NEW DELHI: There isn’t any room at Sion Hospital in India’s megacity, Mumbai – approximately all 500 beds reserved for COVID-19 patients are occupied. And with new patients coming in daily, a doctor said the hospital is being forced to add beds every second day.
Waiting lists in some hospitals in the city are so unreasonable that “numbers can’t define the burden on hospitals,” said Dr. Om Shrivastava, an infectious diseases expert.
Scenes like this were common last year, when India looked set to become the worst affected country with daily cases nearly crossing 100,000. For several months, infections had receded, baffling experts, then since February, cases have climbed faster than before with a seven-day rolling average of 59,000. On Thursday, India reported more than 72,000 cases, its highest spike in six months.
“I think it’s going to be worse (than last year),” said Shrivastava. “If it doesn’t quell in a few months time, we may be in for the long haul.”
Experts say there is a pressing need for India to bolster vaccinations, which started sluggishly in January. The country is expanding its drive to include everyone over 45 years from Thursday.
But scaling up vaccinations in India has implications beyond its borders. Spotlight on Serum Institute of India – the world’s largest maker of vaccines and key global supplier – to cater to cases at home has resulted in delays of global shipments of up to 90 million doses under the UN-backed COVAX program, an initiative devised to give countries access to vaccines regardless of their wealth. Serum Institute declined to comment.
This could have negative consequences worldwide, setting back supplies in developing countries reliant on Indian exports. But some health experts argue that India’s rising caseload is a global public health problem too.
India has exported more vaccines, 64 million doses, than it has administered its own population at 62 million doses, official data showed.
Irrespective of where vaccines are being made, we need to send them to “places where you’re seeing an upward trajectory,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has been tracking the pandemic in India.
And India certainly qualifies: Nearly all its 28 states have seen a rise. Six states account for more than 78 percent of India’s total caseload, which at 12 million is the third-highest in the world. Cases have increased six-fold in less than two months, and deaths – a lagging indicator in the pandemic that follows hospitalization – are rising too.
Maharashtra state, home to Mumbai, is behind 60 percent of daily cases and accounts for about the same percentage of active cases. Capital New Delhi and states of Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh are also among the worst-hit.
After a grinding lockdown and falling cases, life in India had returned to normal in many places. Markets are teeming with people, politicians are addressing massive rallies in local elections and a religious gathering in Uttarakhand state is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of devotees in April.
International travel has also resumed in high volumes, bringing in variants first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. These variants, designated as those of concern, were found in 7 percent of nearly 11,000 samples sequenced since Dec. 30.
India also confirmed a new and potentially troublesome variant at home. Officials have cautioned against linking the variants to the surge, and experts say more expansive genomic analysis is needed to determine how much they are contributing to the rise.
The new infections have also cast doubt over herd immunity – the threshold at which enough people have developed immunity to the virus, by falling sick or being vaccinated – which was floated by some experts earlier this year to explain dropping cases. The last nationwide serological survey found that 21.4 percent of adults had been infected before vaccinations began in January, implying that a large section of India’s nearly 1.4 billion population remains vulnerable.
“It’s a perfect storm of careless crowd behavior, laxity in government vigilance and a misleading perception of herd immunity,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “The virus rode through gates which were left wide open.”
India fights coronavirus surge, steps up jabs amid export row
https://arab.news/n2mse
India fights coronavirus surge, steps up jabs amid export row
- Experts say there is a pressing need for India to bolster vaccinations, which started sluggishly in January
- India confirmed a new and potentially troublesome variant at home
Russia hits Ukraine’s Kharkiv with deadly nighttime barrage of drones
- Zelensky: Attack shows Russia is not facing enough pressure
- Two southern regions without electricity after attacks
KHARKIV, Ukraine: A concentrated, nine-minute-long Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on Wednesday killed six people and injured 64, including nine children, Ukrainian officials said.
The attack followed Russia’s two biggest air assaults of the war on Ukraine this week, part of intensified bombardments that Moscow says are retaliatory measures for Kyiv’s recent attacks in Russia.
A new wave of drone attacks on four city districts was reported early on Thursday by Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov, including a drone that landed in a school courtyard and smashed windows. There were no other reports of casualties or damage.
Elsewhere, two southern Ukrainian regions, Mykolaiv and Kherson, were left without electricity on Wednesday after Russian forces attacked an energy facility, the governors said.
Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, withstood Russia’s full-scale advance in the early days of the war but has since been a regular target of drone, missile and guided aerial bomb assaults.
