The loss of life due to COVID-19 in Odisha rose to 70 on Monday with six additional fatalities, while the count moved to 13,717 as 616 additional individuals tried positive for the sickness, a wellbeing division official said.
Four passings were accounted for from Ganjam area, the state's COVID-19 hotspot, while Khurda and Cuttack detailed one every, he said.
"Lament to educate the destruction regarding six COVID positive patients while under treatment," the division said in an announcement.
A considerable lot of the expired were experiencing diabetes, hypertension and different afflictions, the authority said.
Of the 616 new cases, 415 were recognized among those in isolate, while 201 are neighborhood contact contaminations, he said.
Upwards of 505 patients likewise recuperated from the ailment, pushing the quantity of those relieved to 9,255.
Ganjam, which is Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's home area, represented 283 new cases, trailed by 50 in Koraput and 40 in Nabarangpur.
There are 4,896 dynamic cases in the express, the authority said.
The wellbeing office has tried an aggregate of 3,41,537 examples, he included.
Taking into account the rising number of coronavirus cases, the state government on Monday permitted home treatment of asymptomatic and mellow cases in urban regions.
"All COVID-19 positive cases, who are asymptomatic/have mellow side effects in Urban territories, District/Sub-division/Block Headquarter towns are permitted Home Isolation. They need to follow all conventions spread out by the Health and Family Welfare Department," Chief Secretary A K Tripathy said.
He said the technique was changed so as to escalate and fortify COVID-19 administration and guarantee ideal utilization of all treatment offices.
Congress pioneer Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said the four periods of across the country lockdown have "fizzled" and not given the outcomes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi anticipated.
Tending to a question and answer session in Delhi, he requested that the focal government explain its procedure most definitely and how it plans to help vagrants and states.
"What is the focal government's arrangement to go ahead as the infection is developing exponentially in the nation," he inquired.
"The four phases of lockdown have not given the outcome that the Prime Minister expected," he stated, including that it is quite evident that the point and motivation behind lockdowns have bombed in India.
"India is the main nation on the planet which is loosening up the lockdown when the infection is 'exponentially rising'," he noted.
As researchers and medical labs are stepping up their efforts to find a cure for Covid-19, the Isreal Defence Ministry said in a statement that the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) has completed the development phase of coronavirus antibody or passive vaccine, reports The Jerusalem Post.
The Israeli defence minister was briefed by the research team, who told that this antibody attacks the virus and neutralises it in the body. The institute is now preparing to get a patent for the antibody and contract for its commercial development. The defence ministry of Israel will coordinate this with the IIBR.
“I am proud of the Biological Institute staff, who have made a major breakthrough,” Defence Minister Naftali Bennett said Monday. “The Jewish creativity and ingenuity brought about this amazing achievement.”
Last month, IIBR told that it had begun testing the antibody-based vaccine prototype on rodents. The institute is also involved in plasma collection from people who have recovered from the novel coronavirus infection, hoping that this might help research.
A second Israeli research team, MigVax, has also reported that it is close to completing the first phase of development of a coronavirus vaccine. Last week, it secured a $12 million investment from OurCrowd to accelerate the path to clinical trials.
Israel has tested over 404,000 samples in the country and 16,246 came out positive. The country has reported 235 deaths till now
Amidst a spate of pay cuts in the corporate sector, the demand for loans in Peer to peer (P2P) lending platforms, which mostly cater to subprime borrowers, has increased dramatically. However, with investors facing defaults, lending has significantly slowed down.
Much of this demand is coming from young salaried professionals, who have faced pay cuts in recent days.
With no upper limit, the interest rates in the platform can go as high as 35 per cent, on a reducing balance. However, even with high-interest rates, many investors are turning away the loan proposals.
“As there are a lot of delays in salaries, the demand for loans has substantially increased from salaried class, mostly younger professionals who are outside their hometown. In addition, we are also witnessing high demand from small businesses,” says Ekmmeet Singh, CEO, Lenbox. The company is able to meet only about 60 per cent of the demand, and most of the lenders in the platform are preferring giving loans to MSMEs. For salaries people, close to 50 per cent of the proposals are getting rejected.
Also, many P2P platforms have voluntarily extended the moratorium to on loans. Notably, P2P platforms only act as a marketplace, while loans are given by individual lenders.
“Queries for loans has increased dramatically. The demand on a daily basis ha increased two times. While there are investors in the market, it is the question of cash flows. For the month of March, EMIs have been partially impacted. In our system, only 20 per cent of borrowers have availed moratorium,” according to Amit More, founder, Finzy, a P2P platform offering loans for a longer tenure of 36 months.
The defaults are more in loans for shorter tenure, which require monthly or quarterly repayments.
Also, while many urban-centric P2P lenders have been witnessing more than 50 per cent default rate over the past month, the defaults for rural-focused lenders have been only about 20 per cent.
