This year, eight eminent individuals are being given Padma Bhushan and 54 are being conferred with Padma Shri awards, besides the two Padma Vibhushan recipents.
'Between its natural immunity with Delta, in so many populations, and then getting on top of the vaccination (situation), I do not think India is going to have another bad wave.'
'We lost our place in being first in the epidemic, when it hit India so hard, but we were actually the epicentre of the epidemic from essentially April 2020, for almost an entire year. We had such high cases. We were the country that had the most mixed response.'
These 51 cases were detected from over 45,000 samples sequenced so far in the country.
Registering a steady increase for the 17th day in row, the active cases have increased to 4,52,647 comprising 3.80 per cent of the total infections, while the recovery rate has further dropped to 94.85 per cent, the data stated.
The COVID-19 active caseload remained below two lakh for the 14th consecutive day.
'You will still want to take all the necessary precautions, which is the right thing to do.'
Millions of people across the country stayed indoors on March 22, 2020 in an unprecedented and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appeal for the nationwide curfew. People used to come out briefly at 5 pm to show their gratitude to healthcare and other essential service providers with sounds of bells, conches and claps.
22 cases of the Delta Plus variant of the coronavirus have been detected in India, with 16 of them being reported from Maharashtra and the remaining from Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, the government said.
Maharashtra and Punjab, which are recording a surge in new COVID-19 cases, tightened curbs on Friday and the chief minister of the western state said lockdown is an option, as India added close to 40,000 cases in the biggest daily increase in nearly four months.
'The second wave was more virulent, more aggressive, more transmissible.'
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Thursday that a multilateral response is critical to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic in India and globally as it hailed recent announcements by several countries to provide immediate support to India. India is struggling with a second wave of the pandemic with more than 300,000 daily new coronavirus cases being reported in the past few days, and hospitals are reeling under a shortage of medical oxygen and beds.
'In the second wave, probably due to the mutants, probably due to COVID-19-inappropriate behaviour, we are seeing it coming in the younger population, say from ages 30 to 50.' 'Also, we've seen that sometimes they deteriorate pretty rapidly and therefore we may need to keep a closer watch on the symptoms and on the oxygen levels at home.'
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had on Thursday said the city government will declare black fungus an epidemic if need arises.
Not to say that India couldn't have handled the situation better, but on average, it didn't do anywhere near as badly as the naysayers make it out argues Rajeev Srinivasan.
Wicketkeeper-batsman Rishabh Pant and throwdown specialist Dayanand Garani tested positive for COVID-19, while two others were placed in precautionary isolation as the dreaded virus hit the Indian cricket team ahead of next month's Test series against England.
This is a national leadership gone so wrong that India's most powerful prime minister in four decades has personally taken charge of medical oxygen shortages, observes Shekhar Gupta.
The WHO said that studies have highlighted that the spread of the second wave has been much faster than the first in India.
'If the government has not listened to scientists, it must.' 'It's obvious that this is a science-driven campaign (fight), a science-driven situation.' 'We cannot afford to ignore the science.'
It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other party, observes Shekhar Gupta.
As India emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, the ninth budget under the Modi government, including an interim one, is widely expected to focus on boosting spending on job creation and rural development, generous allocations for development schemes, putting more money in the hands of the average taxpayer and easing rules to attract foreign investments.
The Padma Bhushan was conferred on 17 personalities including N Chandrasekharan, chairman of Tata Sons, Krishna and Suchita Ella of Bharat Biotech, Cyrus Poonawalla, Satya Nadella, chairman of Microsoft, Sunder Pichai, chairman of Google.
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'But to see the effects of that, it will take a week or two more.'
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