Streets were deserted in the Indian capital yesterday and office buildings shuttered as a lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus began and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged people to stay at home and save themselves.
India has reported 415 cases of COVID-19 and seven deaths, but health experts have warned that a big jump could be imminent, which would overwhelm the underfunded and crumbling public health infrastructure.
Modi said many Indians were not taking the lockdown seriously.
Photo: Reuters
“Please save yourself, save your family, follow the instructions seriously,” he said on Twitter.
The lockdown in the capital of more than 18 million people is to last for the rest of the month.
Authorities banned gatherings of more than five people in several of India’s states, including Maharashtra in the west, which has had the highest number of cases.
They warned of legal action against people violating the ban.
In Mumbai, suburban trains, which usually carry 8 million people a day, were suspended until the end of the month. Bus services were limited to people in essential services such as healthcare.
Newspapers canceled print runs in Mumbai after vendors refused to distribute them due to worry about the coronavirus.
Muhammed Nizam, who runs a small meat shop in an alley in Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighborhood, said supplies were falling and he had had to raise prices.
“The price of chicken had fallen earlier, because people stopped buying it fearing the virus was being spread through it. But now I don’t have any chicken left, everything’s been sold,” he said.
Nepal ordered all land border crossings with India and China shut until Sunday, saying thousands of people, most of them Nepalese migrant workers, had crossed into Nepal in recent days from India, believing their homeland to be safer.
Nepal has reported only one case of the coronavirus.
“The closing of the border crossings is meant to ensure that no one infected with the virus crosses over to Nepal from India and China,” said Surya Thapa, an aide to Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli.
In Pakistan, the opposition-ruled southern province of Sindh began a lockdown, including in the biggest city of Karachi, even though Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said he opposed such a sweeping measure because of the economic consequences for the poor.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing