While Maharashtra and Delhi appear to have contained the pandemic, there are fears that the virus will gain the upper hand in the southern states. In Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, people’s and the authorities attention has shifted to politics. A roundup from the battlegrounds.
Public celebrations in the national capital on August 15 were muted owing to the coronavirus pandemic. Desperate to get back to the normal life after the fatigue induced by the lockdown of three months, some people welcomed Independence Day with gusto on their terraces, flying kites and socialising with family and friends.
But Delhi should not get complacent, warned Dr Srinivas Rajkumar T of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences(AIIMS) in Delhi. “We are in a better situation than before, since mid-July. Now there are around 1,000 cases consistently everyday. This will continue but infection will spread through new demographic shifts, when people go to the office and malls or resume social activities, or when the elderly get exposed, which will lead to isolates spikes.”
The AIIMS administration had sent the senior resident doctor in the department of psychiatry a show cause notice after he criticised in a tweet the substandard quality of the personal protective equipment (PPE), provided to AIIMS health care workers.