Covid in India, the record of infections does not stop the oceanic rallies on the Ganges (and at the Modi rallies)

by time news

Impressive images arrive from the Kumbha Mela, the largest pilgrimage in the world that Covid has not stopped: hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims gathered in Haridwar, in northern India, for the traditional purifying bath in the Ganges. S.i immerse en masse in the waters of the sacred river for the Hindus without any precautions, despite the record wave of cases that is biting India, which has become the second country in the world most affected by the virus.
Of the nearly one million devotees who flocked to the festival, almost no one respects the distancing and wears a mask. In random checks at least a hundred tested positive for Covid, local media report. And for tomorrow, Wednesday, among the key dates of the event, hundreds of thousands more people are expected.

At the height of the new wave, India records double the cases of the United States and Brazil, the other two countries most affected by the pandemic. Faced with this exponential growth of infections (from 10 thousand cases at the beginning of February to the current 170 thousand) the New Delhi government is trying to accelerate the vaccination campaign, one of the largest and most complex in the world: so far it has administered over 106 million doses to its population, but in a country of 1.3 billion people, herd immunity is still a long way off.
To reach the finish line, in recent weeks the government has suspended exports abroad of vaccines “made in India” ( the country has so far sold over 54.6 million doses abroad, mostly AstraZeneca, and has donated over 10 million), and now has decided to speed up the authorization process for the emergency use of already approved foreign vaccines by the American Food and Drug Administration, the EMA, the WHO, and other British and Japanese bodies: it will no longer be necessary to conduct tests on site before approval, afterwards it will be enough to observe the first hundred recipients of authorized foreign vaccines for a week . New Delhi thus paved the way for the import of doses of Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, becoming – from a supplier it was – a competitor of Europe in the race to hoard anti Covid vials.

April 13, 2021 (change April 13, 2021 | 15:13)

© Time.News

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