“Overall, in the industry, there is a severe decline in collections. However, for a rural centric platform like us, the scenario is much better. Our April collections are 80 per cent. In the supply side there is constraint,” said Rajiv M Ranjan, Founder and Chief Managing Director of PaisaDukan.
How the world power after 2020 will be decided by the ability of a country or a group of countries to produce bio weapons and also on their ability how to save their population from bio weapons of their own and others.
It is said that most wars are in some ways demonstration of technologies of a warring party more than cultural, monetary or social superiority. In all wars, a side with superior technology and understanding of science has usually won 9 times out of 10 since time immemorial. In that context, the World war 2 was started and fought amongst European powers. Science and technology played a major role during that war.
In some ways, the World war 2 was a delayed outcome of the world war 1 and Spanish flu which later generated Great Depression, US New Deal, World War 2 and subsequent world order. The imbalances in European power structure and emergence of new powers like US and Japan also had to be digested by the world order. However, more importantly, World war 2 was unique in a way that it was a war of science and technology. Use of cars, tanks, submarines, advanced logistics, ships, bombs, war planes etc all took place heavily only during world war 2.
Many countries like Germany, UK etc converted almost all their industrial capacity in to manufacturing of war equipments. Every productive human worked pretty much on war activity. Despite that, the science and technology was largely evenly spread amongst the countries and blocks at war which were largely European. Their societies were already integrated and their technologies available widely. The war was evenly fought although UK and its allies had large armies due to subjugation of countries across the world in several previous centuries. Despite the overwhelming strength, the UK led alliance had on paper, the war looked like a stalemate for many many years. Many millions died and still it didn’t find a clear winner.
With countries virtually shutting down amid the rising Covid-19 pandemic, recruiters, especially multinationals, are revisiting their hiring plans, throwing the placement processes of India’s top management and technology institutes into disarray.
Several students of Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have found their job offers revoked by US-based research and advisory firm Gartner.
IIM Calcutta and IIM Ahmedabad have confirmed the revocations, with an official at the former’s placement panel saying Gartner rescinded its final placement offers as well as those for internships.
“The institute is trying to contact them to find an agreeable outcome,” the IIM Calcutta official said. Amit Karna, chairperson of placements at IIM Ahmedabad, said: “Gartner has revoked offers made at the final placements. It had hired three students. No other firm has revoked final offers. The institute is finding new opportunities for affected students by reaching out to our alumni network, existing and new recruiters.”
When contacted, Gartner refused to comment. A few students of IIM Bangalore took to LinkedIn, saying their summer placements and job offers were rescinded by a US-based firm. But IIM Bangalore said it was in touch with the company, and trying to find other offers for the affected students.
U Dinesh Kumar, chair, career development services, IIM Bangalore, said: “All firms have told us they are going to stand by their commitments. Offers have only been postponed. The companies are trying to work out plans once there is clarity on the lockdown after April 15. Mostly, financial sector firms have postponed offers, as they haven’t been able to begin internships due to logistics and data safety issues.”
Kumar agreed some Gulf-based firms had withdrawn their summer placement offers because of travel restrictions, but the placement team had found other opportunities for the affected students.
Taking a middle path, a leading fast-moving consumer goods multinational has offered virtual assignments to those it picked for summer internships instead of postponing their commitment. The company is likely to take a call on final placements after the lockdown is over, as management trainees joining will happen only in June or July, sources said.
At IIM Calcutta, a start-up has revoked seven internship offers.
“Some of our prominent regular recruiters have come forward to hire additional interns. The placement team is arranging new internships for those who lost their opportunities,” the IIM Calcutta official said. An official of IIM Shillong’s placement committee said while none of the full-time offers had been revoked, certain medium-sized organisations and start-ups had pulled out summer internship offers. “We are dealing with an unprecedented situation, and the placement season has also been affected. We feel that the greater impact of the pandemic will be felt next year, because there could be cases of reduced hiring across sectors to cover up the losses incurred,” the official said.
Sources said offers from US-based companies were the worst affected.
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have also been grappling with similar cancellations, especially by international recruiters. The All IITs’ Placement Committee (AIPC) has written to recruiters, requesting them not to cancel offers.
So far, IITs including Delhi, Kanpur, and Madras have seen at least one recruiter revoking job offers.
The roads are empty, the shops closed, and some areas are cordoned off. Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, is locked down like the rest of Mumbai. However, the rising number of coronavirus (Covid-19) cases in thisteeming shantytown, where people live in huts and decrepit tenements, has put it front and centre of India’s fight against the coronavirus outbreak.
So far, Dharavi has reported five cases, including one death — that of a 56-year-old man. But there is fear that the numbers could inch up in a place where people grapple daily with overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. To add to their misery, the lockdown has left residents with no income and little food.
