Coronavirus Live News Updates: India reports 1.52 lakh new COVID-19 cases today, lowest tally in 50 days

10:01 (IST)

Coronavirus Latest Updates

Trend of declining number of new COVID-19 cases continues; 1.52 lakh cases today

India reported 1,52,734 new COVID-19 cases, 2,38,022 discharges and 3,128 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said on Monday morning. The country has been registering a gradual decline in the number of new cases this week. On Sunday, 1.6 lakh new cases were reported.

Total cases: 2,80,47,534
Total discharges: 2,56,92,342 
Death toll: 3,29,100    
Active cases: 20,26,092 

09:51 (IST)

Coronavirus Latest Updates

Odisha extends lockdown till 17 June; weekend curfew relaxed in 3 districts

The Odisha government on Sunday extended the lockdown by 16 more days till 17 June to further stem the spread of coronavirus. The second phase of the lockdown was to end at 5 am on 1 June. It will now continue till 5 am of 17 June.

"The lockdown is primarily aimed at restricting movement of people and not goods. All restrictions and exemptions of the previous lockdowns will be implemented in the third phase, too," Chief Secretary SC Mohapatra said.

The weekend shutdown will also continue, he said. "However, for three districts  Nuapada, Gajapati and Sundergarh  the relaxation period will be from 7 am till 1 pm, instead of 8 am to 11 am, from Monday to Friday, keeping in view the decline in COVID-19 cases in these places. This relaxation may be withdrawn if there is any sign of rise in infections," Mohapatra said.

09:39 (IST)

Coronavirus Latest Updates

Maharashtra extends COVID-19 lockdown till 15 June

The Maharashtra government on Sunday extended the lockdown-like curbs till 15 June and also announcedthat relaxations will be granted depending upon the COVID-19 positivity rate and availability of oxygen beds.

In municipal corporations or regions of districts with less than 10 percent COVID-19 positivity rate and where the availability of occupied oxygen beds will be less than 40 percent, all the establishments/shops engaged in essential commodities and services that are presently opened from 7 am to 11 am can now remain open from 7 am to 2 pm, the government said in an order.

Coronavirus Live News Updates: India reported 1,52,734 new COVID-19 cases, 2,38,022 discharges and 3,128 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said on Monday morning. The country has been registering a gradual decline in the number of new cases this week. On Sunday, 1.6 lakh new cases were reported.

Total cases: 2,80,47,534
Total discharges: 2,56,92,342
Death toll: 3,29,100
Active cases: 20,26,092

The Maharashtra government on Sunday extended the lockdown-like curbs till 15 June and also announced that relaxations will be granted depending upon the COVID-19 positivity rate and availability of oxygen beds.

In municipal corporations or regions of districts with less than 10 percent COVID-19 positivity rate and where the availability of occupied oxygen beds will be less than 40 percent, all the establishments/shops engaged in essential commodities and services that are presently opened from 7 am to 11 am can now remain open from 7 am to 2 pm, the government said in an order.

For districts and corporations having more than a 20 percent positivity rate and where over 75 percent of oxygen beds are occupied, the borders of such districts will be closed and no person will be allowed to enter or exit in such districts.

The exceptions will be death from a family, medical reason and emergency services or services related to such situations.

Instead of implementing the 'Break the chain' order uniformly in the state, the restrictions will now be relaxed or made more stringent till 7 am of 15 June by taking into account the positivity rate in the municipality jurisdiction and areas of districts, and the availability of oxygen beds at various places, the government said.

As per the census of 2011, the municipal corporations that are having a population of more than 10 lakh will be considered as the independent administrative unit for curbing the spread of COVID-19.

Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Kalyan-Dombivali, Vasai Virar, Pune, PimpriChinchwad, Nagpur, Aurangabad and Nashik corporations will be treated as the administrative units.

Barring the jurisdiction of these corporations, the rest of the part of the district will be counted as a separate administrative unit, it said.

The decision for keeping open all the shops and establishments that do not fall in the essential category will be taken by the local disaster management authority (LDMA) but their timings will be at uniformity with those shops and establishment falling in the essential group, as per the order.

Similarly, the shops will remain closed on Saturdays and Sundays.

In such regions, along with the essential commodities, the non-essential goods and services can also be distributed through the e-commerce system.

However after 3 pm, except for medical services and medical-related emergency, there will be restrictions on commuting and traffic, it said.

Besides the offices that are working for the pandemic-related services, all other government offices can function with the attendance of 25 percent of employees.

If the chief of any of these departments needs the attendance of more than 25 per cent, they can take permission from the disaster management authority, the order said.

All the agricultural work and equipment-related shops will be open on the working days till 2 pm. Considering the monsoon and sowing period, the local disaster management authority can give the permission to increase the timings of such agriculture-related goods and
service providers or can also give a nod to remain open on Saturdays and Sundays, the order said.

