India / Night curfew from 9 pm to 6 am imposed indefinitely in Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad: Ahmedabad has imposed night curfew from 9 pm to 6 am after coronavirus cases kept rising in the city. The curfew will come into effect from Friday and will stay on indefinitely. The city in Gujarat reported a total of 46,022 till yesterday.

Officials have attributed the spike in coronavirus cases to the festival season. They said hospitals in the city have enough beds to accommodate new COVID-19 patients.

Some 40 per cent beds in hospitals are still available for coronavirus patients, said Additional Chief Secretary Rajiv Kumar Gupta, who has been appointed officer on special duty for COVID-19 in Ahmedabad.

The number of micro containment areas in the city rose to 100 after 14 areas were added to the list on Wednesday, according to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation.

Residential areas and individual apartments are designated as containment areas after new COVID-19 cases are detected there. This enables the municipal corporation to carry out surveillance and other activities to contain the spread of COVID-19.

The number of new coronavirus infections in India jumped 18 per cent with 45,576 cases recorded in the last 24 hours, according to government data. That takes the overall figure to 89,58,483 since the outbreak in January. Up to 585 people have died of the disease since yesterday; the overall number till now being 1,31,578.

Another city where COVID-19 cases have seen a spike is Delhi. As the virus rampaged across the national capital weakened by sliding mercury and an envelope of smoke, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had repeatedly appealed to people with folded hands to wear masks and maintain safety norms.

Over the last weeks, to grapple with the surge that had once crossed the 8,000 mark, the centre has flown in paramedical personnel and increased the number of beds in hospitals.

The World Health Organisation's emergencies director has warned that vaccines would not arrive in time to defeat the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO's Michael Ryan said vaccines should not be seen as a "unicorn" magic solution, and countries battling a resurgence of the virus would once again have to "climb this mountain" without vaccines.