Sudden spurt in admission to isolation ward panics people

There is a spate of calls to know if they tested positive for COVID-19

01/04/2020, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,TIRUNELVELI

The admission of 23 of the 24 persons, who attended a religious conference in Delhi recently, in the isolation ward of Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital, where one COVID – 19 positive person is already undergoing treatment has triggered panic among the public.

Since only three persons had been in the isolation ward till Monday and one youth from Samooharengapuram, who tested positive for COVID – 19, is undergoing medication in the ‘treatment ward’, there was a little relief among the residents here as they console themselves with the thought that penetration of the pandemic in one of the hottest districts of Tamil Nadu is less.

When the social media were abuzz on Tuesday with the information that 23 persons had been admitted to the TVMCH’s isolation ward, most of the residents here lost their peace. Besides making calls frantically to the journalists to confirm the panicky news that they have received, they also wanted to know if they had tested positive for COVID – 19.

Of the 24 persons, 17 are from Melapalayam, 3 from Pettai, 2 from Valliyoor, 1 each from Kalakkad and Seythunganallur near Palayamkottai in Thoothoukudi district.

Sources in the Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital here said 23 of the 24 persons, who attended the Tablighi Jamaat conference in Delhi, had COVID – 23 symptoms and had been admitted to the isolation ward.

“We’ve lifted samples from these cases and we, at this stage, cannot say anything on this issue. We’ve to crosscheck the results we got at TVMCH with the results with a Pune-based lab,” a senior doctor of TVMCH said without saying anything concrete about the outcome of the clinical investigations done here.

Another senior doctor of TVMCH said the samples would usually be sent for crosschecking only when the patients test positive for a viral infection.

“Since the samples of these 23 patients have been sent to Pune for crosschecking or confirmation, one can infer that they might be COVID – 19 positive as per the results of TVMCH,” he explained.

Effective steps have controlled spread of virus in Tamil Nadu, says Minister

Home delivery of bags of 22 grocery items for ₹1,000 in Virudhunagar

01/04/2020, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,VIRUDHUNAGAR

Minister for Dairy Development K.T. Rajenthra Bhalaji, along with Virudhunagar Collector R. Kannan, reviewing precautionary measures taken to check spread of COVID-19 infection at Virudhunagar on Tuesday.ma01minister

Despite having a higher population than Italy, Tamil Nadu had a far less number of COVID-19-infected people, thanks to the right action taken at the right time by Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami, said Dairy Development Minister K.T. Rajenthra Bhalaji.

Reviewing the COVID-19 preventive measures being taken at a few local bodies here on Tuesday, Mr. Bhalaji said that precautionary measures were being taken on a war footing.

“The CM has been working hard day and night to contain the spread of the viral infection with a view to safeguarding the people of Tamil Nadu and migrant workers in the State,” he said.

Mr. Palaniswami had declared a lockdown in the State even before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the curfew across the country, he added.

The effective steps taken by the officials of various departments had contained the spread of the virus with the death of only one person, who had contacts with those from other countries, he said. Mr. Bhalaji asked officials to continue closely monitoring disinfecting activities taken up across the district. Community kitchens were catering to the aged, differently abled, mentally retarded and homeless people as well as those living below poverty line, he added.

Collector R. Kannan said that bags of 22 essential grocery items were being door-delivered to the people. He said that the grocery items were grown in rain-fed regions without using chemical fertilizers.

The bag contains turmeric, cumin seeds, saum, muster, fenugreek, pepper, toor dal, urad dal, moong dal, black chenna, tamarind, fried gram, sugar, broad beans, wheat flour, asafoetida powder, red chilli, rava, edible oil, salt and a tea packet. The goods came at a cost of ₹1,000.

People from Sivakasi, Sattur, Virudhunagar and Aruppukottai could call 97509-43814 and 97599-43816 and 92454-12800. The goods would be delivered within 24 hours.

Toiling hard on streets with immense satisfaction

Residents are moved by conservancy workers’ laudable dedication

01/04/2020, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,TIRUNELVELI

No one is watching them even from a distance. But the conservancy workers, sporting masks and gloves, clean the garbage scattered everywhere along the almost deserted roads of Drivers’ Colony in NGO Colony. While a male conservancy worker with the long garden broom gathers garbage strewn all around, two female workers collect the degradable and the non-degradable waste in separate bins kept in a battery-operated garbage vehicle.

“Vanakkm Amma... Romba nandri amma,”... the greetings from Drivers’ Colony Residents’ Welfare Association president Nallaperumal diverts the conservancy workers’ attention from collecting the garbage and they reciprocate it with folded hands and broad smile. And their work continues even as everyone is behind doors of this middle class residential area as COVID -19 scare is everywhere.

