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One more death in Gujarat A 46-year-old woman who had coronavirus infection died at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Hospital in Ahmedabad on Saturday afternoon, taking the number of COVID-19 patients who have died in Gujarat to four, authorities said. The total death toll in India rises to 23.
The woman had tested positive for the virus on March 26 and had been put on ventilator, the hospital said in a statement.
She was also suffering from hypertension and diabetes, it said.
On Thursday, a 70-year-old COVID-19 patient died in Bhavnagar district. Before that, one death each was reported from Ahmedabad and Surat.
Uttar Pradesh:
Five new cases in Gautam Budh Nagar Five news cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Gautam Budh Nagar, district officials said. With this, the total number of cases in the district has reached 23.
“Three persons have been tested positive in Noida, while a couple has been tested positive for the virus in Dadri area of Greater Noida,” said Anurag Bhargav, Chief Medical Officer, Gautam Buddh Nagar. He said the travel history of the persons was being ascertained.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
That would save lives and prevent spread of the disease
Srinagar Mar 28: With 21 positive cases and a death due to the novel (new) coronavirus in Kashmir valley so far, Doctors Association Kashmir (DAK) on Saturday has urged doctors to use arthritis drug, hydroxychloroquine for patients who are diagnosed with the viral infection. “That would save lives and prevent spread of the disease,” said DAK President Dr Nisar ul Hassan. “A French study published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has shown promising results for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus, and when used with Azithromycin, it significantly reduced the viral load,” he said. “According to the study, at day 6 of treatment 70 percent of the patients who received hydroxychloroquine had cleared the virus and 100 percent of the patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combo were virologically cured,” he added. Dr Nisar said weighing the findings, the results are enough for us to recommend the treatment for COVID-19 patients, considering the graveness of the pandemic and the lack of available treatment. He said in addition to the direct therapeutic role, combo drug can play a role in controlling the disease epidemic by limiting the duration of virus shedding which can last for several weeks in the absence of specific treatment. Dr Nisar said the combo treatment could prevent severe disease and spare the hospitals and healthcare systems from most expensive and invasive care of ICU’s and ventilators. “Clinicians across the world are using the drug combo, and it is working and saving lives,” he said. “We can’t see people dying. We can’t deny an off-label drug to a patient when it is backed by solid scientific evidence,” Dr Nisar said. “Off-label means to use the drug for other reasons than what the FDA has approved the drug for,” he said adding “a doctor is legally free to prescribe a drug for any reason that he or she thinks is medically appropriate, and when there are no other options available,” he said. “ICMR has recommended hydroxychloroquin as a preventive medication for healthcare workers and household contacts of confirmed cases. The recommendation needs to be expanded, and clinicians should be authorized to use the drug for treatment. The restrictive use will take a heavy toll on patients and the community at large,” cautioned Dr Nisar.
Srinagar, Mar 28, KNT: District Development Commissioner Srinagar Saturday said that there is nothing to panic and no Covid-19 suspect escaped from JLNM Hospital Rainawari.
Earlier reports surfaced that several quarantine contacts of Covid-19 positive cases fled from JLNM hospital in Srinagar, following pandemonium at Covid-19 designated hospital. Reports added that senior administrative officials reached the hospital to assess the situation.
DC Srinagar, Dr Shahid Iqbal Chowdary told KNT no suspect has escaped and all are back to hospital and quarantined. “There was a minor issue that was sorted out,” he added. Pertinently, at Rainawari Hospital, Covid-19 suspects are up in arms against hospital administration for not providing basic facilities to them. (KNT)
Srinagar, March 28 (GNS): In a sudden spurt in coronavirus cases in Kashmir, seven more COVID-19 positive cases were reported in the Valley on Saturday. This takes the total number of coronavirus disease (COVID1-9) cases in Kashmir to 21 and in the entire J&K to 27.
Official sources told Global News Service (GNS) that the seven persons include a 56-years-old man from Jawaharnagar Srinagar who has travel history to Indonesia, and four persons, aged between 28 to 35 years, from Hajin area of Bandipora district who had come in contact with the 65 year-old man who died of the disease on Thursday. The other is a couple, a 45-year-old man, and his wife (40) from Ahmad Nagar Srinagar. They had returned from Mumbai, the sources said.
Confirming it, an official told GNS that all of them are presently admitted to Chest Disease Hospital (CD) Dalgate here and their samples had been taken recently.
“The test reports were received today and they came out to be positive,” the official said.
With these seven fresh cases, the tally of COVID-19 patients in the Kashmir region has gone up to 21 and one of them, the 65-year-old man from Hyderpora, originally a resident of Sopore, died on Thursday. One of them, a 67-year-old woman who was first COVID-19 patient in Valley, has recovered at SKIMS Soura, the Valley’s only tertiary care hospital. Sources said that doctors at SKIMS also fear increase in cases. “There are at least 3 patients with high viral load and their test reports are expected by this evening or tomorrow,” they said.
