but not sufficient. We need to fundamentally reimagine schools, build a resilient system strategically detailing how are we going to deal with the turbulence for next few years,” said Nilekani, who is also co-founder of EkStep Foundation.

The foundation extends learning opportunities to Indian children through a collaborative, universal platform that facilitates creation and consumption of education.

“A resilient system is something in which we are able to function even when there is turbulence outside, it is like a ship sailing through a stormy sea and resilience has to be thought through. A lot of time has been spent on making things efficient, dealing with things which we could not anticipate,” he added.

Family claims over half-a-dozen hospitals in Gautam Buddha Nagar refused to admit her

An eight-month pregnant woman died in an ambulance after her family reportedly struggled to get her admitted to a hospital despite a frantic search for over 13 hours. The family claimed she was denied treatment by over half-a-dozen hospitals in Gautam Buddha Nagar.

The district administration said it has ordered a probe to ascertain the facts related to the death of 30-year-old Neelam, a Khoda Colony resident, in the ambulance outside a hospital in Greater Noida on Friday night.

In a video circulating on social media, Neelam’s husband Vijender Singh is seen claiming that he had pleaded at the doors of several hospitals, including government-run facilities, before she died. “We first went to the ESI Hospital, then to a hospital in Sector 30 [Child PGI]; from there we went to the Sharda Hospital. All of them refused to admit her,” her husband alleged in the video which surfaced on Saturday morning.

‘Ventilator support’

“She was admitted to the Government Institute of Medical Sciences [Greater Noida] where she also got a ventilator but it was too late by then. In all, the death happened in the ambulance itself,” said the husband.

Neelam was undergoing treatment for pregnancy-related complications at the Shivalik Hospital in Noida which is a private facility, said Mr. Singh.

He alleged that the family also tried to get her admitted to Jaypee and Fortis hospitals in Gautam Buddha Nagar and the Max Hospital in Vaishali, Ghaziabad, only to be told that no beds were available.

Gautam Buddha Nagar District Magistrate Suhas L.Y. has ordered a probe into the incident. “Additional DM Munindra Nath Upadhyay and Chief Medical Officer Deepak Ohri will probe the matter. The DM has instructed them to immediately carry out a probe and take action,” the district administration said in an official statement.

A similar incident was reported in Gautam Buddha Nagar on the night of May 25, when a newborn died allegedly due to lack of medical support as his father kept shuttling from one hospital to another between Greater Noida and Noida. Two private hospitals have been booked for alleged negligence in the case.

With inputs from The Hindu

Country overtakes Spain in numbers even as study finds that infectivity rose from lockdown 1.0 to 3.0.

Registering a new high in the number of daily cases detected — 10,085 — India on June 6 overtook Spain to become the country with the fifth highest confirmed COVID-19 infections (2,46,292). The rise in cases comes despite the fact that 1,37,938 samples were tested on June 6, down from 1,43,661 on June 5, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

The death toll increased by 292 to 6,941, even as the recovery rate remained at close to 48%. Cases have steadily risen, doubling every 17 days, among the fastest in countries with the most infections.

The increase in infections is reflected in a study led by officials at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), a Union Health Ministry body, tasked with disease surveillance. The study found that India’s reproduction number (R0), or the average number of people a single COVID-positive patient infects, has increased between lockdown 1.0 and the beginning of lockdown 3.0. Moreover, India needs 621 million ‘recoveries’ to achieve ‘herd immunity’ at current rates of disease transmission, says the study that appeared online on June 2 in the peer-reviewed Indian Journal of Public Health (IJPH).

India reported its first 100 cases on March 15, and its effective transmission rate then was 2.51. That means, on average, every two infected persons were infecting five others. However, not everyone spreads the virus equally. Some may have higher viral load, some a reduced load and yet others may be more mobile and spread it wider than more sedentary persons. To factor these varying rates of spread, epidemiologists compute reproduction rates in a population as an average. For a pandemic to end, this number must dip below 1.

The initiation of the lockdown reduced the R0, the authors say. “On April 2, 8 days after Phase 1 lockdown, the estimated Rt (the R0 at a particular period) decreased to 1.91. At the end of Phase 1 (April 14) and Phase 2 (May 3) of lockdown, Rt was 1.28 and 1.83. As of May 4, 2020, latest Rt of 2.04 was estimated,” the authors note. May 4, or the beginning of lockdown 3.0 saw easing of restrictions in public activity. Since May 4, India’s COVID count has multiplied five fold as have deaths.

One of the co-authors of the study Additional Director, NCDC, Sudhir Kumar Jain that The Hindu reached out to said the R0 was “decreasing” as of present but he didn’t explain the increasing R0 in the study. He directed this correspondent to the study’s corresponding author, Dr Tanzin Dikid, Joint Director, NCDC, who said she didn’t immediately have institutional clearance to discuss the paper with the media.

“In respiratory infections with a novel virus, herd immunity is usually the only way to stop a pandemic. The whole world is grappling with this,” said Dr. Jain.

A key wing of the NCDC is the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme that is tasked with monitoring infectious outbreaks and has experience in epidemiology. The authors of the study say that the lockdown has “slowed the pandemic” and that India’s health system responded to the pandemic “with swiftness.”

Their estimate for herd immunity at 45% was contingent on maintaining Rt of 1.83 which was “achieved at the end of extended lockdown.”

However the Rt could keep increasing when the lockdown is lifted and ought to be “deliberated extremely cautiously considering critical care demand and fatalities, nature and length of immunity developed after infections, and the possibility of viral mutations, the authors underline.

The infection trend was computed by a software that used existing infection trends to calculate the reproduction number at various points of the pandemic. Dr. Sanjay Rai, President, Indian Public Health Association which publishes the IPJH said herd immunity referred to the number of people protected, either by exposure or vaccination. “The first lockdown certainly slowed progression and was meant to prepare our health facilities but it isn’t clear what the objectives of the subsequent lockdowns were.”

Dr. Rai was among the signatories of a recent petition by public health experts that criticised the government for not taking field-level epidemiologists on board on deciding lockdown extensions, “Estimates of R0 are all projections based on various assumption and we still don’t know what the true numbers are for India,” he said.

India and Russia are the only countries with 2,00,000 cases plus where a lockdown has failed to curb a rise in cases. However, deaths in both these countries are the lowest when compared to other similarly placed countries. Brazil with 500,000 cases and 35,000 deaths didn’t impose a national lockdown. The U.S. with 1.9 million cases and over a 1, 00,000 deaths is still in a lockdown.

Government experts in charge of India’s COVID management strategy have at different points claimed that the lockdown was about stamping out the infection by mid-May but are now arguing that it was about ensuring the number of new cases didn’t exceed hospitals’ healthcare capacity.

With inputs from The Hindu