Confusing messaging has been a hallmark of the government. Niti Aayog’s V K Paul is not sure how to defend the botching of second dose (Covaxin given to Covishield recipients) in a UP village, reported yesterday: “As per the protocol, stick to the same dose of vaccine as the first one. If in case people are getting different doses there is no cause for concern, it’s safe. We are thinking to mix and match (vaccine doses) on a trial basis”. So what is it, safe or unsafe?
Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh clarify that their vaccine wastage rates are nowhere near those claimed by the Modi government. Data from the Union Health Ministry showed that Chhattisgarh had 30.2% wastage, but the actual figure was only 0.95%. The Centre claimed a wastage rate of 37.3% in Jharkhand, while the actual rate was only 4.635%, lower than the national average of 6.3%. Both are Opposition-ruled states.
Niti Aayog’s V K Paul refuted the estimates of death toll proposed and backed by several well-known experts: “NYT’s report on Covid-19 toll in India is completely baseless and false and not backed by any evidence and based on distorted estimates.” Rejecting mortality numbers published in NYT, he said the government estimates that India has an infection fatality rate of 0.05%. NYT presented a “more likely scenario” of 16 lakh deaths assuming 0.3% IFR, which is based on India government’s own available sero-survey data.
The first pattern we see is that there is more utilitarian misinformation – the kind which seeks or pretends to offer solutions or scientific claims, than existential misinformation – which seeks to make sense of a problem within a larger social context.
The second wave of Covid has thus far departed from the first, in that it did not quickly turn communal. The thread, if any, is a lack of faith in institutions – healthcare or government, in providing the citizenry with the needed resources to move on.
Unlike in the first wave, when lockdowns were a major driver of misinformation, this wave saw equally, or arguably more draconian lockdowns in various states, but had only a small number of (debunked) stories about lockdown extensions, vandalism amidst lockdown, and police action against citizens. There was some anti-lockdown propaganda, proposing that the economic losses outweighed the benefits.
Some patterns correspond to earlier rounds of misinformation, such as the sharing of recycled or doctored images, the use of artifacts such as official-looking websites or documents, the use of celebrity ‘endorsers’ of misinformation. But the critical element of misinformation in this wave was the explosion of unverifiable short form messaging on social media, particularly about the appeals of help from people. The misinformation exploded in part because of the collapse of health services.
Generations of Indians are stepping into their problem-solving power as we speak. But more than changemakers, Ashwin says: “we need more question-askers.”
1621 teachers in UP died from Covid, because the government forced them to do poll duty during Panchayat elections. Aliza Noor asks, “Where Does All the Grief Go?“
According to the state civil supplies departments, the all-India monthly average retail prices of six edible oils are at their highest in 11 years. Food Secretary Sudhanshu Pandey said that “there has been a 62% spike in the prices of domestic edible oil”. The monthly average retail price of mustard oil (packed) was 39% higher than in May last year. It was the cheapest in May 2010, at Rs 63.05 a kg. Meanwhile petrol prices have gone up 13 times in last 22 days.
Pan-India retail sales declined by nearly 49% in April against the pre-pandemic levels of April 2019, according to the Retailers’ Association of India.
The Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee says that the government should be spending a lot more to help people in the second wave. “I’m not sure the government is calling it right. Is it possible to spend an extra 2% of GDP on this right now? Probably ― many countries have borrowed 10 times that amount.”
Banerjee believes that India is far from attaining herd immunity. “Lots of places remain relatively untouched, and that remains the basis for another wave,” said Banerjee, who hopes the crisis will spur meaningful improvements to India’s health network. “There’s a tendency in the health-care system to favor opening fancy hospitals, which can be kind of newsworthy, over trying to do little things in little health centers.”
Amidst all this, the new draconian IT rules went into effect yesterday. Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi said, “these rules will make North Korea blush.” There have been several challenges to the rules. Even some Modi government’s advisors had warned about the rules being beyond the scope of law, but they were overruled.