Prosecutors in Kharkiv region said on the Telegram messaging app that the death toll in Tuesday night’s incidents had risen to six as rescue teams pulled bodies from under the rubble. They said three people were still believed to be trapped.
The strikes by 17 drones on Kharkiv sparked fires in 15 units of a five-story apartment block and caused other damage in the city close to the Russian border, Mayor Terekhov said.
“There are direct hits on multi-story buildings, private homes, playgrounds, enterprises and public transport,” Terekhov said on the Telegram messaging app.
“Every new day now brings new despicable blows from Russia, and almost every blow is telling. Russia deserves increased pressure; with literally every blow it strikes against ordinary life, it proves that the pressure is not enough,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram.
A Reuters witness saw emergency rescuers helping to carry people out of damaged buildings and administering care, while firefighters battled blazes in the dark.
Nine of the injured, including a 2-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, have been hospitalized, Oleh Sinehubov, the governor of the broader Kharkiv region, said on Telegram.
In total, the Ukrainian military said Russia had launched 85 drones overnight, 40 of which were shot down.
Blackouts
In the southern Kherson region, workers were trying to restore electricity supplies after Russian forces attacked what its governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said was “an important energy facility.”
“It is currently impossible to predict the duration of the work. Residents of the region, I ask you to show understanding and prepare for a prolonged power outage,” he said on the Telegram messenger.
The governor of the neighboring Mykolaiv region, Vitaliy Kim, said his region was also experiencing emergency shutdowns but that power would soon be restored.
Kherson region directly borders a war zone and is under daily drone, missile and artillery attack. The Mykolaiv region faces mainly missile and drone attacks.
There was no immediate comment from Russia on the latest overnight attacks.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched on its smaller neighbor in February 2022. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
Mali’s government adopts bill granting junta leader 5 more years in power
- The bill now awaits ratification by the National Transitional Council, the legislative body overseeing the transition
BAMAKO, Mali: Mali’s Council of Ministers on Wednesday adopted a controversial bill granting the head of the military junta an additional five years in power.
Gen. Assimi Goita has led the West African nation since orchestrating two coups in 2020 and 2021. The move follows the military regime’s dissolution of political parties in May.
According to the government’s cabinet statement, the bill will lead to the “revision of the Transition Charter, granting the Head of State a five-year renewable mandate starting in 2025.” It implements the recommendations of the national dialogue consultations organized by the military regime in April, which the political parties boycotted.
The bill now awaits ratification by the National Transitional Council, the legislative body overseeing the transition.
Earlier in May, Gen. Goita signed a decree dissolving political parties, a decision made against a backdrop of burgeoning opposition. It coincided with a surge in kidnappings of pro-democracy activists in the capital, Bamako, and just days after a demonstration by several hundred activists.
Mali, a landlocked nation in the semiarid region of Sahel, has been embroiled in political instability that swept across West and Central Africa over the last decade.
The nation has seen two military coups since 2020 as an insurgency by jihadi groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group worsened. The junta had promised a return to civilian rule by March 2024, but later postponed elections. No date has been set yet for the presidential election.
At least 49 people have died in flooding in South Africa with toll expected to rise, officials say
- The death toll included six high school students who were washed away when their school bus was caught in floodwaters
JOHANNESBURG: At least 49 people were confirmed dead Wednesday as floods devastated one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, and officials said the toll was expected to rise as more bodies are recovered in the search for missing people.
The floods hit the largely rural Eastern Cape province in the southeast of the country early Tuesday after an especially strong weather front brought heavy rains, gale force winds and also snow in some parts.
“As we speak here, other bodies are being discovered,” Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane told reporters at a briefing, adding that it was one of the worst weather-related disasters his province had experienced. “I have never seen something like this,” he said.
The death toll included six high school students who were washed away when their school bus was caught in floodwaters on Tuesday near a river close to the town of Mthatha, which was especially hard hit and at the center of the worst flooding. Four other students were among the missing, Mabuyane said.
Authorities found the school bus earlier Wednesday, but it was empty. Three of the students were rescued on Tuesday when they were found clinging to trees and crying out for help, the provincial government said.
A driver and another adult who were on the bus with the schoolchildren were among the dead.
Search and rescue operations would continue for a third day on Thursday, authorities said, though they didn’t give details on how many people might still be missing. They said they were working with families to find out who was still unaccounted for.
Disaster response teams have been activated in Eastern Cape province and the neighboring KwaZulu-Natal province after the torrential rain and snow hit parts of southern and eastern South Africa over the weekend. Mabuyane said there had also been reports of mudslides.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the National Disaster Management Center was also working with local authorities in the Eastern Cape, the province that took the brunt of the extreme cold front that weather forecasters had warned was on its way last week. There were unusually large snowfalls in parts of Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State province in South Africa’s interior.
