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India’s super-rich flee ’unimaginable horror’ - Asia Times
▻https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/indias-super-rich-flee-unimaginable-horror-in-private-jets

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India’s super-rich flee ‘unimaginable horror’British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to cancel state visit to India next week as a ’precautionary measure’. As the rich and super rich scramble to escape the horrors of the Covid-19 surge in India, airline fares have soared along with the number of private jet charters to foreign nations.According to a report in The London Times, at least eight private jets carrying India’s super wealthy landed in London ahead of the UK’s 4 am ban on travel from India.Both the UK and Canada added India to its “red list” of pandemic-stricken countries. As of Friday, any Britons returning from India must quarantine for 10 days in a government-approved hotel.All non-British or non-Irish citizens will be banned entirely from entering the country if they have been in India in the previous 10 days.According to a report in The Daily Beast, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to cancel his own state visit to India scheduled for next week as a “precautionary measure.”The last of the luxury airliners to arrive, VistaJet Bombardier Global 6000, which left Dubai Thursday to collect passengers in Mumbai, landed at 3:15 am, just 44 minutes before the restrictions took place.Meanwhile, the Canadian government has banned passenger flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days, CBC News reported.At a virtual press conference, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said that because an increasing number of travellers from both countries have been arriving in Canada with Covid-19, all commercial and private passenger flights from those countries will be barred as of 11:30 pm Thursday night.Cargo flights will still be permitted in order to maintain shipments of essential supplies, such as vaccines and personal protective equipment, he said.Alghabra also said air passengers who depart from India or Pakistan but arrive in Canada via a third country will need to produce a negative result on a Covid-19 test taken at their last point of departure before being allowed to enter Canada. According to The Daily Beast, the private jet passengers were fleeing unimaginable horror back home.
At least 14 Covid-19 patients perished in a devastating fire that ripped through an ICU ward in one of India’s overcrowded hospitals about 70 miles outside Mumbai, the report said.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says suspending incoming passenger flights from India and Pakistan for the next month must be done to keep Canadians safe.
Earlier in the week, an oxygen leak in Maharashtra state, near where the fire broke out, resulted in the death of 24 Covid-19 patients who were on ventilators, the report said.To make terrible matters even worse, India reported its highest one-day number of cases, recording 332,730 new infections in a 24-hour period. In the same period, 2,263 people died with Covid-19.India has been overwhelmed by new cases coupled with a critical shortage of oxygen, hospital beds, and now ventilators, the report said. Many desperate families have been forced to turn to black-market price gougers who have been able to buy hospital space from corrupt administrators.The spike in cases comes as political rallies are still being held and after a month-long religious ceremony continues to bring millions of people to the Ganges River.According to media reports, at least eight private jets carrying India’s super wealthy landed in London ahead of the UK’s 4 am ban on travel from India.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for not calling a national lockdown to try to mitigate the spread and for hosting rallies ahead of elections in May.Meanwhile, All flights from the UAE to India — one of the world’s busiest air corridors — will be suspended from Sunday onward.
Price comparison websites showed one-way commercial flights from Mumbai to Dubai on Friday and Saturday costing as much as 80,000 rupees (US$1,000), around 10 times the usual rate.Tickets for the New Delhi to Dubai route were going for more than 50,000 rupees, five times the normal level.No tickets were on offer from Sunday when the 10-day flight suspension comes into force.For private jets, the amount of interest was “absolutely crazy,” a spokesman for charter company Air Charter Service India told Agence France-Presse.“We have 12 flights going to Dubai tomorrow and each flight is completely full,” the spokesman said.“I’ve fielded almost 80 enquiries for flying to Dubai today alone,” said a spokesman for Enthral Aviation, another provider.“We have requested more aircraft from abroad to meet the demand … It costs $38,000 to hire a 13-seater jet from Mumbai to Dubai, and $31,000 to hire a six-seater aircraft,” he told AFP.“People are making groups and arranging to share our jets just to get a seat … We’ve had some queries for Thailand but mostly the demand is for Dubai.”The UAE is home to roughly 3.3 million Indians who make up a third of the population — most of them in Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the federation. Seats on routes to the United States were still available but with prices substantially higher, in some cases almost double the normal fare.How much does a private jet travel cost?No-frills private travel can cost as little as US$4,000 on a business commuter jet or as much as US$40,000 to have a plane to yourself.Several variables determine how much flying privately costs, chiefly the size of the plane and the number of hours it’s used. A spokesman for Hong Kong-based APERTUS Aviation said renting an ultra long-range private aircraft from Mumbai to London, with a flight time of 09:15, would range from $US125,800 to $US148,600.As a benchmark, the US-based Air Charter Service provides these “hourly” rental estimates for airplane rental in September 2020. Light jet (4 to 6 passengers): $4,000 to $5,500 Medium jet (6 to 9 passengers): $5,500 to $9,500Heavy jet (16 to 19 passengers): $11,000 to $20,000

