India lacks China's culture of collective discipline, so what will provide the glue for people to cooperate rather than follow their raw survival instincts? asks Ravi Bhoothalingam.
Nearly 2000 people are undergoing treatment and villages are being fogged.
People in the interior parts of the country are yet to receive any aid.
A health care worker from the United States of America has been diagnosed with Ebola after treating a patient who died of the deadly disease last week, sending officials scrambling to find the "breach in protocol" that resulted in her infection - the first case contracted on American soil.
For communities, inadequate shelter and overcrowding are risk factors in the transmission of diseases with epidemic potential such as COVID-19, the National Centre for Disease Control, which falls under the health ministry, said.
The endemic stage is when a population learns to live with a virus. It is very different from the epidemic stage when the virus overwhelms a population.
Officials said 387 passengers were aboard two flights from Toronto and Singapore on the day the country ended its strict COVID-19 restrictions for travellers.
According to the scientists, people infected with SARS-CoV-2 might be spreading the virus without recognizing, or prior to recognizing, symptoms.
'Our government's claim that there are no undetected cases of infection that happened within our bustling cities because of exposure to infected international travellers are not credible,' notes Rahul Jacob.
According a Chinese health department official the number of SARS cases has shrunk to around 200 from 2,500 during the peak period in late April and May.
'Where did this fungus suddenly come from and get all over the country?'
As the virus continued to spread at an alarming rate, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday warned officials of punishment if they shirked responsibility in tackling the virus outbreak.
Dr Anthony Fauci has been named as Chief Medical Adviser to the President on COVID-19, while Dr Rochelle Walensky has been named as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith as COVID-19 Equity Task Force Chair.
The overall confirmed cases on the mainland have reached 80,881 by the end of Monday.
'There is little doubt that India's tobacco epidemic is contributing to its TB epidemic,' says Neil W Schluger.
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Nearly two million people die from mosquito-borne diseases every year. What are we doing about it?
The lockdown should have been used to drum into Indians' head the reasons for social distancing and the necessity for it, and the costs of not applying it in our daily lives and it should have been used to set up the systems that would manage large numbers of infected, observes Mihir S Sharma.
The deadly coronavirus is wreaking havoc globally, killing over 50 people in Iran, 34 in Italy and 22 in South Korea.
The Union health minister said of the total active COVID-19 cases in the country, 1.5 per cent are on oxygen support and 2.34 per cent are in ICUs.
'Your body will be able to deal with Omicron at any time, but it depends (on when) if you are vaccinated.'
Gujarat reported 2,165 cases, Maharashtra 1,188, Uttar Pradesh 663, Madhya Pradesh 590, Haryana 339 and Andhra Pradesh 248 cases.
The reason is that because of the hybrid immunity after three waves of natural infection and a large proportion of adults receiving both doses of COVID-19 vaccine, the susceptible pool has come down drastically, Lahariya said.
The SC asked the Bihar government to file an affidavit on the adequacy of medical facilities, nutrition and sanitation and the hygiene conditions in the state.
The experts said there is a need to relook at the testing strategy in a way that it results in guiding the public health response and effectively limiting the spread of the disease.
"In India, the sector will grow to $10 billion by 2018," predicts Vishal Bali, co-founder, Medwell Ventures, in an interview with Apurva Venkat.
'The virus is constantly, constantly making mistakes when it replicates.' 'When the virus has accumulated enough mistakes, then it becomes now a variant and it behaves differently.'
'The trajectory of the disease will keep increasing because of the population density being very high.'
With the tribes together accounting for less than 1,000 people, largely disconnected from the rest of the world and having very low immunity levels, anthropologists fear they could get extinct should the pandemic spreads its tentacles across the islands.
Besides controlling the spread of the virus, a major task of the WHO team along with their Chinese counterparts was to come up with a standard medicine to cure the disease.
Dr Kalyani Gomathinayagam, a young Indian doctor who volunteered to spend four weeks in west Africa helping those suffering and dying of Ebola, speaks to Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com why she took on an assignment many would shy away from.
A whitepaper released by the Chinese government gave a lengthy explanation to refute the allegations of cover up and delay by Beijing on reporting the COVID-19 outbreak last year in Wuhan. United States President Donald Trump and leaders of several countries have accused China of not being transparent in reporting the deadly disease, leading to huge human casualties and economic crisis across the world.
The Union Health ministry put the number of positive cases at 82, eight more since Thursday night, which includes the woman and a 76-year-old man from Karnataka who became the country's first coronavirus fatality besides 17 foreign nationals, Health Ministry officials said.
A person from Kerala with a travel history to China has been tested positive. Health ministry said the patient is stable and is being closely monitored.
The guidelines are being drafted to dispel any misconception and raise awareness regarding spread of the disease from a deceased
Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana have announced a lockdown of educational institutions, malls and other places that attract people in large numbers, even as some of them have been reporting increase in positive cases.
'The mental issues are too complex to be handled.' 'It is hitting us hard for one reason.' 'We have such a high level of fear about this disease.'
It is necessary to have a dramatic increase in the number of rapid tests for COVID-19 conducted on a large number of people and that should become the basis for estimating the morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19, not relying only on hospital reports, says Professor K Srinivasan.
'Testing is a very good strategy if only symptomatic people are transmitting the disease.' 'Here asymptomatic people, with minimum, trivial symptoms, are transmitting too.' 'Testing, treating, tracing contacts and quarantining them -- yes, it will work up to a certain extent.' 'But more important is physical distancing, hand hygiene, cough etiquette and cocooning, protecting with reverse quarantining the most vulnerable people, senior citizens, people with other major medical problems.' 'To me, that makes much more sense.'
