-CaravanMagazine.in On 17 May, for the third time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Narendra Modi administration extended India’s lockdown—one of the harshest across the world. For the third time, the Indian government did so without seeking scientific inputs from a national task force constituted to advise the central government on its pandemic response, according to multiple members of the team of scientists. There was a consensus among members we spoke...
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Why did the Centre put migrant workers through five weeks of anguish before letting them go home? -Ipsita Chakravarty
-Scroll.in Neither Testing nor hospital capacities in rural districts seems to have shown much improvement since lockdown was imposed. Five weeks after a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus was announced to contain the spread of the coronavirus, the Centre will allow migrant workers to return home. Five weeks during which hundreds of thousands of workers set out on foot to cover the hundreds of kilometres that lay between...
More »Lancet: Credit goes to states, give them leeway -GS Mudur
-The Telegraph The journal has cited examples of Kerala, Odisha and Maharashtra The Centre should loosen its control and give states more autonomy over funding and decision-making on the Covid-19 pandemic, The Lancet, a top international medical journal, said on Saturday in a commentary on India under the lockdown. The journal said the states “deserve much of the credit for India’s Covid-19 response” and that the lockdown was “hastily prepared and immediately disadvantaged...
More »Big Brother is watching -Charu Sudan Kasturi
-The Telegraph The pandemic has given surveillance tools legitimacy in the eyes of civil society which at other times might have been more concerned about privacy issues Among the “seven” to-dos that Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed for the country on April 13 while announcing the extension of a nationwide lockdown was a call for citizens to download the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app. It would help “prevent the spread of [the] corona infection,”...
More »Who gets tested for coronavirus determines infection rates better than how many are -Vignesh Radhakrishnan, Sumant Sen & Naresh Singaravelu
-The Hindu When Testing is done for people within a cluster, the number of positive cases seem to be higher, and vice-versa Generally, the number of positive COVID-19 cases increases when the Testing rate increases. However, this is not always the case, as data from Gujarat show. Who gets tested determines the number of positive cases more than how many get tested. In Tamil Nadu, the number of positive cases went up when...
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