Addressing the people of the state through social media, Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday said the daily coronavirus case count in the state is on the decline, but these numbers are close to the last year's peak levels.

Thackeray announced that the lockdown-like restrictions currently in force in the state since mid-April, have been extended by a fortnight till June 15.

He said he was taking a district-wise review of the coronavirus situation and curbs will be made stricter where the numbers are on the rise, while some relaxations will be given where the case count is on the decline.

As of Sunday, Maharashtra's tally of COVID-19 cases stood at 57,31,815 and the overall death toll is 94,844. The state has 2,71,801 active cases, as per the state health department.

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Odisha extends COVID-19 lockdown by two weeks till 17 June; restrictions to be relaxed in 3 districts

Bhubaneswar: The Odisha government on Sunday extended the lockdown by 16 more days till 17 June to further stem the spread of coronavirus.

The second phase of the lockdown was to end at 5 am on 1 June. It will now continue till 5 am of 17 June.

Follow LIVE updates on COVID-19 here

"The lockdown is primarily aimed at restricting movement of people and not goods. All restrictions and exemptions of the previous lockdowns will be implemented in the third phase, too," Chief Secretary SC Mohapatra said.

The weekend shutdown will also continue, he said.

"However, for three districts Nuapada, Gajapati and Sundergarh the relaxation period will be from 7 am till 1 pm, instead of 8 am to 11 am, from Monday to Friday, keeping in view the decline in COVID-19 cases in these places. This relaxation may be withdrawn if there is any sign of rise in infections," Mohapatra said.

He said all businesses except saloons, parlours and malls are allowed to operate with strict Covid guidelines in the three districts.

Restrictions like a cap of 25 people at marriage functions and 20 people at funerals will continue, along with prohibition on mass feasts during such events.

Meanwhile, Additional Chief Secretary of the Health and Family Welfare Department, P K Mohapatra said the second wave's peak period is over in Odisha, and hoped that the situation will improve further in the next 10 days.

Mohapatra said nine of the state's 30 districts, including Khurda, Cuttack, Balasore and Puri contribute 60 percent of the total active cases.

He said there has been significant decline in positive cases in western Odisha districts bordering Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

On the vaccination front, Mohapatra said 98 percent of healthcare workers and close to 100 percent of frontline workers have so far been inoculated.

Nearly 30 percent of people who are aged 45 and above have been vaccinated in the state. "We have procured 3.82 crore doses of vaccines through global tender," the senior state government official said.

Mohapatra added that the state has decided to set up one RT-PCR testing machine in hospitals in every district headquarter.

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Nehru’s Nazi friend: How Adolf Hitler’s star pilot came to play a cameo role in making of modern India

Illuminated by tracer and exploding artillery, the small training plane hurtled through Berlin’s bombed-out Tiergarten, lurching into the air with the last, desperate hopes of the Third Reich. Flight-Captain Hanna Reitsch had spent the evening begging to stay inside the Führerbunker and die with her leader, Adolf Hitler. Instead, she had been ordered to carry Field Marshal Robert von Greim—appointed head of the Nazi Luftwaffe after the betrayal of HermannGöring—to rally its remaining aircraft to Berlin’s defence.

Later, the young Flight-Captain would tell a United States military intelligence officer: “It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side”.

In the summer of 1959, Flight-Captain Reitch had her next moment in history: this one, inside the home of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, along with his daughter, and future prime  minister, Indira Gandhi, and his grandchildren, Rajiv Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi. Reitch had flown the prime minister over New Delhi in her glider. He was delighted, and an invitation to lunch followed. For last several days of her visit to India, she lived at the Nehrus’ home as their guest.

“Nehru was particularly curious about the rumour that Hanna had been Hitler’s mistress”, Reitch’s biographer, Sophie Jackson, records. “Hanna did not mind recounting her time in the bunker. At least with this audience, she could speak openly and would not be automatically condemned”.

The grandchildren—one of whom was later to become an airline pilot, and then Prime Minister; the other, to die in an aviation accident—“were enthusiastic, as only young boys can be, over all things to do with flying”. “They showed her their model aeroplanes and escorted her around Delhi”. Indira Gandhi and Reitch, according to her autobiography, continued to correspond.

In some senses, the brief friendship between Nehru and the Nazi tells us little—except perhaps about the exceptional privilege being White brought, and sometime still brings, in post-independence India. Yet, the story illuminates, how quickly the world—and even committed anti-fascists like Nehru—were to forgive those who participated in and enabled the most evil regime the world has ever known.

Emerging from prison late in 1945, Reitch found her world no longer existed. Fearing the prospect of being repatriated to Soviet Union-controlled Germany, her father Wilhelm Reitch had shot dead his wife Emy von Alpenheim, younger daughter Heidi Reitch, and her three children, before turning the gun on himself. These kinds of suicides, historian Jörg Freidrich has shown, were not uncommon: the downfall of Hitler had meant not just military defeat, but the implosion of society itself.