The main way is to register through a government website. But it is in English — a language the 25-year-old Kumar and nearly 90% of Indians can’t speak, read or write — and his family has a single smartphone, with spotty internet service.
Vaccine disparity is “not just a question of inequality but also inefficiency,” said developmental economist Jean Dreze. If people get sick, Dreze said, they will not be able to work. That in turn could push many more into poverty. “We should not just make vaccines free but also give people incentives to get vaccinated,” Dreze said.
The Bengaluru Police have arrested a close aide of BJP MLA Satish Reddy in connection with the alleged bed allocation scam involving officials in-charge of a COVID-19 War Room of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP).
World
Several authors of a new Comment in The Lancet call for 8 urgent actions from Indian Central and state governments. Here are the points in a nutshell:
First, the organisation of essential health services must be decentralised.
Second, there must be a transparent national pricing policy and caps on the prices of all essential health services—eg, ambulances, oxygen, essential medicines, and hospital care.
Third, clear, evidence-based information on the management of COVID-19 must be more widely disseminated and implemented.
Fourth, all available human resources across all sectors of the health system, including the private sector, must be marshalled for the COVID-19 response.
Fifth, central systems to procure and distribute COVID-19 vaccines free of cost should be established in a departure from the current policy of decentralised procurement through state governments.
Sixth, community engagement and public participation must lie at the heart of India’s COVID-19 response.
Seventh, there must be transparency in government data collection and modelling to enable districts to proactively prepare for the likely caseloads in the coming weeks.
Finally, the profound suffering and risk to health caused by loss of livelihoods should be minimised by making provisions for cash transfers by the state to workers in India’s vast informal economy who have lost their jobs, as is being done by some state governments.
The “next big outbreak” will be reliant on a perfect storm of a few variables coming together. At the core of this storm will be a slow vaccine rollout and susceptible populations mixing freely.
In his memoir, written in 1938, Nirala recalls how the Ganga was laden with corpses during the pandemic. Nirala, who had lost his wife, elder brother and uncle to the pandemic, wrote, “This was the strangest time in my life… My family disappeared in the blink of an eye. All our sharecroppers and labourers died, the four who worked for my cousin, as well as the two who worked for me. My cousin’s eldest son was fifteen years old, my young daughter a year old. In whichever direction I turned, I saw darkness.”
It isn’t just Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, where prisoners are in danger during Covid-19, activists say. When the pandemic was about to hit in 2020, the Indian government detained more than 1,700 people on several charges – mostly young people protesting the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act, a law that many say discriminates against Muslims.
Among the arrested were several prominent young Muslim activists, including Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Safoora Zargar, and Khalid Saifi.
The government’s scattershot reliance on scientific expertise in responding to the pandemic is hugely to blame for the current crisis. As case numbers ticked up, authorities were more interested in managing public relations than in correctly assessing caseloads and mortality rates. Some states actively discouraged testing to give the perception that case numbers were low; authorities also attributed many deaths to comorbidities rather than to COVID-19.
A better understanding of the scale of the threat would have allowed Indians to remain more vigilant and protect themselves. Officials should have remembered the lessons of the HIV/AIDS crisis: countries such as India, Thailand, and Uganda that were upfront in disclosing their HIV case numbers were able to get their populations to adopt condoms and reduce risky sexual activity; countries that obfuscated those numbers, such as Botswana and South Africa, fared much worse.
Poor transparency and mismanagement have plagued the development of the vaccine– touted by the government as India’s first fully indigenous Covid vaccine—since it commenced last May. The biggest example of this was Bharat Biotech’s application for regulatory approval for Covaxin in December 2020, even though it had no efficacy data—evidence that the vaccine prevented disease. A month later, when participants at the biggest site of a Covaxin clinical trial, a hospital in Bhopal, complained of mistreatment, the firm dismissed the complaints as baseless. And now, even though Anvisa’s observations have cast a shadow on the vaccine’s quality, Bharat Biotech has done little to clear the air. At the same time, four months after the vaccine was approved by the DCGI for use in India, the firm is yet to publish its efficacy data.
