Coronavirus: Mock drill across states, UTs on Tuesday

According to the leaked government documents that are circulating on social media, 248 million people were infected with Covid-19 from December 1 to 20, or 17.65 per cent of China's population.

A Beijing hospital official says about 500 patients daily are received at its emergency unit. That's 2.5 times the usual. About 20 per cent of them have developed serious symptoms. Looking at the number of Covid cases, other hospitals in Beijing are setting up makeshift intensive care units and increasing the number of beds for patients with serious symptoms, reported NHK World.

Three new cases of coronavirus have been detected in Maharashtra's Thane district, taking its infection count to 7,47,391, a health official said on Sunday. With the addition of the latest cases on Saturday, there are now eight active Covid-19 cases in the district, which comes under the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, he said.

The active cases increased to 3,424, according to the Union health ministry data updated on Sunday. The Covid case tally was recorded at 4.46 crore (4,46,77,106) . The death toll stands at 5,30,693 with two fatalities with one reconciled by Kerala and one death reported in Maharashtra in the last 24 hours, the data updated at 8am stated.

The current Covid surge in many countries including China is believed to be driven by Omicron sub-variant BF.7. India has also so far reported four cases of this variant that includes two from Gujarat and two from Odisha.

China narrowed its definition for reporting Covid deaths, counting only those from Covid-caused pneumonia or respiratory failure, raising eyebrows among world health experts.

The NHC's halt to reporting daily infection and death totals comes as concerns grow around the lack of vital information since Beijing made sweeping changes to a zero-Covid policy that had put hundreds of millions of its citizens under relentless lockdowns and battered the world's second-largest economy.

China's National Health Commission, which for the past three years or so has published daily COVID-19 case figures for the country, said it will no longer release such data from Sunday.

As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID-19 wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.

Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Saturday said the government is considering making RT-PCR test mandatory for passengers arriving in India from China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand in the wake of a surge of Covid-19 infections in these countries.

Will financial distress and the uncertainty around Covid suspend international mobility for education again? Early indications suggest that while there has been a drop in applications from India at foreign universities, local campuses are high up on the choice list of a large percentage of undergraduate candidates from international boards this year. Not only has the number of Indian private universities gone up, but many more are now accepting SAT scores. Earlier this year, the Members of International Schools Association (MISA) read the writing on the wall and conducted a fair of Indian universities for their graduating students.

As hospitals and morgues in China are overwhelmed by millions of Covid cases, official data projected that millions have been infected since December 1 while the government has permitted the opening up of "Internet Hospitals" for the affected people to seek medical help to reduce the overload on clinics. There were nearly 37 million new infections nationwide as of Tuesday this week, officials cited data, highlighting for the first time the surge in cases across the country.