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With the highest spike in new COVID-19 cases of nearly 35000 in the last twenty-four hours India crossed the 1 million or 10 lac mark. Although the number of deaths was also the highest at 687 in the same period the overall death rate further deceased to around 2.5% with a little more than 25000 deaths so far. The number of recovered patients is almost 6,50,000, recovery rate reaching almost 65%, which is really the silver-lining in the nation’s fight against the killer virus. This means that the number of active infections still hovers around 300000 which is not a cause of great worry for the national healthcare infrastructure as we have maintained earlier also, provided the spike does not get out of control in near future. The states, mostly contributing to the rising number of new cases, are Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar (showing an increasing trend in recent days), Gujarat, Odisha and Assam.
At various point…

Late last night the Government of India announced Unlock 2.0 to commence from the 1st of July 2020 till the end of the month after Unlock 1.0 ends today. The guidelines contained herein do not offer much as compared to Unlock 1.0 as most of the locked services continue here too, for example: schools and colleges are to remain shut till 31st of July; all educational training institutions to remain shut too till at least 15th July; cinema halls/gyms/auditoriums/bars/entertainment parks also to remain shut; all social/cultural/religious gatherings still banned; metro rail services not operating till 31st July despite requests from a few states. The exit plan Phase-2 and Phase-3 concerning primarily reopening of educational institutions/ metro services/international flights still under hold after extensive discussions with all stakeholders. Unlock 2.0 allows more domestic flights and train services, and offers further relaxations in the night curfew hours which will now be from 10 pm to 5…