Having declared a month ago that our UT had almost defeated Coronavirus, the steep rise of cases again, caught the authorities unawares. We had 6570 odd positive Covid-19 cases yesterday. The number of positive cases reported per day in Jammu and Kashmir steadily rose from the last few days, from an average of few hundreds in mid-December, to more than 6500 this week, inching us back toward levels we haven’t seen since 2019. The situation in some of the districts is very bad. There still are dangerously high numbers of active cases and at the same time the number of recovered cases is also increasing. The number of pregnant women getting infected is emblematic of the fact that the situation is really bad. It is good to maintain a positive atmosphere in sad times. We cannot just remain home and curse Covid-19. At the same time opening up everything is downright stupidity.
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The economic impact appears to have lessened with each subsequent surge as businesses and consumers have been able to adapt better, even experts have begun to pare down their growth estimates and considerable variation persists in assessments of the economic impact of this wave. It is amazing to note that if the cases rise at this phenomenal rate then we are just a few weeks away from community spread. At this point what is the logic behind a few hours of lockdown on weekends. The current establishment needs to put all its metrics in place before taking a decision to open up everything. And at the same time everything cannot be opened all of a sudden. The number of people dying because of Covid-19 is also increasing and it seems the healthcare system which was said to be well equipped is actually ill-equipped to deal with such a situation. At the current time it seems nothing is clear and there seems to be a lot of confusion in the air. Just till this surge settles down, if you have symptoms, for the sake of all of us, stay at home.