In all, 27 persons have tested positive for the COVID-19 in Jammu and Kashmir, 21 of them are in Kashmir region—3 in the winter capital of the J&K and as many in Rajouri district. (GNS)
Six more test positive for COVID-19 in Guj; count rises to 53
Gujarat recorded six new cases of coronavirus in the last 12 hours, taking the State’s tally of COVID-19 patients to 53, a senior official said.
As many as six new cases were reported since Friday evening, taking the count of coronavirus patients to 53, principal secretary (Health) Jayanti Ravi said.
Maharashtra tally reaches 160 as seven more test positive
With seven more persons testing positive for coronavirus in Maharashtra, the total number of such cases in the state has gone up to 160, officials said.
Of these seven new COVID-19 patients, five are from Mumbai and two from Nagpur, Health Department officials said.
On Friday, 28 persons were found infected in different parts of the State, they said.
Four new cases in Madhya Pradesh
Three men from Indore and one from Ujjain tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday night, taking the count of active cases in Madhya Pradesh to 31, according to the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College, Indore.
The college had received 52 samples for testing on Thursday, of which three were inappropriate and 45 tested negative. Those who tested positive are aged 60,42 and 23 in Indore, and 23 in Ujjain.
First COVID-19 death in Kerala
A 69-year-old man who was admitted to the COVID-19 care centre in Ernakulam died at 8 a.m. on March 28. He is Kerala’s first COVID-19 victim.
The man, who had returned from Dubai, was admitted to Ernakulam Medical College Hospital with pneumonia on March 22, said the authorities in a statement.
TN records two new cases
Tamil Nadu has recorded two new COVID-19 positive cases, TN health minister Dr. C. Vijayabaskar informed via Twitter.
This includes a 42-year-old male from Kumbakonam and a 49-year-old from Katpadi. Both have a history of foreign travel and had transit via Middle East. The former had returned from West Indies and the latter from United Kingdom, and are in isolation at the Thanjavur Medical College Hospital in Thanjavur and at a Vellore private hospital respectively.
Both the patients are stable.
Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine opens for clinical trial on humans
As the world is grappling with thousands of deaths and lakhs of coronavirus-infected cases, there is some hope as the world’s top university Oxford has announced its vaccine is entering Phase 1 clinical trials in humans.
In a press release, University of Oxford stated that its researchers working in an unprecedented vaccine development effort to prevent COVID-19 have started screening healthy volunteers (aged 18-55) on Friday for their upcoming ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine trial in England’s Thames Valley. The vaccine based on an adenovirus vaccine vector and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is already in production but won’t be ready for some weeks still.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
China has said the domestic passenger flights will resume operations in the coronavirus epicentre Hubei province, except for its capital Wuhan, from Sunday as part of a plan to ease lockdown in the region after it reported zero COVID-19 cases for several days. No new confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease were reported in Wuhan on Friday, though the city reported three new fatalities, taking the total death toll in China to 3,295.
The Central Hubei province has so far reported a total of 67,801 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 50,006 in Wuhan. Domestic operations in the province except in Wuhan Tianhe International Airport will be resumed from Sunday, China’s Civil Aviation Regulator (CAAC) said on Friday. Local bus and train services have already resumed in Wuhan and Hubei province. Wuhan and the province with over 56 million people was kept under lockdown from January 23 as part of aggressive measures to bring down COVID-19 cases which rapidly spread in the area. Flight operations from Wuhan would start from April 8, CAAC said.
Due to mounting pressure from the epidemic prevention and control, the flights to resume services exclude international passenger flights, flights to and from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and those between Hubei and Beijing, state-run Xinhua new agency reported. The cargo flights will resume operations from March 29 at all airports in the central Hubei Province. Aviation companies are encouraged to add extra domestic and international cargo flights to stabilise the supply chain, the CAAC said. The novel coronavirus, that first originated in wuhan in December, has wreaked havoc across the globe, upending life and businesses.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
While Pakistan’s government and military are at odds over how to respond, doctors are protesting to get equipment and more testing, and clerics are refusing to limit mosque gatherings.
By: Zia ur-Rehman, Maria Abi-Habib and Ihsanullah | The NewYork Times
KARACHI, Pakistan — Doctors are refusing to show up for work. Clerics are refusing to close their mosques. And despite orders to stay at home, children continue to pack streets across Pakistan to play cricket, their parents unwilling to quarantine them in crowded homes.
Pakistan is facing its biggest challenge ever: how to mobilize its broken state as the number of coronavirus cases rapidly spreads in the world’s fifth most populous country.
