Covid-19 rages in Brazil; Nepal’s PM receives Indian-made vaccine jab
SAO PAULO/ KATHMANDU: Brazil registered 1,555 Covid-19 deaths over the last 24 hours, taking the total nationwide death toll from the disease to 264,325, the country’s health ministry reported on Saturday. It also recorded 69,609 new cases of the coronavirus disease, raising the caseload to 10,938,836.
As the country faces a fresh wave of the pandemic, driven by the more contagious variant that was found in the state of Amazonas, many states have brought in curfews and banned non-essential business activities after reaching a critical level of capacity in hospital intensive care units.
To take the strain off the health system, the state of Sao Paulo has asked for volunteer healthcare workers who can help at field hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients, while the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia have requested an increasing number of mobile cold storage units due to the high demand for mortuary services.
In Nepal, the country’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Sunday received his first dose of an Indian-made Covid-19 vaccine, as the second phase of the inoculation drive began.
Oli got vaccinated at the Maharajgunj-based Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu. After receiving the vaccine, Oli urged the eligible group to take the vaccine without any fear in order to control the Covid-19 virus. The vaccine was also administered on PM Oli’s spouse Radhika Shakya. Oli, 69, has a history of comorbidities and underwent a kidney transplant in 2020.
The pandemic has negatively affected women’s income, health and security, and now there is a “magnified problem” of the impact of care burden that is precluding them from rejoining the workforce, top Indian-origin official at the UN
Women Anita Bhatia has said ahead of the International Women’s Day.
Bhatia, the assistant-secretary-general and deputy executive director of New York-based UN Women, a United Nations entity working for the empowerment of women, stressed on the need for women-focused policies as nations strive to build back better.
“One year into the pandemic, we are seeing the real impact of all this playing out. But one thing has become crystal clear through the pandemic which wasn’t so clear at the beginning, is the impact of the care burden that women have,” she told PTI in an interview on Saturday.