HOCKEY HEROES AMONG HORROR INDIA TOLL
TWO members of India’s last Olympic gold medal-winning hockey team have died from COVID-19 on the same day.
Ravindra Pal Singh, 60, and Maharaj Krishan Kaushik, 66, who competed in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, died hours apart on Saturday, their families said. Both had been on ventilators in hospitals.
Kaushik went on to coach India’s men’s side to gold at the 1998 Asian Games in Bangkok. He also coached the women’s side that took bronze at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha.
Singh also played for India at the 1984 Olympics in Los
Angeles, but retired because of chronic back injuries.
“His contribution to Indian sports will always be remembered,” Sports Minister Kiren Rijuju said in a tribute.
India’s COVID deaths rose by more than 4000 for the second straight day on Sunday. The Health Ministry reported 4092 fatalities, only marginally fewer than Saturday’s tragic record toll of 4187 deaths recorded.
India on Sunday also added another 403,738 new COVID infections, with its total caseload ballooning to 22.3 million.
The World Health Organisation has also warned that a COVID-19 variant spreading in India is more contagious and may be dodging vaccine protections.
The WHO’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said that “the epidemiological features that we see in India today do indicate that it’s an extremely rapidly spreading variant”.
Dr Swaminathan, an Indian paediatrician and clinical scientist, said the B. 1.617 variant of COVID-19, which was first detected in India in October, was clearly a contributing factor to the catastrophe unfolding in her homeland.
“There have been many accelerators that are fed into this,” she said, stressing that “a more rapidly spreading virus is one of them”.
The WHO recently listed B. 1.617 — which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics — as a “variant of interest”.
But so far the WHO has stopped short of adding it to its short list of “variant of concern” — a label indicating it is more dangerous than the original version of the virus by being more transmissible, deadly or able to get past vaccine protections.
Several national health authorities, including in the US and Britain, have meanwhile said they consider
B. 1.617 a variant of concern, and Dr Swaminathan said she expected the WHO to soon follow suit.
“B 1.617 is likely to be a variant of concern because it has some mutations which increase transmission, and which also potentially could make (it) resistant to antibodies that are generated by vaccination or by natural infection,” she said.
But she insisted that the variant alone could not be blamed for the dramatic surge in cases and deaths seen in India, lamenting that the country appeared to have let its guard down, with “huge social mixing and large gatherings”.