More than ever, the epidemic is showcasing weaknesses in the government, and the tensions between it and the country’s powerful military. Many within the country’s clerical establishment have refused to help, rejecting calls to limit mosque gatherings and bringing together at least 150,000 clerics from around the world this month in a religious gathering that helped spread the virus
By Thursday afternoon, Pakistan’s cases had risen to 1,098, up from some 250 a week ago. Eight deaths have been reported. But many fear that the real numbers are much higher because of a lack of testing and, in some cases, suppressed information.
Already, Pakistan was struggling to provide electricity, water and adequate health care to its 220 million people. Diseases that have been controlled elsewhere, like rabies and polio, still persist here.
In recent weeks, as the coronavirus’s march across the globe was intensifying, Prime Minister Imran Khan played down its dangers. Pakistani officials bragged that the country was virus-free, but little was being done to set up testing anywhere.
Bus passengers traveling Sunday despite the three-day lockdown in Karachi.
Mr. Khan rejected calls from health care workers and provincial officials to enforce a lockdown, saying it would ruin the economy. Instead he urged citizens to practice social distancing and ordered everyone back to work, many returning to the sweltering, cramped factories that are the backbone of the economy.
Finally, the military stepped in on Sunday and sidelined Mr. Khan, working with provincial governments to deploy across the country and enforce a lockdown. They erected a maze of military checkpoints in cities like Karachi and sent baton-wielding police officers to violently disperse crowds.
But the action may be too late. Doctors and nurses are refusing to come to work, fed up with the weak initial response to contain the virus’s spread.
And the extremist clerics who often heckle or march against the civilian government, with the tacit approval of the military, are refusing to help. They largely ignored Mr. Khan’s call to limit Friday prayer gatherings. And even after the military deployed to try to enforce a lockdown, several clerics made videos that went viral in recent days, urging Pakistanis to come back to the mosques to worship.
To avoid mosques on Fridays would only invite God’s wrath at a time when people need his mercy, the clerics warned.
“We cannot skip Friday prayers because of fears of coronavirus,” said Shabbir Chand, a trader who attended a packed service in Karachi, the country’s biggest city. “Instead, we should gather in even larger numbers in mosques to pray to God to protect us from this fatal disease.”
A gathering of more than 150,000 people was held this month on the outskirts of Lahore by Tablighi Jamaat, one of the world’s largest proselytizing groups. The event was eventually called off at the urging of officials, but the participants had already come, sleeping and eating in close quarters.
The gathering proved a perfect transmission point, infecting indeterminate numbers of Pakistanis, at least two Kyrgyz citizens and two Palestinians who flew home and introduced the virus to the Gaza Strip. A similar gathering of Tablighi Jamaat in Malaysia infected more than 620 participants who then returned to half a dozen countries across Southeast Asia.
In Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, doctors and nurses at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, known as PIMS, who were tasked with screening coronavirus patients threatened to walk off the job this week if the government didn’t provide them with basic equipment like masks and gloves, which they received only on Saturday.
In one case at the hospital, government officials who had tested a woman who died there after showing symptoms of the coronavirus disease, Covid-19, refused to share her test results with doctors and nurses there and told them not to talk to journalists about it, they said.
The state has always been too impoverished to provide masks to the doctors and nurses at the emergency rooms of public hospitals, and they have always bought their own. But prices are surging as civilians hoard whatever they can, forcing emergency room doctors at PIMS to spend $70 of their $460 monthly salary on masks, some said.
While many of his colleagues called in sick this week, refusing to work as the virus surges, one doctor said he would continue to scrub in every day.
“We have no other way. We just can’t think about it. If we don’t fight it, who will?” the doctor said, adding that morale was low among his colleagues. “So we tell each other, ‘Our profession is sanctified from God. God will protect us.’ But those are just words.”
If the virus spreads much further, Pakistan’s entire health care system may melt down. In Karachi, a port city of some 20 million, there are only 600 beds in intensive care wards. There are 1,700 ventilators across the country, and last week, there were only 15,000 N95 masks for doctors and nurses, officials said.
“We don’t even have anti-rabies vaccines. How can we deal with thousands of people who will come here for coronavirus treatment?” said one doctor at a state-run hospital, who also complained that they had not been issued protective gear. As a government employee the doctor had been barred from talking to the media, and requested anonymity to express concerns.
In February, it became clear Pakistan was facing a major outbreak of coronavirus, as the disease surged in Iran, which quickly became an epicenter. Thousands of Pakistanis visit Iran every month for work or religious pilgrimage, and the countries share a long border.
Officials closed the border, but hundreds of Pakistanis managed to get back in anyway, either rerouting through Afghanistan to cross the border there, or bribing guards to get back in, witnesses and officials said.
In order to prevent thousands more from illegally crossing, officials decided to quarantine them in Taftan, a border town. But conditions were so bad — cramped and filthy, with the virus spreading quickly — that people being held there rioted, burning part of the camp down.