Ramaphosa offered his condolences to the affected families in the Eastern Cape in a statement from his office and described the situation as “devastation.”
Power outages have affected hundreds of thousands of homes in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Eastern Cape provincial government officials said hundreds of families were left homeless and in temporary shelters in that province after their houses were washed away or broken apart, while at least 58 schools and 20 hospitals were damaged by the floods, which mostly affected Mthatha and the surrounding district.
Other houses were left submerged under water. Cars and debris that were carried away by the floods were left strewn in piles as the rain stopped and the water began to subside.
South Africa is vulnerable to strong weather fronts that blow in from the Indian and Southern Oceans. In 2022, more than 400 people died in flooding caused by prolonged heavy rains in the east coast city of Durban and surrounding areas.
Poor areas with informal housing are often the worst affected and where the majority of fatalities occur.
Northern Ireland hit by third night of violence but main flashpoint calmer
BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland: Violence erupted in different parts of Northern Ireland for the third successive night on Wednesday, with masked youths starting a fire in a leisure center but unrest in the primary flashpoint of Ballymena was notably smaller in scale.
Hundreds of masked rioters attacked police and set homes and cars on fire in Ballymena, a town of 30,000 people located 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Belfast, on Tuesday night in what police condemned as “racist thuggery.”
The violence flared on Monday after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court earlier that day, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town.
The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied the charge, the BBC reported. Police are investigating the damaging of properties on Monday and Tuesday in Ballymena, which has a relatively large migrant population, as racially-motivated hate crimes.
Two Filipino families told Reuters they fled their home in Ballymena on Tuesday night after fearing for their safety when their car was set on fire outside the house.
A few dozen masked youths threw some rocks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police after officers in riot gear and armored vans blocked roads in the town on Wednesday evening.
Police deployed water cannon against the crowd for the second successive night but the clashes were nothing like the previous night that left 17 officers injured and led to five arrests.
Much of the crowd had left the streets before midnight.
A small number of riot police were also in the town of Larne 30 kilometers west where masked youths smashed the windows of a leisure center before starting fires in the lobby, BBC footage showed.
Swimming classes were taking place when bricks were thrown through the windows and staff had to barricade themselves in before running out the back door, a local Alliance Party lawmaker, Danny Donnelly, told the BBC.
Northern Ireland’s Communities Minister Gordon Lyons had earlier posted on Facebook that a number of people had been temporarily moved to the leisure center following the disturbances in Ballymena, before then being moved out of Larne.
The comments drew sharp criticism from other political parties for identifying a location used to shelter families seeking refuge from anti-immigrant violence. Lyons condemned the attacks on the center.
Police said youths also set fires at a roundabout in the town of Newtownabbey, a flashpoint for sectarian violence that sporadically flares up in the British-run region 27 years after a peace deal largely ended three decades of bloodshed.
Debris was also set alight at a barricade in Coleraine, the Belfast Telegraph reported.
The British and Irish governments as well as local politicians have condemned the violence.
US immigration officers intensify arrests in courthouse hallways on a fast track to deportation
- The large-scale arrests that began in May have unleashed fear among asylum-seekers and immigrants accustomed to remaining free while judges grind through a backlog of 3.6 million cases
SEATTLE: A transgender woman who says she was raped by Mexican cartel members told an immigration judge in Oregon that she wanted her asylum case to continue. A Venezuelan man bluntly told a judge in Seattle, “They will kill me if I go back to my country.” A man and his cousin said they feared for their lives should they return to Haiti.
Many asylum-seekers, like these three, dutifully appeared at routine hearings before being arrested outside courtrooms last week, a practice that has jolted immigration courts across the country as the White House works toward its promise of mass deportations.
The large-scale arrests that began in May have unleashed fear among asylum-seekers and immigrants accustomed to remaining free while judges grind through a backlog of 3.6 million cases, typically taking years to reach a decision. Now they must consider whether to show up and possibly be detained and deported, or skip their hearings and forfeit their bids to remain in the country.
The playbook has become familiar. A judge will grant a government lawyer’s request to dismiss deportation proceedings. Moments later, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers — often masked — arrest the person in the hallway and put them on a fast track to deportation, called “expedited removal.”
President Donald Trump sharply expanded fast-track authority in January, allowing immigration officers to deport someone without first seeing a judge. Although fast-track deportations can be put on hold by filing a new asylum claim, people can be swiftly removed if they fail an initial screening.