In consultation with more than a dozen experts, The New York Times has analyzed case and death counts over time in India, along with the results of large-scale antibody tests, to arrive at several possible estimates for the true scale of devastation in the country.
To arrive at more plausible estimates of Covid infections and deaths in India, we used data from three nationwide antibody tests, called serosurveys.
In 512 villages that it looked at, there were 11,777 excess deaths. Official data says 3,918, only reporting 1/3rd.
Vaccinations:
PTI reports via sources that Moderna is expected to launch single-dose Covid-19 vaccine in India next year. It is talking to Cipla and other Indian firms to supply 5 cr doses. It’d be too little too late or may be not. By the current rate most of the population would still be waiting for their first dose next year.
Moderna is also getting ready for the regulatory approval of its vaccine among 12-15 yr group. The trial results suggest the vaccine is highly effective in the group.
After some states including Punjab and Delhi reported that global vaccine makers are not talking to them, the Centre has now begun direct talks. As someone said on Twitter, “It took a Moderna and a Pfizer to remind the Modi government of its responsibility.”
It does not seem likely that India will be receiving currently approved vaccines from either Pfizer or Moderna any time soon. Several other countries are ahead of India in line, waiting for delivery of their confirmed orders, and the two American companies, which began supplying vaccines in December 2020, are committed to delivering millions of doses to these countries through 2023.
The Caravan: India is the only country among those with most deaths by Covid-19, to charge the recipients for the vaccine.
Top 10 most impacted countries and vaccination (from the Caravan article)
Government
The Central government is procuring 5,000 ventilators from a Rajkot-based firm named Jyoti CNC, which has already been accused of supplying breathing machines to Ahmedabad’s largest Covid-19 hospital that doctors there say are not up to the mark.
The firm’s current and former promoters have had close associations with top BJP leaders – with at least one business familylinked to the controversial gift of an expensive suit to Prime Minister Modi.
States
Jitan Ram Manjhi, former CM and current BJP ally in Bihar, made a reasonable point: If they can put Modi’s photo on vaccine certificates, then it should also be on the death certificates of people dying from Covid.
The Court noted that out of 150 ventilators received through PM Cares funds, 113 ventilators put to use at government or private hospitals were found to be defective.
Jyoti CNC, which is getting another order of 5000 ventilators had manufactured the ventilators.
Of total 150, 113 were defective and remaining 37 were left packed in boxes. So xero properly working ventilators while people were literally dying for them.
Such “molecular violence” – a slow haemorrhaging, a gradual exposure to death by means of enslavement, exploitation, everyday forms of pain, injury and debility – then becomes the very fabric of political order. In other words, necropolitics treats certain bodies as disposable and expendable through outright strangulation and confinement or acts of abandonment, indifference and neglect.
As Indians reel under what is undoubtedly the greatest crisis the country has seen since the 1940s, Modi remains fatally aloof and focused on image management.
The pandemic is now ravaging vast areas of rural India, where health infrastructure barely exists, and thousands are falling ill and dying, beyond the reach of social media SOS calls and far from the public eye. The Modi government downplays the catastrophe by claiming that caseloads are stabilizing. It is left to intrepid local journalists reporting on the hundreds of corpses on the banks of the sacred Ganga River to expose the lie.
PM Narendra Modi coined the term ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ (self-reliant India) and launched the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan. What came to pass, instead, was not Aatmanirbhar Bharat but Aatmanirbhar Bharatiya (self-reliant Indian), as each Indian was left to fend for himself or herself.
Let’s say your total expenditure over the course of a few weeks on COVID-19 related medical expenses was therefore Rs 4,00,000. Rs 1,00,000 (50+50) out of that amount will be exempted from taxation while the balance Rs 3,00,000 will be taxed at the rate applicable to your tax bracket. So, if your annual income is more than Rs 15 lakh, then you’ll be paying 30% of Rs 3,00,000 i.e. Rs 90,000 more as income tax to the exchequer on money that you’ve already spent on treatment that the government failed to provide you. I like to call this the Aatmanirbharta Tax.
