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India has crossed 6 million or 60 lakh total COVID-19 cases last evening. The situation is slightly better as it has taken 13 days to add one million new cases as against the 11 days taken for the rise to 5 million from 4 million on 16 th September. Except for the last twenty-four hours daily recoveries had been more than daily new cases for about a week, and more hopefully, after a supposed peak of over 98.000 new cases on a day about ten days back the spikes have been consistently less than 90,000 for the last week. For the last twenty-four hours new cases were 82,170 while daily recoveries lagged behind at 74,893 cases. Daily fatalities have also been consistently above 1000 with total fatalities at a mammoth 95,542 now. Out of the total 6,074,702 total infections 5,016,520 have recovered so far. The next few days are going to be crucial if India has indeed reached the peak and that from now onwards the trend would be more recoveries than new infections.   Maharashtra continu

In the last one- or two-months India has been crossing milestone after milestone in terms of daily spikes of new cases: from over 50 thousand to over 90 thousand new cases per day. Since the spikes had crossed fifty thousand a day the question has never stopped coming to most of the minds of the country: has India reached the peak in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? From the experience of most other countries of the world we tend to see a trend that in about three months the acceleration in new infections start declining slowly effecting a flattening of the curve, and this flattening stays for about two months or more after which some countries begin to experience a second wave of the pandemic. In India, the pandemic has been raging for about 8 months now with no definite peak reached or any lasting flattening of the curve. Therefore, from this angle India emerges as the only country of the world to have experienced an unending and uneven saga of fluctuations.   There is one

The legendary playback singer and composer-actor-producer, SP Balasubrahmanyam has passed away in a Chennai hospital today after a spirited fight against the COVID-19 disease. The singer-composer who dominated the film industries of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka and Mumbai (Bollywood) for over five decades had tested positive on 5 th August 2020 and was in hospital since. Although the artiste was doing well in the initial stage serious complications developed later and he was put on the ventilator and ECMO (Extra-corporeal Membrane Oxygenation) support. He did test COVID-19 negative on September 7, 2020, but as his breathing problems persisted, he continued to be on ventilator and ECMO support. His condition became extremely critical in the last two days, and finally the music legend had to give in. He was 74.   Born into a Telugu family in Tamil Nadu in 1946 and raised mostly in Andhra Pradesh, SP Balasubrahmanyam, better known as ‘SPB’ or ‘Balu’, showed his liv