UK, Canada sanction Myanmar’s generals
YANGON: The UK and Canada slapped sanctions on Myanmar generals on Thursday, as railway workers continued to strike despite a police rampage the previous night and anti-coup protests spread across the country.
Canada imposed sanctions on nine military officials while Britain targeted three.
“We, alongside our international allies will hold the Myanmar military to account for their violations of human rights and pursue justice for the Myanmar people,” British foreign minister Dominic Raab said.
“We work alongside our international partners who call for the restoration of the democratically-elected government,” Canadian foreign minister Marc Garneau said, calling for release of detainees.
The US had imposed new sanctions on the Myanmar military last week and urged other UN members to follow suit.
After a meeting of the those violating quarantine rules. High-risk contacts will again be stamped with indelible ink on their hands for identification. Buildings in Mumbai with more than five positive cases will now be sealed as well. On Wednesday, seven districts in the state (Amravati, Buldhana, Yavatmal, Akola, Nagpur, Parbhani and Jalna) imposed restrictions on movement of people and have restricted gatherings to five or fewer people.
In Punjab, the case trajectory now stands 32% above the postfirst wave trough. In the past week, 260 new cases have been reported in the state on average against a low of 181 on January 27. And while the positivity rate has not spiked as high as Maharashtra, it has climbed from 1.2% to 1.5% in just the last week. To be sure, this rate is still comfortably below the 5% threshold recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Average testing in the state has dropped 35% from peak levels — it was testing 28,352 samples a day for week ending September 15 and has tested 18,311 samples a day in the last week.
Similarly, cases have risen 32% and 20% post first wave in Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana. While the former has seen only a 19% drop from peak testrow so-called Quad on Thursday, Japanese foreign minister Toshimitsu Motegi said he had agreed with his US, Indian and Australian counterparts that democracy must be restored quickly in Myanmar.
Three-quarters of the country’s civil servants are on strike, all private banks are closed and the protests have weakened the economy significantly, said Tom Andrews, the independent UN rights expert on Myanmar.
On Thursday, a group called Myanmar Hackers disrupted government websites including the Central Bank, the Myanmar military’s propaganda page, state-run broadcaster MRTV, the Port Authority, and the Food and Drug Administration to protest the toppling of Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government.
The military junta has issued arrest warrants against six celebrities for encouraging strikes that have paralysed many government offices in protests against this month’s coup, with total arrests since then now nearing 500. ing, in Haryana, the rate of testing has dropped over 70% from peak levels. Both states still have low positivity rates of 0.3% and 0.8%, well below the Who-recommended threshold.
Testing is an area where most states have slipped in recent weeks. On average, 726,562 samples a day have been tested across the country in the past week – a drop of over 50% from peak levels when the country was testing an average of nearly 1.5 million samples a day.
Experts said that the real impact of the relaxation of curbs in states such as Maharashtra may be yet to surface.
“While it would be too early to extrapolate what is happening in Maharashtra to the rest of the country, there is no denying that what is happening in the state is really concerning. There has barely been enough time since the local trains opened up in the state to see the real on-ground impact of the spread of the disease,” said Dr Lalit Kant, former head of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), adding that the state should be looking to isolate as many regions that develop into hot spots as possible.
“Moreover, we can’t afford any drop in testing numbers anywhere in the country. If we have built up the testing capacity to run 1.5 million tests a day, we should try to stay as close to that number as possible instead of letting our guard down.”
Kant, like many others is also worried about the new strains. India has so far reported 187 cases of infection of the UK variant, four of the South African variant and one of the Brazilian. “My real fear right now is new variants of the virus. If a large number of people develop antibodies against the virus, then it undergoes mutations in order to survive – something we’ve seen happen across the world where new strains have become dominant. We need to keep running genome sequencing to keep a track on variants of the virus.”