You took more than three weeks to tell us that there was no evidence to support the use of this drug. Weren’t you aware of this fact earlier? As a Pulmonologist, I have reasons to believe that you would have been aware of the Tamiflu fiasco. Yet AIIMS prescribed Remdesivir under your watch.
Even more horrific has been the advisory on the use of steroids. That steroids should not be given during the first few days of a viral infection is plain common sense in the practice of medicine. Sadly, common sense is not very common. Most medical practitioners, unfortunately, continue to blindly follow the guidelines issued by AIIMS.
I have similar reasons to flag concerns on convalescent plasma and Tocilizumab in the guideline that does not pass muster of scientific scrutiny.
What proportion of Covid deaths could be attributed to the misuse of steroids will never be known; nor the number of families who pawned their meagre possessions or sold their tiny parcels of land for a prohibitively expensive but useless Remdesivir.
People are forgetting a basic fact that vaccination is to be carried out by healthcare workers, not by IT engineers.
A partial list of the myths propagated by BJP leaders and their supporters to ‘boost immunity’ against Covid-19 – from Bhabhi ji Papad to Coronil.
An in-depth report from Article 14 covering Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Odisha and UP, where 65% of Indians (about 800 million) live: A surge of untested, undocumented, unmonitored Covid-19 infections in India’s villages is killing thousands, many times more than reported cases. With no access to big-city medical care or Twitter SOSs, millions are at risk.
कफन चोर? प्रयागराज में गंगा किनारे क़ब्रों पर से पीली चादरें हटाई जा रही हैं, ताकि फ़ोटो खींचने पर वे पहचानी न जाएं। उन्नाव के बक्सर में भी पुलिस क़ब्रों से पीली चादरें उठा ले गयी थी।
Parul Khakkar’s Gujarati poem – poignantly translated in Punjabi (much better than in Hindi) by Jaswant Singh Zafar and very effectively composed and sung by Sukhpal Darshan
India reaches the official death count of 3 lakhs. Estimates and rampant miscounting and suppression suggest the real numbers could be 5 to 10 times more.
Only 1.04 lakh out of the targeted 2.5 lakh panchayats in the country have Wi-Fi hotspots installed under the Bharat Net project. However, just around 65,000 of these hotspots are operational.
There are only 15.5 lakh active users of Wi-Fi and FTTH (fibre to the home) in nearly 65,000 panchayats where hotspots are operational.
A UK study has revealed that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines work well against the B.1.617.2 variant first discovered in India, but after two jabs rather than one. Single does is only 33% effective. This is not good news for Indians who have a much longer wait now for the second shot.
India reached alarmingly low rates of vaccinations this week.
The meeting of BJP and RSS leaders is to discuss the party’s strategy ahead of the 2022 Assembly election in Uttar Pradesh. The Adityanath-led government has come under severe criticism for their handling of the Covid-19 situation.
Government is doubling down on its toolkit fiasco. In its latest move they sent Delhi Police to Twitter offices. Twitter had refused to remove “manipulated media” label from BJP officials’ tweets that had displayed a fraudulent and maliciously faked “toolkit” which was meant to show the Congress party in poor light. So they raided Twitter. They don’t even want to hide these extraordinary retaliatory actions. On the contrary, they invite media betraying their real motive, which is to create a chilling effect. People noticed that even CBI doesn’t conduct raids in a preliminary enquiry. Salil Tripathi sums up the fiasco:
India has a shortage of vaccines and oxygen. A BJP politician uses manipulated media to distract attention. Twitter calls him out. And so the Modi administration focuses on India’s main problem – and raids @TwitterIndia. Masterstroke, as his fans will say.
State governments need to be taken into confidence by the Centre before any decision, otherwise, there would be a problem in implementation.
Haryana tax payers’ money will be spent on buying Coronil, which has no known benefit for Covid or post-Covid relief. Haryana health minister Anil Vij said one lakh Coronil kits of Patanjali will be distributed free of cost for speedy recovery of patients battling Covid-19.