‘People are more likely to give up’
The transgender woman from Mexico, identified in court filings as O-J-M, was arrested outside the courtroom after a judge granted the government’s request to dismiss her case.
She said in a court filing that she crossed the border in September 2023, two years after being raped by cartel members because of her gender, and had regularly checked in at ICE offices, as instructed.
O-J-M was taken to an ICE facility in Portland before being sent to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, where attorney Kathleen Pritchard said in court filings she was unable to schedule a nonrecorded legal phone call for days.
“It’s an attempt to disappear people,” said Jordan Cunnings, one of O-J-M’s attorneys and legal director of the nonprofit Innovation Law Lab. “If you’re subject to this horrible disappearance suddenly, and you can’t get in touch with your attorney, you’re away from friends and family, you’re away from your community support network, that’s when people are more likely to give up and not be able to fight their cases.”
O-J-M was eligible for fast-track deportation because she was in the United States less than two years, but that was put on hold when she expressed fear of returning to Mexico, according to a declaration filed with the court by ICE deportation officer Chatham McCutcheon. She will remain in the United States at least until her initial screening interview for asylum, which had not been scheduled at the time of the court filing, the officer said.
The administration is “manipulating the court system in bad faith to then initiate expedited removal proceedings,” said Isa Peña, director of strategy for the Innovation Law Lab.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about the number of cases dismissed since last month and the number of arrests made at or near immigration courts. It said in a statement that most people who entered the US illegally within the past two years are subject to expedited removals.
“If they have a valid credible fear claim, they will continue in immigration proceedings, but if no valid claim is found, aliens will be subject to a swift deportation,” the statement said.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the immigration courts, declined to comment.
ICE has used increasingly aggressive tactics in Los Angeles and elsewhere while under orders from Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, to increase immigration arrests to at least 3,000 a day.
Tension in the hallways
In Seattle, a Venezuelan man sat in a small waiting room, surrounded by others clutching yellow folders while a half-dozen masked, plainclothes ICE officers lined the halls.
Protesters held signs in Spanish, including one that read, “Keep faith that love and justice will prevail in your favor,” and peppered officers with insults, saying their actions were immoral.
Judge Kenneth Sogabe granted the government’s request to dismiss the Venezuelan man’s deportation case, despite his objections that he and his wife faced death threats back home.
“I want my case to be analyzed and heard. I do not agree with my case being dismissed,” the man said through an interpreter.
Sogabe, a former Defense Department attorney who became a judge in 2021, told the man that Department of Homeland Security lawyers could dismiss a case it brought but he could appeal within 30 days. He could also file an asylum claim.
“When I leave, no immigration officer can detain me, arrest me?” the man asked.
“I can’t answer that,” the judge replied. “I do not have any connection with the enforcement arm.”
The man stepped out of the courtroom and was swarmed by officers who handcuffed him and walked him to the elevators.
Later that morning, a Haitian man was led away in tears after his case was dismissed. For reasons that were not immediately clear, the government didn’t drop its case against the man’s cousin, who was released with a new hearing date.
The pair entered the United States together last year using an online, Biden-era appointment system called CBP One. Trump ended CBP One and revoked two-year temporary status for those who used it.
Alex Baron, a lawyer for the pair, said the arrests were a scare tactic.
“Word gets out and other people just don’t come or don’t apply for asylum or don’t show up to court. And when they don’t show up, they get automatic removal orders,” he said.
At least seven others were arrested outside the Seattle courtrooms that day. In most cases, they didn’t speak English or have money to hire a lawyer.
A judge resists
In Atlanta, Judge Andrew Hewitt challenged an ICE lawyer who moved to dismiss removal cases against several South and Central Americans last week so the government could put them on a fast track to deportation.
Hewitt, a former ICE attorney who was appointed a judge in 2023, was visibly frustrated. He conceded to a Honduran man that the government’s reasoning “seems a bit circular and potentially inefficient” because he could show he’s afraid to return to his country and be put right back in immigration court proceedings.
The Honduran man hadn’t filed an asylum claim and Hewitt eventually signed what he called a “grossly untimely motion” to dismiss the case, advising the man of his right to appeal.
He denied a government request to dismiss the case of a Venezuelan woman who had filed an asylum application and scheduled a hearing for January 2027.
Hewitt refused to dismiss the case of a young Ecuadorian woman, telling the government lawyer to put the request in writing for consideration at an August hearing. Immigration officers waited near the building’s exit with handcuffs and took her into custody.
