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The situation in India worsened further on Saturday with several states registering record highs in daily cases and deaths, and more reports emerging of hospitals turning away COVID-19 patients due to the unavailability of beds and oxygen.

In Uttar Pradesh, a COVID-19 patient was reportedly told to die during a conversation with a help centre.

Daily cases surpassed two lakhs for the third consecutive day on Saturday. The country added 2,34,692 new coronavirus cases and 1,341 fatalities due to the disease pushing its COVID-19 tally to 1,45,26,609 and the death toll to 1,75,649, the Union Health Ministry said.

New Delhi: The ordeal of Covid-19 test and quarantine awaits thousands of devotees who are returning home after attending the Maha Kumbh at Haridwar. As India grapples with a devastating second wave of the coronavirus and States imposing lockdown, several States and UTs, including Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Delhi and Gujarat, have made Covid-19 test mandatory for Kumbh returnees.  Some States are also keeping the returnees in mandatory quarantine.

Thousands of Kumbh visitors and hundreds of “sadhus” who attended Kumbh Mela in Haridwar have tested positive for the coronavirus disease.  On Saturday alone, 175 “sadhus” who attended Kumbh Mela have been found infected from coronavirus.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday took to Twitter and said that the Kumbh Mela should be made symbolic because of the Covid situation in the country. He said he got an update on the health of the Niranjan Akhada seers who had tested positive following the Kumbh Mela that was held in Haridwar in the past week. On Saturday, the seers of Juna Akhada also announced that they were withdrawing from Kumbh.

The decision comes as India on Saturday saw yet another record high of Covid-19 cases in 24 hours with 2,34,692 fresh Covid cases and 1,341 deaths. Active cases in India are now at 16,79,740. Ten States including Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan have reported 79.32% of the new cases.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is predominantly transmitted through the air, a new assessment by medical journal The Lancet states. The analysis done by six experts from the UK, the US and Canada has found “consistent, strong evidence” of the airborne transmission. It further says public health measures that fail to treat the virus as predominantly airborne leave people unprotected and allow the virus to spread. Moreover, transmission rates of SARS-CoV-2 are much higher indoors than outdoors, and transmission is greatly reduced by indoor ventilation.

“The evidence supporting airborne transmission is overwhelming, and evidence supporting large droplet transmission is almost non-existent,” said Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the University of Colorado Bould. “It is urgent that the World Health Organization and other public health agencies adapt their description of transmission to the scientific evidence so that the focus of mitigation is put on reducing airborne transmission,” he said.

Lessons learned during the Covid-19 pandemic should be used to fight the spread of drug-resistant bacteria, which kill tens of thousands of people each year, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The UN health agency warned that the world was running out of options for fighting so-called superbugs, with few new effective antibiotics in the pipeline.

But it said that the coronavirus crisis, which had dramatically deepened the global understanding of the health and economic implications of an uncontrolled pandemic, could spur progress. The worldwide push to rein in the pandemic had proven that rapid progress can be made when there is enough political will, the WHO pointed out.