As the Covid narrative shifts from the horror of suppressing death statistics in urban India to the challenge of uncovering the enormity of the pandemic in rural India, a livelihood disaster is also emerging alongside.
As the founder of the NGO, Goonj, observed dryly in The Indian Express, for millions dal chawal is the oxygen needed to survive this pandemic. But he found it difficult to convince corporate donors to tackle hunger in the hinterland. As for migrants who stayed back in the cities during the second wave, they faced hunger because the fear of a more virulent infection has prevented better-off benefactors from undertaking food distribution which they did last year. No food queues, no pictures, and more invisibility.
Today, there is a rural livelihood story and a rural Covid story, the former with greater long-term implications. Both had remained largely invisible until bodies washed up on the banks of the Ganga as another grim pointer and brought reporters rushing.
The common thread that runs through the successes in Covid response is leadership. There were other qualities as well: humility, transparency, efficiency and compassion. All five are missing in India.
A well-referenced thread with news screenshots on Covid-19 timeline in India, starting in January 2020, by Hasiba Amin.
ICMR study found no black fungus cases after first wave. It did found, however, that secondary bacterial and fungal infections caught in hospital settings increased the mortality of Covid patients by five times on average.
The study was conducted between June and August last year, on 17,534 patients in 10 hospitals (Two in Delhi, two in Mumbai, one each in Vellore, Jodhpur, Bhopal, Pondicherry, Chennai, and Kolkata)
Second infections affected around 3.6% (ranging from 1.7% to 28% between hospitals) of patients hospitalized with Covid-19.
India to push for Covaxin recognition by WHO and EU. Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla is to meet Biotech reps on Monday. Sources pointed out that the WHO’s processes don’t allow for “diplomatic” or “political” inputs but rather depend on documentation.
India late to the table, says virologist Dr Gagandeep Kang, who is also a member of the Supreme Court-appointed committee on medical oxygen.
India delayed the process of bulk-buying vaccines unlike several other nations and may now have few options available in the international market.
Delhi HC: The absence of medical resources forced Covid-19 patients to fend for themselves and look for oxygen concentrators as an alternative to liquid medical oxygen (LMO) and even procure the device from overseas amid short supply.
The court made the observation while declaring as “unconstitutional” the Centre’s decision to impose Integrated Goods and Services Tax (IGST) on oxygen concentrators which are imported by individuals or received as gifts for personal use.
Me: Aren’t you worried about Covishield and Covaxin? B.1.617: We did share our concerns with the Indian government. They have assured us that the extremely slow pace of vaccination will give us enough time to come up with new mutations that can comfortably evade the vaccine. I’m optimistic.
In Surat, Gujarat, diamond workers die while employers neglect directives. Between September 2020 and March 2021, 20 workers committed suicide raising the toll of death by suicide to 46 since September 2019. Adding to that, the diamond workers’ union claims that at least 150 workers have died due to COVID-19 and 600 have tested positive so far.
Sky News drone video of bodies near Prayagraj, UP. Originally tweeted by @fs0c131y on May 23, 2021.
For a while this was alarming, but not necessarily dangerous. But now, it has gone beyond that. As thousands of Indians die, the government’s health ministers and health officials (the chyawanprash mafia, for want of a better term) make mistake after mistake, the most serious of which was the failure to understand India’s vaccine needs and to order enough doses.
Not mainstreaming wastewater epidemiology is a major opportunity lost. Urgently embraced, it might still help India predict the third wave of COVID-19, and future outbreaks.
The mystery surrounding the bodies has not been solved, nor is it known how many were infected with the coronavirus. But many believe that families resorted to extreme measures because they could not afford to have their relatives cremated — a rite that once cost about $70 here but has skyrocketed to $400 since late last month, locals say
Barkha Dutt reports from Basi Gaon in UP: “There isn’t a home here that has not seen some one falling ill. At least 35 people have died in the last few weeks”. The primary health centre is locked, there are no vaccines, no COVID testing & deaths are left unrecorded.