“We had no proper food, no screening of anyone for coronavirus,” said Syed Haider Ali, a student who had been quarantined at Taftan.
“It was not an attack on the camp, but an attempt to rescue ourselves from the animallike treatment we were receiving,” he said. “We appealed to the government to treat us like humans, but it fell on deaf ears.”
The government kept some 4,600 people under a 14-day quarantine in Taftan and let most go after they developed no symptoms. They returned to their villages and cities across Pakistan, where dozens turned out to have been infected when they tested by local health care workers.
Now the government is trying to build more quarantine centers, but they keep coming under attack by residents who live nearby and do not want the risk of another botched government operation.
In Karachi, military checkpoints have been erected every few hundred yards throughout the city and the police make rounds to enforce a lockdown, wielding batons to beat people back into their homes.
But in the slums, a carnival-like atmosphere has burst out onto the streets, with schools shut down and children playing in the narrow alleyways that are lined with open sewers. During a recent visit by journalists, the police swept through the neighborhood, yelling at people to get back indoors. But residents ignored them, and, outnumbered, the officers soon gave up.
Janangir Baloch, who lives with dozens of family members in a cramped three-story building, pointed at the children playing in the street as he explained why keeping them home was a lost cause.
“Tell me how I can observe social distancing when I live with 40 other people,” Mr. Baloch said. “It won’t work.”
Zia ur-Rehman reported from Karachi, Pakistan; Maria Abi-Habib from New Delhi; and Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud from Islamabad, Pakistan. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Fearing backlash, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government has not been able to ban people praying in mosques, leading to increased risk of coronavirus spread.
Here’s an anecdote that will explain to the world how Pakistanis are fighting the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, I met a coronavirus-enlightened Uber driver in Lahore. He was wearing a face mask, regularly using hand sanitiser, encouraging his passengers to also do the same. He made rather compelling points on why people should stay home and how social distancing is the key to not catching the virus. At the end of the ride, he asked me which is the closest mosque where he could offer his Friday prayers?
Social distancing in Pakistan is good but when it comes to coronavirus jo Allah ki marzi.
Pakistan waiting for Godot
Like the rest of the world, coronavirus outbreak is a real crisis for Pakistan. Yet our current state is like that of Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting For Godot. We are waiting for the arrival of someone named Godot who might never arrive, or guess what, he might not even exist. But we are waiting for you Godot to help us.
As we wait for Godot, an unending and rather useless debate on lockdown and curfew continues in Pakistan. What is a lockdown and what is a curfew? Can a poor country like Pakistan afford a curfew? But with hundreds and thousands of lives at stake, can the government afford inaction? One set of governments, Sindh, Balochistan, and Gilgit-Baltistan follow a strict lockdown. While Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa along with Islamabad are following a token lockdown.
In the middle of this chaos, there is no respite for Pakistan from the spread of Coronavirus. More than 1,000 people have now tested Covid-19 positive and the suspected cases now stand at 7,736. The country has also reported eight deaths.
Pakistan never stops praying
The closure of markets, shopping malls, restaurants and public transport is one step to break the chain of the virus but the continuing Jummah congregational prayers in mosques doesn’t help the cause. The churches and temples in Punjab and Sindh were voluntarily closed by the Hindu and Christian community leaders after an increase in Covid-19 cases. The government, fearing backlash, has not been able to ban people praying in mosques.
Pakistan never stops praying
The annual Tablighi Jamaat gathering brought 250,000 people from across 90 countries in Raiwind, a Lahore suburb, continued for a few days before it was called off. The result was that two men from Gaza were infected with coronavirus when they returned from Pakistan.
Twelve other participants of this Jamaat, from suburbs of Islamabad, have been found to be infected. Four others were found positive in Sindh. One Kyrgyzstan preacher of the Jammat was diagnosed in an Islamabad mosque, his 13 companions were quarantined and the mosque was locked down and disinfected. However, none of this has stopped the Tablighis from gathering, in Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where hundreds of participants defied the law and continued to preach and pray.
One of the prominent leaders of the Tablighi Jamaat, Maulana Tariq Jameel, a close ally of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, could have been instrumental in stopping the main ijitima in Raiwind. After all, he is used to encouraging people to not shake hands and saying emotional prayers for PM Khan on national television. But sadly, a decree from the Maulana to influence his followers wasn’t something that government thought of.
The doubts that Pakistan’s first coronavirus victim, from Mardan may have exposed thousands of people to the disease is now becoming a reality. As many as 39 people who were in touch with the 50-year-old Saadat Khan have now tested positive. He had returned from a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and was welcomed by 2,000 people in his village, ten days later he tested positive and died. His relatives say that he was sick when he arrived but was not screened at the airport. Failure to screen people at the airports has been the biggest blunder of this government.
(This story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