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#inde#canada#etatsunis#dubai#grandebretagne#sante#elite#circulationtherapeutique#frontiere#inegalite

The secret of Taiwan’s Covid-19 success - Asia Times
▻https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/the-secret-of-taiwans-covid-19-success

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The authors assumed that testing and isolation occurred simultaneously. This was the case in Taiwan, but not in other countries, for example England, where delays between testing, results and isolation diminish the effectiveness of case-based measures.Taiwan is an island nation with the ability to control the introduction of new cases through border control, and the authors acknowledge the findings of this study may not be fully applicable to other countries.This is why the authors focused on the effectiveness of case-based and population-based interventions on local transmission, rather than on border controls on the number of introductions of Covid-19.The authors conclude that intensive contact tracing is not possible when public health systems are overwhelmed. This never happened in Taiwan due to the success of its strategies, but it did, for example, take place in Ireland in January 2021, which experienced a damaging third wave.(...)We already knew there was much to be learned from Taiwan’s success in preventing Covid-19 from taking hold. Now, as vaccines roll out and new variants emerge, we have more information about the comparative and combined contributions of public health measures.

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#taiwan#sante#politiquesante#systemesante#frontiere#controle#despistage#tracking

India loses a complex plot as Covid surges back - Asia Times
▻https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/india-loses-a-complex-plot-as-covid-surges-back

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India is in the grip of a massive second wave of Covid-19 infections, surpassing even the United States in terms of new daily infections.
The current spike came after a brief lull: daily new cases had fallen from 97,000 new cases per day in September 2020 to around 10,000 per day in January 2021. However, from the end of February, daily new cases began to rise sharply again, passing 100,000 a day, and now crossing the 200,000 mark.
Night curfews and weekend lockdowns have been reinstated in some states, such as Maharasthra (including the financial capital Mumbai). Health services and crematoriums are being overwhelmed, test kits are in short supply, and wait times for results are increasing.
How has the pandemic spread? Residents in slum areas and those without their own household toilet have been worst affected, implying poor sanitation and close living have contributed to the spread.
One word that has dominated discussions about why cases have increased again is laaparavaahee (in Hindi), or “negligence”. The negligence is made out to be the fault of individuals not wearing masks and social distancing, but that is only part of the story.Negligence can be seen in the near-complete lack of regulation and its implementation wherever regulations did exist across workplaces and other public spaces. Religious, social and political congregations contributed directly through super-spreader events, but this still doesn’t explain the huge rise in cases.
The second wave in India also coincides with the spread of the UK variant. A recent report found 81% of the latest 401 samples sent by the state of Punjab for genome sequencing were found to be the UK variant.Studies have found this variant might be more capable of evading our immune systems, meaning there’s a greater chance previously infected people could be reinfected and immunised people could be infected.
Many states have set up expert committees to re-examine and verify Covid-19 deaths after criticism that reported death rates were not accurate. Many states made corrections in mortality figures, and the full extent of undercounting is being actively researched.

District-level mortality data, both in the first wave as well as in the current wave, confirm that the global case fatality rate of 3.4% was breached in several districts of states such as Maharashtra, Punjab and Gujarat. Case fatality rates in some of the worst-affected districts were above 5%, similar to the 5% mortality level in the US.
What are the challenges this time?A majority of the cases and deaths (81%) are being reported from ten (of 28) states, including Punjab and Maharashtra. Five states (Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala) account for more than 70% of active cases. But the infection seems to have moved out of bigger cities to smaller towns and suburbs with less health infrastructure.
Last year, the government’s pandemic control strategy included government staff from all departments (including non-health departments) contributing to Covid control activities, but these workers have now been moved back to their departments. This is likely to have an effect on testing, tracing and treating cases. And health-care workers now have a vaccine rollout to contend with, as well as caring for the sick.
What now?In early March the government declared the endgame of the pandemic in India. But their optimism was clearly premature.Despite an impressive 100 million-plus immunizations, barely 1% of the country’s population is currently protected with two doses. The India Task Force is worried that monthly vaccine supplies at the current capacity of 70 million to 80 million doses per month would “fall short by half” for the target of 150 million doses per month.Strict, widespread lockdowns we have seen elsewhere in the world are not appropriate for all parts of India given their effect on the working poor. Until wider vaccination coverage is achieved, local containment measures will have to be strengthened.This includes strict perimeter control to ensure there is no movement of people in or out of zones with local outbreaks, intensive house-to-house surveillance to ensure compliance with stay-at-home orders where they are in place, contact tracing, and widespread testing.It should go without saying large congregations such as political rallies and religious festivals should not be taking place, and yet they have been.Strong leadership and decentralised strategies with a focus on local restrictions is what we need until we can get more vaccines into people’s arms

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#inde#sante#travailleurmigrant#deplacementinterne#pelerinage#transmission#confinement