-TheWire.in One report suggests that Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh are also underreporting deaths due to COVID-19 Bengaluru: In a strange turn of events, the Gujarat state government informed the Supreme Court on January 16 that it has approved 68,370 claims for ex gratia for COVID-19 victims – while the state’s official cumulative death toll was only 10,094 until then. According to Times of India, the state wrote in its compliance report...

-The Telegraph They say the revised testing guidelines that exempt asymptomatic contacts from tests are suited only for omicron, which is linked to mild disease and rapid spread A mix of narrower targeted Covid-19 testing, home-based self-testing kits and large cities approaching epidemic peaks might explain falling counts of daily new infections nationwide, doctors and health experts said on Tuesday. India’s daily count of new Covid-19 infections fell to around 238,000 for the...

In the previous news alert, we looked at the under-nutrition problem in the Bundelkhand region in terms of 3 indicators -- proportion of children under 5 years who are stunted (height-for-age); proportion of children under 5 years who are wasted (weight-for-height); and proportion of children under 5 years who are underweight (weight-for-age). However, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data also indicates that severe under-nutrition like severe wasting and anaemia among...

-NDTV.com The revised COVID-19 treatment guidelines spelt out the conditions for mild, moderate and severe disease. New Delhi: Doctors should avoid giving steroids to COVID-19 patients, the government has said in its revised clinical guidelines for coronavirus treatment, days after its task force chief expressed regret for the overuse of the drug during the second wave. The revised guidelines said that drugs like steroids can increase the risk of a secondary infection like...

-The Hindu With most of India’s livestock in rural and remote areas, a game changer now will be the use of mobile veterinary units The twentieth livestock census indicated that India today has a livestock population of approximately 537 million; of this, 95.8% is concentrated in rural areas. Given the fact that most of the country’s livestock is in rural and remote areas, access to veterinary services is a major challenge. Livestock...