Home ›› 05 Feb 2022 ›› Front
The Delhi government decided to re-open schools, colleges and coaching institutes from Monday while Bali welcomed its first direct flight carrying foreign tourists for nearly two years on Thursday.
As new infections of the Omicron variant fell sharply off the peak in India’s capital Delhi, authorities further eased curbs and said they will allow schools and colleges to reopen from Monday, and permit private offices to be fully staffed.
The city’s sports complexes, including gyms, swimming pools and spas, will also reopen, its Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said in a webcast on Friday.
Meanwhile, the duration of night curfew has been reduced by an hour; it’s now from 11:00pm to 5:00am, reports Indian news media NDTV. Earlier, night curfew started from 10:00pm.
India’s official Covid-19 death toll crossed 5,00,000 on Friday, a level some data analysts said was breached last year but was obscured by inaccurate surveys and unaccounted dead in the hinterlands, where millions remain vulnerable to the disease.
The country, which has the fourth-highest tally of deaths globally, recorded 4,00,000 deaths by July 2021 after the devastating outbreak from the Delta variant of the coronavirus, according to official data. Some believe the figures were much higher.
“Our study published in the journal Science estimates 3 million Covid deaths in India until mid-2021 using three different databases,” Chinmay Tumbe, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, who co-authored the study, told Reuters.
Last month, the Indian government dismissed the study as baseless in a notification saying there is a robust system of birth and death reporting.
India’s states record deaths from Covid after collating data from their districts. In the last few months, several states have updated the number of deaths, some under pressure from the country’s top court. In most instances, authorities said there were lapses due to delayed registrations and other administrative errors.
India is currently in the midst of a third wave of the coronavirus led by the Omicron variant, which some top experts say is already in community transmission although federal officials say most cases are mild.
Last month, the government eased testing norms and told states to drop mandatory testing for contacts of confirmed cases unless they were old or battling other conditions. But, with the number of tests falling, the government issued a revised circular warning states they would miss the spread of the virus.
According to official figures, India’s overall number of Covid infections has reached 41.95 million, the second-highest globally behind the United States.
To prevent new surges, the government has vaccinated three-fourths of the eligible 939 million adult population with the mandatory two-dose regime.
Indian officials are carrying out a vaccination drive in remote parts of the country to increase lagging vaccination rates, with health workers going door-to-door to administer shots.
“I make them understand how important vaccines are to escape from coronavirus,” health worker Asmita Koladiya, who is forced to take her infant daughter along with her because of a lack of childcare, told Reuters.
Indonesia’s holiday island of Bali welcomed its first direct flight carrying foreign tourists for nearly two years on Thursday, but just a handful of visitors were on board to enter strict quarantine on arrival.
A Garuda Indonesia flight from Tokyo arrived in Bali in the afternoon, with six foreigners and six Indonesians aboard, said Ida Ayu Indah Yustikarini, an official at the Bali Government Tourism Office.
Though the island officially opened to visitors from China, New Zealand, Japan and a few other countries in mid-October, there have been no direct non-cargo flights since then.
The six foreign tourists arriving from Tokyo were travelling using business visas since the new rules for tourists were not ready when they applied to come, said Yustikarini.
Indonesia has said restarting international flights is intended to boost Bali’s battered tourism sector, which usually accounts for 54 per cent of its economy.
Known for its surfing, temples, waterfalls and nightlife, Bali drew 6.2 million foreign visitors in 2019, the year before Covid-19 struck. The entire country recorded just 1.6 million foreign visitors last year, down 61.57 per cent from 2020.
However, Indonesia is maintaining much stricter quarantine requirements than Southeast Asian neighbours Thailand, which resumed quarantine-free entry for vaccinated visitors from Tuesday and the Philippines, which will do the same from February 10.
Vaccinated tourists to Bali must quarantine between five and seven days at hotels or on vessels offshore.
Bali’s slow reopening comes as Indonesia has been seeing a steady increase in Covid-19 cases, primarily driven by the Omicron variant. The country on Wednesday reported nearly 18,000 infections, the highest tally since August.
Singapore Airlines said last week it would resume flights to Bali from Singapore starting on February 16.