The conservancy workers, drawing paltry daily wages, start their work at 6 a.m. sharp and the work continues until the target given for them for the day is achieved. Besides cleaning the garbage, the conservancy workers desilt the drainage channels, sprinkle bleaching powder along these desilted drainage channels, spray disinfectants around the wet nauseating silt and their colleagues remove this silt in the lorries once it dries-up.

The cash-starved and short-staffed Corporation has deployed 1,077 conservancy workers in Tirunelveli, Thatchanallur, Palayamkottai and Melapalayam Zones to carry-out the cleaning operations in the wake of the dreaded pandemic threat. Their laudable work attracts everyone’s attention as they, without anything from anyone, concentrate on their work. Since there is no roadside teashop, they have to wait for the arrival of a vendor without stopping their work.

Apart from this routine work, conservancy workers in small groups are taken for cleaning operation and putting lime powder circles in the temporary vegetable markets created with 479 shops to ensure ‘personal distancing’ to avert community transmission of SARS –CoV- 2 virus.

Moreover, the conservancy workers deployed along the streets housing the individuals under home quarantine have to spray disinfectants thrice a day besides the regular work of keeping these areas clean. The increased arrival of the homeless and the labourers to the ‘Amma Unavagam’ has burdened them with more work.

Most of their families have three children and most of them are studying in the schools.

“We’ve told them not to come out of our houses as COVID – 19 threat is everywhere,” the women conservancy workers say even as their work continues.

Though most of these workers are entangled in debt and their borrowings from the local moneylenders continue, there is no sign of worries on their face as they draw immense satisfaction from their work.

“This is the job that feeds us and our families... We should do it with utmost dedication and do it as we do usually even as pandemic threat looms large everywhere now,” the conservancy workers say while leaving the Drivers’ Colony area with the collected garbage even as no one is monitoring them.

‘Exodus could have been avoided’

PM should have consulted States before announcing lockdown, says Baghel

01/04/2020, SOBHANA K. NAIR ,NEW DELHI

The displacement of lakhs of migrants could have been avoided had Prime Minister Narendra Modi first consulted the State governments, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel said in an interview to The Hindu.

“Who is to implement the lockdown? Can the Union government on its own do so? The answer is no. Ultimately, it’s the State government’s job to implement it. Did the Prime Minister talk to any of the State governments before unilaterally announcing it? No,” Mr. Baghel said, speaking over phone from Raipur.

Chhattisgarh has reported seven COVID-19 cases, with no deaths so far.

It was one of the first States to announce a lockdown on March 21, four days before Mr. Modi announced a nationwide 21-day lockdown.

“We have the Mumbai-Howrah highway cutting across the State and could not have taken a chance,” Mr. Baghel said the citing reason for an early lockdown.

The Union government should have reached out to the industry also and the economic package should have precluded the lockdown. It should have anticipated that once the lockdown was implemented scores of persons would not be able to earn a living and would obviously head out to places where they felt more secure, Mr. Baghel said.

“We are staring at a severe economic crisis,” he said.

“All skilled and unskilled labourers have left the factories because of the lockdown. The wheels of all industries have come to a screeching halt. I am no economist, but surely, we will see the economic impact of this lockdown in years to come,” he said.

The lockdown, he added, would have a similar impact of pulling down the economy as demonetisation had.

The Chief Minister said that there was a crying need for a second economic package to reach out to those who did not benefit from Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s announcements of March 26 such as the landless labourers and workers in the unorganised sector, among others.

‘Pay MNREGA workers’

In a recent letter to Mr. Modi, Mr. Baghel had suggested that ₹1,000 a month should be transferred to MNREGA and workers in the unorganised sector for the next three months.

Instead of the promised ₹500 to women Jan Dhan account holders, Mr. Bhagel suggested that ₹750 must be transferred and the scheme should be extended to men too.

“The only way to avert an economic crisis is to infuse financial liquidity and increase the purchasing power of the end consumer. The Union government will have to move swiftly in this direction,” Mr. Baghel added.

Forced to stay, workers now battle hunger

01/04/2020

Nearly 100 of them left for home. With no trains or buses, they just rode home in auto-rickshaws and cycle rickshaws, that on a normal day was the means of earning a living. Thirty-two of them pedalled cycle-rickshaws to cover a distance of 1,390 km to Katihar. Three days later, covering a distance of 554 km, they reached Lucknow on Tuesday morning. “Their mobile phones are switched off, so we don’t know if the police caught them or if they are still continuing on their journey,” Mohammed Nizammudin, another auto-rickshaw driver, whose distant relative is one of the 32 making the journey, says.