Rains have washed away the top layer of sand of shallow graves at a cremation ground on the banks of the Ganges River in Shringverpur, northwest of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. Coronavirus testing is limited in parts of rural India, but some of the people buried there are believed to have died of COVID-19. Photo by Ritesh Shukla (Getty Images). via NPR.Data on health and economy for major Asian countries, compiled by economist Kaushik Basu“I heard It’s Getting Better” by Diksha Bijlani
In April 2021, there were 5433 funerals in Bhopal. That makes for 4325 excess deaths considering the average normal death numbers. The official toll is 109, a 40 times undercount.
Vaccinations: 19.33 cr (+14.93 lakh)
NTAGI, the government’s advisory body on the rollout of Covid-19 jabs, says the decision to open vaccination for 18-45 age group was political. It had only recommended vaccination for those older than 45, as this demographic accounts for the bulk of hospitalization and deaths.
Milan Vaishnav is joined in his podcast “Grand Tamasha” by Samanth Subramanian to discuss the Indian vaccination plan
Government
The External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar suddenly realizes that “India in particularly difficult situation right now”.
Uttarakhand High Court yesterday criticized the handling of the Char Dham pilgrimage: “First we make the mistake of Kumbh Mela, then there is Char Dham. Why do we repeatedly cause embarrassment to ourselves?”
Villages after villages are getting empty but the media, government, and planners are calling the second wave done. There are still no lessons learned – bad data will lead to bad decisions.
Despite raging second Covid wave, only 50% in India wear masks – and most who do don’t cover nose, a national survey finds.
India stopped exporting Covid-19 vaccines in mid-April, leaving Covax and the 92 low-income and lower-middle-income countries that depend on the program in the lurch. The shortfall is estimated to be at 190 million doses by the end of June.
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda were to receive the largest allocations of Indian-made Covax vaccines during the first half of 2021.
140 individuals, or 0.000014 per cent of the population, had a cumulative worth equivalent to 22.7 per cent (or well over a fifth) of our Gross Domestic Product of $ 2.62 trillion, bringing, as they always do, that whole other meaning to the word ‘Gross’.
That combined wealth of these 140 plutocrats went up by 90.4 per cent – in a year when GDP contracted by 7.7 per cent. And the news of these achievements comes in as we watch a second wave of migrant labourers – once again in numbers too large and dispersed to seriously enumerate – leaving the cities for their villages. The resultant job losses won’t do the GDP any good. But mercifully, shouldn’t harm our billionaires too much. We have Forbes’ assurance on that.
By not discussing what the government could have done better, differently or not at all, the advisory gives the impression that the pandemic’s future is in the people’s hands. However, the Indian and many state governments are already out of step with many of the recommendations.
Your sin, in fact, the collective sin of the country – choosing a government that substituted bigotry for inclusiveness, incompetence for efficiency, and smugness for governance – has partially been accounted for. You personally paid with your life. You ended up being George Floyd, unable to breathe because the knee of incompetence, indifference, and braggadocio sucked the air out of you.
Compassion and caring have to be the cornerstones of government policy. History will judge our society, your government and, above all, you personally, on how effectively we handle this crisis.
Two Covid centers in Noida that were visited by CM Yogi a couple of days ago, are locked now.
Officially 196 people had died from the virus in Kanpur between 16 April and 5 May, but the data from seven crematoriums showed nearly 8,000 cremations.
