Kerala to allow 10,000 Devotees in Sabarimala from tomorrow

Mangalore Today News Network / News18

Sabarimala, Jul 17, 2021: The Kerala government on Saturday decided to increase the number of devotees, allowed to visit the Sabarimala shrine, from 5000 to 10,000. The devotees will be allowed to go through virtual queue system daily till July 21, when the temple closes. The visitors will have to either provide a negative RT-PCR certificate taken within 72 hours or they should be fully vaccinated.

 

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Saturday recommended Tuberculosis (TB) screening for all COVID-19 positive patients and COVID-19 screening for all diagnosed TB patients.

Mumbai’s Dharavi, known as Asia’s largest slum, did not report a single COVID-19 case over the last 24 hours, the city’s civic body said on Saturday. Dharavi which has a population of about 10 lakh densely packed into an area of 2.1 square kilometers had reported its first COVID-19 case on April 1 last year. On April 8 this year, it recorded its highest ever single day spike of 99 cases during the second wave of the virus outbreak.

India recorded 38,079 new coronavirus cases, which took the infection tally to 3,10,64,908, while the death toll reached 4,13,091 with 560 more fatalities, according to Union health ministry data updated on Saturday. The active cases have declined to 4,24,025 and comprise 1.36 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate stands at 97.31 per cent, the data updated at 8 am showed. It said that active COVID-19 cases have decreased by 6,397 in a span of 24 hours. The ministry said that 19,98,715 tests were conducted on Friday, taking the total cumulative tests conducted for detection of COVID-19 in the country to 44,20,21,954.

Despite the high number of Covid-19 deaths in the first wave that hit India during April-June, the death rate in the second wave in the country remains lower than the first. However, the death rate in the second wave is still climbing as states continue to report relatively high number of casualties.

The case fatality rate (CFR or death rate) in the first wave of the pandemic was 1.41%. But, the CFR in the second wave in the four-and-a-half months is at 1.28%. Last month, the rate was even higher at 3.07%. Whereas in July, a death rate of 2.12% has been recorded, Times of India reported.

The report says that the high CFR since May-end has been due to the high number of "backlog" deaths reported across states- Maharashtra, Bihar, MP, Goa, Uttarakhand and others. So far, 2,55,923 deaths have been recorded in the second wave (since March 1), nearly 1 lakh more than the toll in the first wave (1.57 lakh).

President Joe Biden said Friday that social media misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccinations is “killing people” and the White House said Facebook needs to clean up its act. “They’re killing people. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” Biden told reporters at the White House, as he left for a weekend at the presidential retreat in Camp David.

The White House is turning up the pressure on social media companies to weed out what officials say is widely spread misinformation on coronavirus vaccinations. According to US health officials, a current spike in Covid-19 deaths and illnesses around the country is almost exclusively hitting people who remain unvaccinated.

“There is a clear message that is coming through: this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky told reporters on Friday. Many of those refusing vaccinations, despite the ease of availability throughout the United States, have said they do not trust the shots.

Skepticism is being fueled both by false posts spread by anti-vaccine activists online and by Republican politicians claiming the vaccinations are part of attempts at government control. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that Facebook and others are not doing enough to push back.