Rajesh Tope, Maharashtra’s health minister, told Business Standard that Dharavi was a grave concern for the government, given the density of its population and the poverty of its residents. “We are ensuring there is strict adherence to the rules of the lockdown in Dharavi. We do not allow crowds to collect, but it isn’t easy. There’s a space constraint, people are poor and without work right now. There are challenges,” he says.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) estimate that the average monthly income of a household in Dharavi is below Rs 5,000. Around 5-10 per cent of its population of 1.5 million, spread over 613 hectares and seven Mumbai wards, have headed back to their home towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar after the lockdown.
Sajeevan Jaiswal, a cloth merchant, is dipping into his meagre savings to somehow get by till the lockdown ends. His shop, near the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation office in Dharavi, is shut. Jaiswal fears for the safety of his family — his wife, two sons, and a daughter-in-law — who live above his shop in a small, 200 square feet space.
chart “I don’t let them step out of the house,” he says. “If groceries have to be brought, I do it. We don’t have the luxury of using hand sanitizers and hand wash. We share a small bar of soap between us,” he says, speaking through a cheap mask, his only means of protection outside of home.
Jaiswal’s fears are echoed by Anil Shivram Kasare, a social worker and resident of Dharavi. The biggest challenge, he says, comes from the slum’s public toilets. “There are 1,500 public toilets in Dharavi. This is not enough for the people who reside here. But what can we do? We have to use them. The danger of catching the virus lurks everywhere in a slum,” he says.
Dharavi’s narrow bylanes, its lack of hygiene, and large families squeezed into small spaces — some of them near open gutters — make the area a veritable nightmare for any effort to step up cleanliness. To tackle the situation, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has set up a branch in each of the seven wards of Dharavi.
Every branch has around 150 sanitation workers who fan out across the length and breadth of the slum pocket, sweeping the roads and collecting garbage twice a day. Fumigation is done every two days. But the garbage piles up quickly, says Akhtar Khan, an advocate who helps run a free food delivery service for Dharavi’s poor. “These days, people have been frequently sweeping their homes, no matter how small, in an attempt to keep them clean. It’s a good habit. But let’s see how long they do it,” he says.
The country's manufacturing sector activity grew at the slowest rate in four months during March, hampered by softer rises in new business as international demand faltered owing to the coronavirus pandemic, a monthly survey said on Thursday.
IHS Markit India Manufacturing PMI fell to 51.8 in March, from 54.5 in February, signalling the slowest improvement in business conditions since November 2019. This is the 32nd consecutive month that the manufacturing PMI has remained above the 50-point mark.
In PMI parlance, a print above 50 means expansion, while a score below that denotes contraction. "The Indian manufacturing sector remained relatively sheltered from the negative impact of the global coronavirus outbreak in March, however, there were pockets of disruption and a clear onset of fear amongst firms," Eliot Kerr, Economist at IHS Markit, said.
Moreover, the confidence towards the business outlook plummeted to a record low, with positivity tapered by Covid-19 concerns, the survey said.
"Should the trajectory of injections continue in the same vein, the Indian manufacturing sector can expect a much sharper negative impact in the coming months, similar to the scale seen in other countries," Kerr said.
According to the survey, the sentiment towards the 12-month business outlook weakened in March. Some panelists said there are fears of prolonged shutdowns due to Covid-19 and the associated negative impact on demand.
Commenting on the latest India survey results, Kerr said new orders and output both grew at softer rates, but those readings were relatively tame compared to those seen at goods producers in Europe and other parts of Asia.
"The most prominent signs of trouble came from the new export orders and future activity indices, which respectively indicated tumbling global demand and softening domestic confidence," Kerr noted.
Currrent Affairs
The Union government is intending to give joblessness advantages to an area of sorted out laborers who may lose their positions due to the coronavirus pandemic. This will be along the lines of measures taken by certain nations, for example, the United States to battle the effect of the pandemic, otherwise called COVID-19, on the working populace.
The administration's 'Atal Beema Vyakti Kalyan Yojana', which gives joblessness protection to laborers who have bought in to the Employees' State Insurance (ESI) conspire, will cover such specialists during the pandemic. The ESI is a self-financing medical coverage plot for formal division laborers in India oversaw by the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC).
Under the plan, which has been operational since July 2018, laborers who become jobless get remuneration as money as long as a quarter of a year of joblessness. Be that as it may, this can be profited just once in a blue moon.
"The work and business service is hoping to broaden the plan and permit laborers to benefit of joblessness protection on the off chance that they are affected by coronavirus," a senior government official said.