The Covid disaster in Bareilly’s Kyara village is symptomatic of the UP government’s foremost policy during the second wave of the pandemic: denial. In this village with “zero” Covid deaths, 20 died of Covid-like symptoms. (YouTube Video, ~9:45)
India announces new rules for Covid vaccination. It has started feeling like demonetization when every day the rules were changed because someone found a truck-sized “why didn’t you think of it before” hole. Anyway, here’re the new rules:
Vaccination to be deferred by 3 months after recovery from illness
If infected with Covid after 1st dose, 2nd dose to be deferred by 3 months after clinical recovery from Covid
Daily Bhaskar did an analysis of 10 cabinet ministers’ tweets during May 1-14 (The Wire did a summary of the analysis in English). Amit Shah has tweeted 51 times in all, but only once about Coronavirus/Covid. That one tweet is about the approval to 1.5 lakh oxycare system purchase. Over 3500 people were dying every day during this time, by government’s records. Bhaskar hasn’t analyzed the chief’s tweets. But no worries, I got it:
Between May 1-18, Modi tweeted about 80 times. Here’s a rough breakdown:
Elections-related – 19
Shok Sandesh – 18
None of these obituaries mention Covid even though most if not all of them died due to it.
I reviewed/took stock/met for Covid – 12
Wishes on Festivals/Special Days – 9
Farmers – 4
Cyclone Tauktae – 4
Misc – 4
Covid Announcements – 3
Covid messaging – 3
Vaccines – 2
Medianama obtained a copy of the advisory the govt issued recently to social media companies. It goes beyond the already-draconian IT act. It asks companies to “issue warning to imposters who misuse your platform and indulge in such fraudulent activities.”
An undesirable mix of bureaucratic lethargy, static institutional thinking and legislative unwillingness is driving the Centre’s refusal to waive GST on relief materials.
It is not justifiable to collect additional amounts in taxes from people when they are trying to protect their lives during the pandemic. The government has many options to temporarily alleviate this. The entire value chain of manufacturing the COVID-19 relief materials can be exempted from GST. This will solve the issue of blockage of input tax credit and an increase in price.
A private hospital in Haridwar withheld information about deaths of 65 COVID-19 patients from the health authorities for over a fortnight. The rules require them to report within 24 hours.
Vijay Kashyap, is the 5th UP MLA to die of Covid. The rate of MLAs dying in UP is higher than average CFR for Covid.
Vaccinations: 18.58 cr (+13.56 lakh)
Vaccination inequities are on full display in India’s drive. Tech savvy Indians drive to villages for Covid-19 vaccinations. Those without smartphones lose out.
Calls to stop or reset the vaccination system are rising. A public policy expert Chandrakant Lahariya writes that for six weeks now, India’s vaccination drive has been struggling. How long must one wait before acknowledging that what was planned is not working?
The government instead is relying on propaganda. They have published a toolkit on the Washington DC Embassy Student Hub, asking Indian students in the US to counter articles in foreign media that show India in poor light.
US scientists are working on a coronavirus super-jab for the ‘pandemic age’. Their aim is to develop a shot that can protect against a range of such viruses, both known and unknown, to prepare for future outbreaks
Opinions and Analysis
An analysis by Article 14 shows that assembly elections played a major role in spurring the second wave. Between announcement and final results, active Covid-19 infections in six states that held elections amidst a virulent second wave grew at more than double the national average over the same period.
Shruti Kapila: Carrying on accepting Modi now means accepting cruelty. Suggesting that the pandemic is the work of an ‘unseen enemy’ that the government is hapless against is but an admission that the State has failed.
India was already short-staffed in health care. India had about 17 active health workers — doctors, nurses and midwives — per 10,000 people, according to the Indian Institute of Public Health-Delhi and the World Health Organization. That is far below the W.H.O.’s threshold of 44.5 trained health workers per 10,000.
The distribution is unequally concentrated in urban centers. About 40 percent of health care providers work in rural areas, where more than 70 percent of India’s population lives. Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, has only 0.24 beds per 1,000 people, less than one-tenth of the world average.
In Basi, about 1.5 hours from the capital New Delhi, about three-quarters of the village’s 5,400 people are sick and more than 30 have died in the past three weeks. It has no health-care facilities, no doctors and no oxygen canisters. And unlike India’s social-media literate urban population, residents can’t appeal on Twitter to an army of strangers willing to help.
“Most deaths in the village have been caused because there was no oxygen available”
India's Covid-19 Journal 
