'Sheetal Pawar, who lives in Tamil Nadu’s Vellore, was in Mumbai’s Bhandup area to attend her sister’s wedding when the nationwide lockdown was announced in March. Pawar, a multidrug resistant tuberculosis patient, had sufficient medicines, but getting someone to administer a daily Amikacin injection, became impossible.
'On April 18, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal gave a 10-minute speech on the coronavirus situation in New Delhi. It was also live-streamed on YouTube. At the 2:00 mark, Kejriwal pointed out that some people in coronavirus hotspots area continue to step out on streets and visit their neighbours. He said in Hindi (from 2:00 to 2:44), “Yesterday in a containment zone at Jahangirpuri, 26 members from one community (translated from कुनबा) tested positive for corona… all members are from one family.
'Karnataka reported its 20th COVID-19 related death on Monday, and nine new coronavirus cases were confirmed in the state, taking the total number of infections to 512. As of Tuesday morning, as many as 193 people had been recovered. While a 50-year old COVID-19 patient allegedly committed suicide at a hospital, the Health Department has categorised it as "death due to non-COVID cause". Confirming the 20th COVID-19 death in the state, Medical Education Minister Sudhakar said the 57-year-old person was a resident of Aland and had tested positive on April 21...'
'A 12-year-old boy succumbed to 16 hours of excruciating pain in Agra after half-a-dozen nursing homes and hospitals allegedly refused to treat him, fearing that he might be Covid-19 positive. Nihal Singh, the deceased, was suffering from acute stomach pain. After being turned away from six private nursing homes and hospitals, when his father finally took him to the government-run S.N. Medical College, they were told that it was meant for Covid patients only and he would be treated in the same ward as these patients.
'When the Indian Council of Medical Research invited bids for the supply of rapid antibody test kits on March 25, it made an elementary mistake: it did not ask the bidding companies to produce an import licence. As a result, companies without a licence to import the kits submitted bids – and won. These distributing companies in turn subcontracted the order to an importer. This had a cascading effect on the price of the kits, with both the importer and the distributors factoring in a profit margin.
'In a move to check for community spread of COVID-19, Kerala has begun random testing of asymptomatic persons. The state has formulated a new testing plan to find ‘any undetected COVID-19 positivity among the general population of Kerala’. The state plans to test 3,000 samples from the general population and all these tests will use the RT-PCR (real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) kit – considered the gold standard to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease.
'On 26 April, in what can only be described as inadvertent whistle-blowing, a dispute between three private companies over the distribution of antibody kits in India revealed that the centre had allowed the costs of COVID-19 antibody tests to be inflated by nearly 145 percent. In a judgment that favoured none of the companies, it was the Indian Council of Medical Research that suffered the most. The court disclosed that the ICMR offered to pay Rs 30 crore for five lakh test kits, at an inflated price that offered a profit of Rs 18.75 crore to the intermediary companies.
'India could find itself in an acute health crisis over the next few months and the direct cause of it will not be the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Hundreds of thousands of children might already have missed vital immunizations, shows a Mint analysis of the latest health ministry data. Thousands of adults may have missed potentially life-saving medical treatment as the novel coronavirus epidemic spread and a lockdown came into force.
'...Despite her husband’s non-cooperation, every day, Seema wears her light pink sari (ASHA’s formal attire) and visits around 25 households, a target which she has set for herself. “I am supposed to do this. Even if I am scared, I cannot step back,” she says. “More than myself, I am afraid of transmitting the infection to my children and my mother-in-law,” she added. ASHAs have been assigned a number of tasks during the ongoing pandemic. “On a normal day, in addition to distributing posters, we are supposed to trace the contacts of COVID-19 patients.
'While voices on our phones, televisions, and radios don’t tire of telling us to wash our hands frequently, reminding us how important that simple act is in this battle against Covid-19, a simple fact of Mumbai life seems to have escaped all our experts and planners – lakhs of Mumbaikars don’t have access to enough water to do that. According to a survey carried out by Pani Haq Samiti, an NGO involved in fighting for water rights of underprivileged, there are at least 5 lakh slum-dwellers in Mumbai spread across 60 slum pockets who get less than 60 litres of water per family per day.
