India coronavirus dispatch: Demystifying Covid-19 care, if you are infected

Bengaluru's spike explained, no need for government doctor prescription for Covid-19 test, and how a wedding led to 100 Covid-19 positive cases

Bengaluru’s spike explained, no need for governmentt doctor prescription for Covid test, and how a wedding led to 100 Covid-19 positive cases — a roundup of articles in Indian news publications on how India is dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Managing Covid-19
 

Health ministry hasn’t shared info on non-Covid disease outbreaks since March: The last time the government provided information on disease outbreaks that were not Covid-19 was for the week ended March 22. The ministry of health and family welfare’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme is supposed to issue weekly reports on disease outbreaks in various parts of the country, drawing from its surveillance network spread across 600 districts. But this year, the ISDP has not published any report beyond week 12 of the year, i.e. March 16-22. Read more here

From success story to big worry, Bengaluru’s Covid spike explained: Between 1 June to 30 June, the total number of Covid-19 cases in Bengaluru city increased from 385 to 4,555. In terms of the total number of positive cases, Bengaluru is still far behind other metros like Mumbai (76,294), Chennai (86,224) and New Delhi (85,161). But the massive 1083 percent increase in one month has the Karnataka government worried. Read more here

With community support and solidarity, Sikkim weathers a lockdown: Sikkim was India’s only state that was free of Covid-19 for a long time, and recorded its first case only on May 23. The state responded proactively to contain the spread of the virus. However, the number of active cases spike in late June, after students native to the state returned home from different parts of the coun-try. While the Covid-19 epidemic didn’t affect the people of Sikkim very much, considering the number of cases continues to remain relatively low, the nationwide lockdown has taken a toll on the state’s economy. Read more here

How a wedding led to a funeral and 100 Covid-19 positive cases: More than 100 people who attended a wedding ceremony on June 15 at a village near Patna have been infected by the Covid-19 virus. The groom died two days after the wedding. He was allegedly the carrier of the virus. This is possibly Bihar’s first case of a coronavirus spread which began with a single person. Read more here

No need for govt doctor prescription for Covid test, contact-tracing must: The union govern-ment has asked states and union territories to ramp up “testing and contact-tracing” capabilities. The government, according to a letter sent to all states and union territories Wednesday, has called “test-track-trace” a key strategy for early detection and containment of the pandemic, and stressed that it is the “only way to detect the infection early and prevent the spread”. Read more here

How has Covid-19 helped reduce farmer suicides in Punjab: Over the past three months, which included the lockdown period and the unlocking that started unfolding since June 1, around three dozen farmers and/farm labourers have committed suicides as per the reports collected by the farm-ers’ organisations.According to this figure, on an average around 12-13 farmers took their lives per month over the past three months. This number though is very high, still it is about 70 per cent lesser than suicides per month that the state was recording prior to the lockdown. Read more here

Opinion
 

As Covid-19 puts India’s largest cities under strain, municipalities must rethink finance strate-gies: As Covid-19 sweeps through India, the outbreak has been most intense in the country’s largest cities. The pandemic has put India’s urban public health systems under stress, both infrastructurally and economically. In addition, the municipal finance systems that support the activities necessary to fight the pandemic on the local level have also been put under pressure. Read more here
 

Understanding Covid-19
 

If you are infected, demystifying Covid-19 care: We have known with fair certainty since early March that Covid-19 does not spread like Ebola, and that in the absence of effective medical treat-ment, non-pharmaceutical interventions like hand-washing, masking and physical distancing would be the best defence. And yet, for nearly one hundred days, confirmed cases of Covid-19 in India’s cities were being admitted to hospitals, irrespective of the severity of disease. Read more here

Why does it take so long to develop a vaccine? The Covid-19 coronavirus has knocked our world off its axis. We won’t return to anything approaching normal — that is, life without social distancing, quarantines, masks, school closures and other control measures — until most of the world has been vaccinated against the virus. Everyone, therefore, has the same question on their mind: How fast will a vaccine be ready? Read more here