Laborers get money to the tune of 25 percent of the normal compensation that they were getting over the most recent two years of their activity under this plan. In any case, a significant condition for laborers to get the joblessness advantage is that they ought to have been a supporter of the ESIC for at any rate two years….Read More
Current Affairs
In excess of 127,000 individuals have been tainted comprehensively and more than 4,700 have passed on, as indicated by a Reuters count of government declarations. Terrain China had 15 new contaminations, down from 24 cases per day sooner, carrying the aggregate to 80,793. The loss of life contacted 3,169, up by 11 from the earlier day. EUROPE
* Poland has detailed its first passing from coronavirus. So far 47 instances of coronavirus have been affirmed in the nation.
* Greece detailed its first casualty, a multi year-elderly person who had come back from a strict journey to Israel and Egypt toward the finish of February.
* Italy's loss of life from the coronavirus pestilence shot past 1,000 as the financial effect declined. The all out number of contaminations rose to 15,113.
* The quantity of affirmed cases over the UK rose 29% to 590 in the course of recent hours. Ten individuals have kicked the bucket.
* The loss of life in France rose to 61 from Wednesday's 48. The nation will close all nurseries, schools and colleges from Monday.
* Turkish schools will be shut for multi week and colleges for three weeks from March 16 and games will be held without onlookers until end-April.
* Austria will deny passage to individuals showing up from Italy, boycott indoor occasions of in excess of 100 individuals and close schools from one week from now until April....Read More
Current Affairs
So far, close to 80 countries, including India, have already reported cases of Coronavirus infection or Covid-19. In India, the number of cases has risen to 28, including 15 Italian tourists in the country.
Well, experts still believe that the virus can be contained, but there are several questions and a lot of confusion around Dos and Don’ts.
Here're the top 9 questions you always wanted to ask 1. How does Coronavirus spread?
The virus cannot travel by itself. Its most common carrier is respiratory droplets, or saliva.
So when an infected person coughs or sneezes, the ejected saliva droplets infect others in their vicinity.
To avoid infection, doctors recommend maintaining a distance of at least 1 metre (3 feet) from the sick person. 2. What are the symptoms of Coronavirus infection?
Unlike other life-threatening diseases, the symptoms shown in the Coronavirus disease are not distinct. They are more like common cold and cough — such as fever, dry cough, exhaustion, expectoration of mucus when coughing, shortness of breath, sore throat, headaches, muscle aches, chills. Some less frequent symptoms are nausea and vomiting, stuffy nose and diarrhoea. Running nose is not a symptom of Covid. 3. Is there any treatment found to combat the virus?
Despite toiling hard, scientists have so far not been able to find proven drugs or vaccines for effective treatment of the disease....READ MORE
Current Affairs
Coronavirus is exceptionally infectious and is spreading at a lightning speed far and wide. The infection has just tainted individuals in near 70 nations. As per the World Health Organization, there are 92,819 affirmed cases and 3,164 passings
revealed all around. In India, absolute number of affirmed cases rose to six on Tuesday after an Italian visitor in Jaipur tried positive. So what is coronavirus and how might it be transmitted? Here is the thing that you have to know:
What is coronavirus?
Coronaviruses are a huge group of infections that cause ailment running from the normal virus to progressively serious sicknesses, for example, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV). A tale coronavirus (nCoV) is another strain that has not been recently recognized in people. The present alarm is a direct result of COVID-19, an irresistible infections brought about by the most as of late found coronavirus. The episode started in Wuhan in China in December, 2019.
The infection can be transmitted among creatures and individuals. Normal indications of contamination incorporate respiratory side effects, fever, hack, brevity of breath and breathing troubles. In progressively serious cases, disease can cause pneumonia, extreme intense respiratory disorder, kidney disappointment and even passing.
Will the coronavirus spread through hack?
Individuals can contract the infection from others. The sickness can spread from individual to individual through little beads from the nose or mouth which are spread when an individual hacks or breathes out...READ MORE
Current Affairs
Japanese Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura on Tuesday cautioned that A medication store in Beijing will be fined 3 million yuan ($434,530) for climbing the cost of face covers by just about multiple times the online cost in the midst of the coronavirus episode, the Beijing civil market controller said on Wednesday.
The controller has given a notification of authoritative punishment to Beijing Jimin Kangtai Pharmacy for pointedly raising the cost of N95 veils, it said in an announcement on its site.
Jimin Kangtai raised the cost of 3M brand veils to 850 yuan for every container, while the cost of a similar kind of covers sold online was 143 yuan for each case, state TV said.
The Beijing city controller has ventured up supervision on costs of scourge defensive types of gear and rebuffed criminal operations, for example, accumulating or manufacturing data about value climbs. It has examined 31 instances of value infringement since Jan. 23, it said.
The coronavirus flare-up, which began in the focal city of Wuhan before the end of last year, has executed 132 individuals and tainted about 6,000 in China...Read More