In 1932, Reitch had learned to fly gliders in the small town of Grunau, going on to set several altitude and endurance records. Following a brief stint as a movie stunt pilot, she went on join the Luftwaffe’s testing centre at Rechlin-Lärz Airfield—achieving iconic status in Nazi propaganda for flying the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the world’s first fully controllable helicopter, the Junkers Ju87 dive bomber, the Dornier D017 light bomber and the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet.

Following the war, though, Germans were barred from piloting powered aircraft. Reitch returned to her first love, gliding. From 1955 on, she set multiple new records. New Delhi, meanwhile, had lost its flying club’s fledgling fleet, after a jet aircraft crashed into the hangar. Hans Georg Steltzer, the Federal Republic of Germany’s ambassador in New Delhi from 1957 to 1960, thought a new glider would make a perfect present to the newly-independent country.

The fact that Steltzer chose an apparently unrepentant Nazi icon to fly that glider is illuminating. In fact, key figures in Nazi Germany were being rehabilitated across the world. Reitch’s one-time lover Wernher von Braun—the architect of the Nazi missile programme, and now widely known to have been responsible for war crimes involving the use of slave labour—had become a respected figure in the United States’ space programme.

Large numbers other Nazi scientists were rehabilitated in both the United States and Soviet Union; the new Federal Republic’s political leadership and intelligence services, too, were awash with former Nazis.

Elsewhere in the world, too, figures close to the Nazi establishment found themselves rehabilitated. Kurt Tank, the legendary Focke-Wulf aircraft designer, went on to design combat jets for Argentina, Egypt and India. Indeed, Tank was in India when Reitch made her visit, although there’s nothing to suggest the two met.

For Reitch, the India visit appears to have coincided with an effort to build a new inner world. Reitch, Sophie Jackson tells us, became drawn to“various forms of Eastern religion, particularly meditation. It seemed to Hanna that this might help combat her anxiety and emptiness”. She went on what her biographer describes as a “pilgrimage” to Pondicherry, meeting with the French spiritualist Mira Alfassa. The one-time Nazi test pilot, by her own account, even practiced yoga with Nehru.

The journey to India was to mark Reitch’s rebranding as a feminist aviation icon. Meetings with President John F Kennedy, and other world leaders, followed. Then, she moved to Ghana in 1962, setting up a flight school for the newly-independent country. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s iconic freedom movement leader, became a close friend.

Berhard Rieger, in a signal 2008 essay, observed that Ghana provided an ideal stage for Reitch’s effort at “moral self-reinvention: it allowed her to parade herself as a racially unprejudiced humanitarian, thereby sidestepping the very political questions of responsibility and guilt that marred her biography”. For the country she served, too, German technology could be marketed as a benevolent philanthropic tool, thus freeing it of the burden it carried for abetting industrialised slaughter.

In interviews given in her last years, though, Reitch took off the veil she had donned. “And what do we have now in Germany”, she asked the American photojournalist Ron Laytner? “A land of bankers and car-makers. Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders. I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with Diamonds Hitler gave me”.

“Today in all Germany”, she concluded, “you can’t find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power”. “Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don’t explain the real guilt we share—that we lost”.

Even at the very end, she expressed neither shame nor regret for the Holocaust, or her own role in Nazi Germany’s wars of aggression. Perhaps, in private, Nehru had asked her what she thought on these issues. Whether he did, and what she said, the archive does not tell us.

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Uttar Pradesh relaxes lockdown in all but 20 districts from 1 June onwards

Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government on Sunday relaxed the COVID-19 lockdown from 1 June allowing shops and markets outside containment zones to open for five days a week, but it would not be implemented for now in 20 districts where active cases are over 600.

Once the tally of active COVID-19 cases in these districts falls below 600, relaxation will be implemented there, said Uttar Pradesh Chief Secretary RK Tiwari.

The 20 districts where there would be no relaxation yet are Meerut, Lucknow, Saharanpur, Varanasi, Ghaziabad, Gorakhpur, Muzaffarnagar, Bareilly, Gautam Buddh Nagar, Bulandshahr, Jhansi, Prayagraj, Lakhimpur-Khiri, Sonbhadra, Jaunpur, Baghpat, Moradabad, Ghazipur, Bijnor and Deoria.

For the rest of the 55 districts, shops and markets outside containment zones will be allowed to remain open 7 am to 7 pm from Mondays to Fridays from 1 June, Tiwari said in a government statement.

Eateries on highways and vendors will be allowed to operate, according to the statement.

It also said night curfew will remain in place from 7 pm to 7 am and weekend restrictions or "corona curfew" will be there on Saturdays and Sundays.

