New Delhi, India
Reuters
India ordered its armed forces on Monday to help tackle surging new coronavirus infections, as nations including Britain, Germany and the United States pledged urgent medical aid to try to contain an emergency overwhelming the country’s hospitals.
The situation in the world’s second most populous country is “beyond heartbreaking”, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, adding that WHO is sending extra staff and supplies including oxygen concentrator devices.
Health workers wearing personal protective equipment carry wood to prepare a funeral pyre for a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) victim during a mass cremation at a crematorium in New Delhi, India, on 26th April. PICTURE: Reuters/Adnan Abidi
In a meeting with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat said oxygen would be sent to hospitals from armed forces reserves and retired medical military personnel would join COVID-19 health facilities.
Where possible, military medical infrastructure will be made available to civilians, a government statement said, as new coronavirus infections hit a record peak for a fifth day.
INDIA ASKS TWITTER TO TAKE DOWN SOME TWEETS CRITICAL OF ITS COVID-19 RESPONSE
The Indian Government asked social media platform Twitter to take down dozens of tweets, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as cases of COVID-19 again hit a world record.
Twitter has withheld some of the tweets after the legal request by the Indian Government, a company spokeswoman told Reuters on Saturday.
The government made an emergency order to censor the tweets, Twitter disclosed on Lumen database, a Harvard University project.
India’s Information Technology ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
In the government’s request, dated 23rd April and disclosed on Lumen, 21 tweets were mentioned. Among them were tweets from a lawmaker named Revnath Reddy, a minister in the state of West Bengal named Moloy Ghatak and a filmmaker named Avinash Das.
In its request, the government cited the Information Technology Act of 2000, according to Lumen. Reuters was unable to independently confirm Lumen’s information.
India has, in the past, used the IT Act to block information in a bid to protect the “sovereignty and integrity of India” and maintain public order, among other things.
Last June, India invoked the IT Act to ban video app TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, saying they were prejudicial to India’s sovereignty and integrity as well as to the “security of state and public order”.
India and Twitter locked horns in February when the US social media giant did not fully comply with a government order to take down over 1,100 accounts and posts that New Delhi said spread misinformation about farmer protests against new agriculture reforms. Twitter later blocked access to the bulk of accounts it was ordered to take down, an IT ministry source told Reuters previously.
“When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law,” the Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement on Saturday.
“If the content violates Twitter’s rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only,” she said.
The spokeswoman confirmed that Twitter had notified account holders directly about withholding their content and let them know that it received a legal order pertaining to their tweets.
Asked about the request, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday: “That certainly wouldn’t be aligned with our view of freedom of speech around the world.”
The development was reported earlier by technology news website TechCrunch, which said that Twitter was not the only platform affected by the order.
India is in the grip of a second wave of the pandemic, hitting a rate of one COVID-19 death in just under every four minutes in Delhi as the capital’s underfunded health system buckles. Criticism is mounting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s federal government and state authorities have not prepared adequately to handle the crisis.
Some health experts said India became complacent in the winter, when new cases were running at about 10,000 a day and seemed to be under control. Authorities lifted restrictions, allowing the resumption of big gatherings, including large festivals and political rallies for local elections.
India’s health minister said earlier this month that activities such as elections, religious gatherings and a lack of mask-wearing at functions such as weddings had contributed to a surge in cases.
– KANISHKA SINGH/Reuters
“Air, Rail, Road & Sea; Heaven & earth are being moved to overcome challenges thrown up by this wave of COVID19,” Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Twitter.
Modi said he had spoken to US President Joe Biden about the crisis, discussing supply chains for COVID-19 vaccine raw materials and medicines. On Sunday Biden said his country would send medical supplies to India to help fight the pandemic.
Modi has urged all citizens to get vaccinated and to exercise caution amid what he called a “storm” of infections, while hospitals and doctors in some northern states posted urgent notices saying they were unable to cope with the influx.
In some of the worst-hit cities, bodies were being burnt in makeshift facilities offering mass cremations.
Lockdowns
The southern state of Karnataka, home to the tech city of Bengaluru, ordered a 14-day lockdown from Tuesday, joining the western industrial state of Maharashtra, where lockdowns run until 1st May, although some states were also set to lift lockdown measures this week.
The patchy curbs, complicated by local elections and mass festival gatherings, could prompt breakouts elsewhere, as infections rose by 352,991 in the last 24 hours, with crowded hospitals running out of oxygen supplies and beds.
“Currently the hospital is in beg-and-borrow mode and it is an extreme crisis situation,” said a spokesman for the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in the capital, New Delhi.
Following a fire at a hospital in the western diamond industry hub of Surat, five COVID-19 patients died after being moved to other hospitals that lacked space in their intensive care units, a municipal official told Reuters.
Television channel NDTV broadcast images of three health workers in the eastern state of Bihar pulling a body along the ground on its way to cremation, as stretchers ran short.
“If you’ve never been to a cremation, the smell of death never leaves you,” Vipin Narang, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, said on Twitter.
“My heart breaks for all my friends and family in Delhi and India going through this hell.”
In Russia, which expects 50 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine to be made each month in India this summer, a Kremlin spokesman expressed concern over the situation.
India, with a population of 1.3 billion, has an official tally of 17.31 million infections and 195,123 deaths, after 2,812 deaths overnight, health ministry data showed, although health experts say the figures probably run higher.
The surge in infections hit oil prices amid worries about a fall in fuel demand in the world’s third-biggest oil importer.
Rally backlash
Several cities have ordered curfews, while police enforce social distancing and mask-wearing. Politicians, especially Modi, have faced criticism for holding rallies during state election campaigns that draw thousands into packed stadiums.
About 8.6 million voters were expected to cast ballots on Monday in the eastern state of West Bengal, in the final phases of a contest set to wrap up this week. Also voting in local elections was the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, which has been reporting an average of 30,000 infections a day.
Virologists said more infectious variants of the virus, including an Indian one, have fuelled the resurgence.
The government told people to stay indoors and follow hygiene protocols.
Vaccine demand has outpaced supply as the inoculation campaign widened this month, while companies struggle to boost output, partly because of a shortage of raw materials and a fire at a facility making the AstraZeneca dose.
However, the federal government will not import vaccines itself but expects states and companies to do so instead, in a step aimed at backing domestic manufacturers, two government officials told Reuters.
Neighbouring Bangladesh sealed its border with India for 14 days, though trade will continue. Air travel has been suspended since Bangladesh imposed a lockdown on 14th April to combat record infections and deaths.
– Additional reporting by SUMIT KHANNA, KRISHNA DAS, ANURON KUMAR MITRA, and CHANDINI MONNAPPA in Bengaluru, RAJENDRA JADHAV in Satara, RUMA PAUL in Dhaka and DMITRY ANTONOV in Moscow.
