Novel coronavirus cases in India surge; Israel braces for full lockdown

NEW DELHI－COVID-19 continued to ravage India as the highest single-day rise of 90,632 new cases and 1,065 deaths were registered across the country, according to the federal health ministry on Sunday.

The COVID-91 tally rose to 4,113,811, as total deaths surged to 70,626, and about 3.2 million affected people had received medical treatment, the government said.

Medical experts said the country was seeing fresh infections in some parts of the country and that case numbers have surged because of increased testing and the easing of restrictions on public movement.

The government will partially restore subway train services in the capital of New Delhi from Monday.

The pandemic would continue beyond this year because the virus has spread from big cities to other parts of the country, Randeep Guleria, the director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, said in an interview with India Today TV.

The number of cases could continue to rise before the curve flattens, he said.

Globally there were 26,902,024 coronavirus cases and 879,914 deaths as of Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Israel will soon impose a full nationwide closure because of the recent jump in COVID-19 morbidity, the state's Interior Minister Aryeh Deri told Channel 12 TV news on Saturday.

The government will decide on Thursday on a date on which the full closure will begin, he said.

The daily number of new coronavirus patients in Israel has approached 3,000 recently, and the number of deaths surpassed 1,000 on Saturday, reaching 1,007.

Before the full closure, on Monday Israel will impose local closures on places where morbidity is highest, classified "red" as part of a new program.

"There is no escape from a full lockdown," Deri said."It is a terrible thing, an economic blow, but no one has been able to lower the numbers with any other method."

Vaccine development

Iran and Russia will work together to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in the Islamic republic. Iran, the hardest-hit country in the Middle East, reported 1,894 new cases, taking the total number of infections to 384,666 on Saturday. The pandemic has claimed more than 22,150 lives in Iran, including 110 in the previous 24 hours, according to official figures.

The announcement of Iran-Russia collaboration on producing a vaccine was made on Friday in an online meeting between Kazem Jalali, Iran's ambassador to Moscow, and Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Iranian semiofficial FARS news agency reported on Saturday.

In Rome, pandemic deniers held a protest on Saturday, drawing a few thousand people near the Circus Maximus in the historic center. None of the protesters at the demonstration was seen wearing a face mask.

The rally drew condemnation from authorities. "Today we have people gathering in Rome who think the pandemic does not exist,"Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said during an annual event in Rome broadcast live online.

"We answered them with figures: more than 274,000 people infected, and over 35,000 dead. Period."

The event came amid concerns for a limited but constant rise in coronavirus infections registered in the past five weeks, as official data and the latest monitoring report by Italy's National Health Institute showed.

Xinhua - Agencies