Instructions were issued that during weekend restrictions, cleanliness, sanitisation and fogging campaigns will be carried out.

Shopkeepers and their employees will have to wear masks, maintain a two-yard distance and ensure the arrangement of sanitiser. This rule will also be applicable for the customers, it said.

While there would be full attendance for frontline workers, for the rest of the government officers, there would be 50 percent attendance with employees being called in a rotational manner. COVID helpdesk must be established at all the offices.

The private sector has been asked to encourage the employees to work from home.

According to the statement, industrial units will stay open while vegetable markets in the densely populated areas will function in open areas.

At railway stations, airport and bus stand all the COVID protocols have to be followed, screening of passengers and antigen tests have to be conducted and then sent to hospitals. Buses of the UP Roadways have been allowed to operate within the state with passengers according to seating capacity, it said.

Schools, colleges and educational institutes will remain closed while teachers and other staff have been allowed to come to the school for administrative work.

Barring the containment zones, not more than five devotees will be allowed inside the religious places at a time. Coaching centres, cinema halls, gyms, swimming pools, clubs and shopping malls will remain completely closed, the statement said.

A maximum of 20 persons will be allowed in a funeral procession, it said.

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Two children from rural Karnataka contract black fungus; both critical

Bengaluru: Mucormycosis, commonly known as black fungus, which was till now affecting only adults, has been detected among children as two cases were reported in rural Karnataka.

A 11-year-old girl from Ballari district and 14-year-old boy from Chitradurga district have been infected with the fungal disease. Both are undergoing treatment at government hospitals here and their condition is said to be serious.

They had contracted COVID-19 but were not aware of it, a health official said adding they were admitted to the hospital after they developed complications. "Two children are undergoing treatment for the black fungus infection at Government Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospitals. They are suffering from Acute Juvenile Diabetes (AJD)," a senior health official told PTI.

The official added that they are in a critical state.

According to the state health department, 1,250 cases of black fungus have been reported so far in the state. As many as 1,193 are currently under treatment and 18 are cured while 39 have lost their lives.

Meanwhile, Karnataka Health Minister K Sudhakar told reporters that the state has so far received around 10,000 vials of amphotericin-B drug used for the treatment of the fungal infection, from the Centre.

In government hospitals, we are providing the treatment and medicine free of cost, he noted.

Black Fungus has emerged as a post COVID-19 complication, especially among the diabetes patients with high sugar levels.

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Uttar Pradesh announces Rs 10 lakh aid for families of journalists who died due to COVID-19

Lucknow: In a bid to encourage and honour the tireless and unparalleled contribution of journalists, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced Rs 10 lakh financial aid for family members of scribes who died due to COVID-19.

On the occasion of ''Hindi Journalism Day'', Adityanath said, "From the freedom movement to the present times, Hindi journalism has had an unprecedented contribution in social awakening and nation-building. My heartfelt greetings to all journalists on Hindi Journalism Day."

The chief minister said that the government is committed to provide all support to journalists and will continue to encourage them.

Praising the efforts of journalists, he said, "During such challenging and testing times, all journalists and media workers have risked their lives to bring to us relevant and authentic information. They have worked 24x7 which is commendable."

During the second wave of the pandemic, many journalists across the country got infected on duty and lost their lives, leaving their families helpless, the UP government said.

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World No Tobacco Day 2021 Awards: Madhya Pradesh Voluntary Health Association wins prestigious WHO prize

Amid the lockdown and surge in COVID-19 cases, Madhya Pradesh Voluntary Health Association (MPHVA) was given the prestigious World No Tobacco Day Award by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

This big announcement was made on Monday, 24 May.

According to a press release from WHO, MPVHA won the award in the South East Asia Region category for its efforts in tobacco prevention and control.

WHO annually organises this event to acknowledge individuals or organisations in each of the six selected regions for their activities in the area of tobacco control.

Sharing light on the association’s work, the executive director of MPVHA Mukesh Kumar Sinha said that they are working towards the national tobacco control program for the last two decades in Madhya Pradesh.

“Global Adult Tobacco Survey data of the state says that the overall consumption of tobacco reduced from 40 percent in 2009 to 34 percent in 2016 and smoking at public places reduced from 40 percent in 2009 to 24 percent in 2016,” Sinha said.

Further giving an update on the various health projects, he asserted that they are currently working with the State Tobacco Control Cell for the implementation of the National Tobacco Control Programme in the state. Few measures have been introduced in the state to protect the teens, women, and poor section of people from the tobacco menace, he explained.

MPVHA is the first civil society organisation in India that has received this prestigious award.

Finally talking about the award, Sinha informed that WHO director-general's special award had been conferred on Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare. Uttar Pradesh’s State Tobacco Control Cell, also won the World No Tobacco Day Award this year.

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