George Floyd was Covid-19 positive, autopsy shows

LOSANGELES: George Floyd, whose fatal encounter with Minneapolis police stirred a global outcry over racial bias by US law enforcement, tested positive for the coronavirus, his autopsy showed, but the infection was not listed as a factor in his death. The official cause of death, according to the full 20-page report made public on Wednesday by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office, was cardiopulmonary arrest while Floyd was being restrained by police taking him into custody.

Jan 23

THE 1ST WAVE OF CASES

The first ‘wave’ of cases started in early Jan with the first infections reported in central China’s city of Wuhan

THE 2ND WAVE

A surge of cases was reported in mid-march in Italy, and was followed by waves in the US and Europe by March-end. This wave ‘flattened’ towards the end of April with drop in new cases across Europe

THE 3RD WAVE In the last few weeks, countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, Peru, Chile and Mexico have emerged as the new hot spots and have pushed the global numbers up despite new cases dropping in Europe and the United States

May 10

June 3

nNEWDELHI: Wednesday night’s minor tremor in Noida was the 14th to hit Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) over the past two months, but the increased frequency may not necessarily indicate a major one is coming, say seismologists.

Only two of the 14 tremors have been above magnitude 3.5, according to National Centre for Seismology (NCS).

“While these [minor earthquakes] may be because of activity in the local faults, we have to remember that north Delhi is close to the Himalayan belt where the Indian plate is subducting under the Eurasian plate. That region is seismically very active. We need to monitor even these small earthquakes critically because we do not know how much energy is there and how much has been released through these small events,” said Kalachand Sain, who heads the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology. Subducting is the process by which one tectonic plate moves under another.

AP Pandey, an NCS seismologist, said, “In the past three years, there have been numerous small earthquakes in this region…we are close to the Himalayas. The Himalayan plate is moving in the north-northeast direction and subducting beneath the Eurasian plate. So, there is a lot of energy along weak zones which are sometimes released through fissures and lineaments.”

A fissure is a crack or a fracture; a lineament is a linear feature corresponding to a fault — such as a valley or a mountain range.

NCS head (operations) JL Gautam said it is not abnormal to record so many earthquakes within a couple of months in the Delhi-ncr region but that “does not mean we cannot expect a big earthquake”.