-The Hindu As and when India emerges on the other side of the pandemic, bolstering public care systems has to be the top priority As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic ravages India, many bitter home truths and fault lines have been starkly exposed. One of these is the abysmally poor state of the country’s health infrastructure. World Bank data reveal that India had 85.7 physicians per 1,00,000 people in 2017...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-Newsclick.in As India faces a grim economic scenario due to the second wave of the pandemic in India, the government needs to step in to create employment opportunities. The second wave of COVID-19 beginning from February 2021 has not only severely impacted the economic recovery in India, but has also threatened a contraction in its GDP and consequently a sharp spike in unemployment. S&P’s moderate and severe severe downside scenario has estimated...

-The Hindu Balram Bhargava says more Rapid Antigen Tests will be conducted from now on. The national COVID-19 positivity rate stood at 21% and 310 of the 734 districts had reported positivity greater than or equal to the national average, Balram Bhargava, Director-General, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said on Tuesday. At the Health Ministry briefing, Dr. Bhargava said the country now had the RTPCR testing capacity of about 16 lakh a...

-The Hindu Business Line WTO has allowed countries to issue compulsory licenses during emergencies A Division Bench of the Kerala High Court on Tuesday asked the Centre to respond to a plea for invoking the compulsory licensing to allow other capable vaccine manufacturers to produce Covid vaccines. The Bench comprising Justice Raja Vijayaraghavan and Justice M.R.Anitha passed the directive when a public interest litigation in this regard came up for hearing. The petition...