Prime Minister Narendra Monti warned today Tuesday (13/7) against overcrowding in tourist spots and called for faster vaccinations against him coronavirus while official figures suggest a slower spread of new cases.
Indian Medical Association (IMA) expressed fears yesterday that gatherings of tourists and pilgrims could be manifestations of over-transmission, fueling a deadly third wave of infections and warned that there would be no complacency.
“I will say very emphatically that it is not OK to have huge crowds in tourist areas, in markets, without the use of a mask”, Monti said in comments posted on Twitter, while acknowledging that the tourism industry has been hit hard by lockdowns.
Coronavirus’s 30.91 million infections in India are the second highest in the world after the United States.
The official death toll was 410,784, many of them in a violent second wave of infections in April and May as people died outside hospitals waiting for beds and corpses to be washed up on the banks of the sacred River Ganges.
The spread of new cases is slowing down
Today, authorities announced 32,906 new cases – the lowest daily rate since mid-March – compared to about 400,000 a day at the peak of the second wave.
Last month, government launches immunization campaign for all adults to immunize 950 million people by year’s end, but the pace of the campaign is slowing down due to the lack of vaccines and differences in their storage and transport, and only 18% of the target has been fully vaccinated.
Monti called for vigilance against the new strains of the virus and a faster campaign to protect the population.
The Delta strain, which spreads to many countries, was first identified in India, where experts recently identified what they consider to be a new strain and named it Delta +.
“To fight the third wave, we must continue to speed up the vaccination process.” said Monti.
Last week, the government administered less than 4 million vaccines a day, compared with a record 9.17 million on the day Monty launched the campaign.
While new daily infections are at a three-month low, deaths have not dropped at the same rate, raising concerns that local governments, which have the ability to enforce their own restrictions, are lifting the lockdown very quickly.
India today announced 2,020 new deaths due to COVID-19 but this report includes deaths of previous days that had not already been recorded in the state of Mantia-Pradesh, in central India, according to data from the Ministry of Health.
The death toll from state authorities comes less than a month after Maharashtra and Bihar, India’s most populous states, revised their death toll significantly, raising concerns about incomplete data and calls for wider review.
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