-The Hindu No sample was found COVID-19 positive, but most of the patients had Influenza B and respiratory syncytial virus. Kolkata: Hundreds of children across several districts of north Bengal have been hospitalised with symptoms of viral infection. Reports that at least six children have died in the past few days — three in Jalpaiguri, two in Malda and one in Uttar Dinjapur — have spread fear and panic in the State. Chief...

-Civil Society News, Gurugram THROUGHOUT the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic, the extent of the tragedy in India was mostly unknown. How many people had really died? Were they men or women? Information was anecdotal and speculative. This April, there were queues at crematoriums and burial grounds, but even as bodies piled up there were no reliable figures to go by. We now have some figures based on data-hunting...

-Down to Earth The disease has been on India’s radar since 2006; need to strengthen disease surveillance, train workforce and build robust laboratories    The death of an 11-year-old boy from Haryana at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences due to Avian influenza — the first such fatality in the country — has stressed the need to respond to zoonotic diseases in a timely manner.  Experts have flagged the emergence and re-emergence of...

-Health-check.in Between 1817 and 1920, India faced three pandemics that wiped out large chunks of its population. What lessons do these events hold for India today on how to manage the ongoing Covid-19 surge and how to plan ahead? Our interview with Chinmay Tumbe. Mumbai: The Covid-19 pandemic has been with us now for more than a year and in India we are just seeing the beginning of the tapering off of...

-The Indian Express They will not only help capture the true scale of the tragedy, but will also help in planning better for the next waves of the pandemic. In his memoirs, the writer Suryakant Tripathi (1896-1961), better known as Nirala, described the river Ganga as “swollen with dead bodies” when the deadly second wave of the influenza pandemic struck India in 1918. The pandemic was a deeply traumatic experience for him,...