For the 80-odd who stayed back, each day is getting more challenging. Coronavirus, the lynchpin of this lockdown, doesn’t occupy much mindspace, though all of them are wearing masks, some readymade, some fashioned out of gamchas.

The group complains that the police posted outside the gates of the colony don’t let them step out. “They hit first and ask questions later. We are shooed back into the colony each time we try to leave. We heard on the radio that the Delhi government is providing food, but we don’t know where or how to get to it,” 38-year-old Abdul says. After a day without any food on Sunday, the Rozi Roti Adhikar Abhiyan provided ₹2,000 for emergency rations on Monday.

‘COVID-19 crisis a turning point in history’

Modi, Macron hold talks over pandemic

01/04/2020, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,NEW DELHI

The COVID-19 pandemic is a “turning point in history”, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a telephone conversation with French President Emanuel Macron on Tuesday.

According to a release by the Ministry of External Affairs, PM Modi expressed his condolences for the loss of lives in the pandemic in France.

“The French President strongly agreed with Prime Minister’s view that the COVID-19 crisis is a turning point in modern history and offers the world an opportunity to forge a new human-centric concept of globalisation,” the MEA statement said, adding that the two leaders had agreed to have Indian and French experts share preventive measures, research on treatment and vaccines.

The two leaders had both appeared on an emergency video conference convened by Saudi King Salman last week to discuss the pandemic, where leaders of the G-20 had committed to infusing $5 trillion into the global economy to mitigate the impact of the virus.

During the conference, Mr. Modi had stressed on the need for the G-20 to look at humanitarian aspects to global challenges like pandemics, climate change and terrorism.

Global concerns

The MEA said Mr. Modi and Mr. Macron had “underlined the importance of not losing sight of other global concerns like climate change, which impact humanity as a whole.

They also stressed the need to devote special attention to the needs of less developed countries, including those in Africa, during the present crisis.”

SC upholds right to discuss COVID-19

It asks the media to publish official version to avoid panic; government told to issue a daily bulletin

01/04/2020, KRISHNADAS RAJAGOPAL,NEW DELHI

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the right to free discussion about COVID-19, even as it directed the media to refer to and publish the official version of the developments in order to avoid inaccuracies and large-scale panic.

It ordered the government to start a daily bulletin on COVID-19 developments through all media avenues in the next 24 hours.

A Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde, was responding to a request from the Central government that media outlets, in the “larger interest of justice”, should only publish or telecast anything on COVID-19 after ascertaining the factual position from the government.

A Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) report in the court, signed by Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, explained that “any deliberate or inaccurate” reporting by the media, particularly web portals, had a “serious and inevitable potential of causing panic in larger section of the society”.

The Ministry said any panic reaction in the midst of an unprecedented situation based on such reporting would harm the entire nation. Creating panic is also a criminal offence under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, the Ministry said.

But the court took a view balancing free press and the need to avoid panic in society during an unprecedented crisis. “We expect the media [print, electronic or social] to maintain a strong sense of responsibility and ensure that unverified news capable of causing panic is not disseminated. A daily bulletin by the Government of India through all media avenues, including social media and forums to clear the doubts of people, would be made active within a period of 24 hours as submitted by the Solicitor- General of India. We do not intend to interfere with the free discussion about the pandemic, but direct the media refer to and publish the official version about the developments,” the court ordered. Noting that the 21-day nationwide lockdown was “inevitable” in the face of an “unprecedented global crisis” like the COVID-19 pandemic, the government blamed “fake and misleading” messages on social media for creating widespread panic, which led to mass “barefoot” journey of migrant workers from cities to their native villages in rural India.

Fake news

“Deliberate or inadvertent fake news and material capable of causing a serious panic in the minds of the public is found to be the single most unmanageable hindrance in the management of this challenge... Will set up a separate unit headed by a Joint Secretary-level officer in the Health Ministry and consisting of eminent specialist doctors from recognised institutions like AIIMS to answer the queries of citizens,” the Ministry’s 39-page status report said.

The Ministry said the Narendra Modi government, in fact, took “pro-active, pre-emptive and timely” action 13 days before even the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern”. Very few countries responded as well as India.

But the mass migration of the poor would defeat the preventive measures taken by the Central government, the Ministry said. It said “there was no necessity for migrant workers to rush to their villages” when the Centre, fully conscious that no citizen should be deprived of basic amenities, had announced a ₹1.70 lakh crore package under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana to take care of their daily needs.