India adds cases, with more woes for E. Africa

MUMBAI/KAMPALA, Uganda－India reported its biggest single-day spike in new coronavirus cases on Friday as the country gears up to resume domestic flights after a two-month halt.

The 6,088 fresh cases reported in the 24 hours to Friday morning took the national tally to 118,447.The number of deaths rose to 3,583, according to the Health Ministry.

Maharashtra remains the worstaffected state in India with more than 41,000 cases after it added over 2,000 new infections for the fourth straight day. The number of fatalities in the state rose to 1,454, the highest in the country.

India has the 11th most confirmed cases in the world. It has eased its nationwide lockdown to restart economic activities and given states more power to set the next phase of reopenings. Some domestic flights will resume from Monday.

India's central bank slashed interest rates on Friday in an effort to contain the economic fallout and warned the economy could contract this year.

Even before almost all activity shut down in late March, Asia's third-largest economy was struggling to gain traction with sluggish growth, record unemployment and banks reluctant to lend.

The Reserve Bank of India, or RBI, slashed the repo rate, the rate at which it lends to commercial banks, by 40 basis points to 4 percent; it was the second cut this year.

"The impact of coronavirus is turning out to be more than expected. GDP growth is estimated to remain in negative territory in 2021," RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said.

The rate cuts on Friday did little to soothe investor fears, with shares in Mumbai falling almost 2 percent in the afternoon.

Earlier this month Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a $266-billion stimulus package－equal to 10 percent of the country's GDP－to boost the economy. In East Africa, COVID-19, locusts and deadly flooding pose a triple threat to millions of people across the region, officials warned on Thursday, while the World Bank announced a $500 million program for countries affected by the historic swarms of desert locusts.

A new and larger generation of the insects, numbering in the billions, is on the move in East Africa, where some countries haven't seen such an outbreak in 70 years. Climate change is in part to blame.

The added threat of COVID-19 imperils the region that already was home to about 20 percent of the world's population of food-insecure people, including millions in South Sudan and Somalia.

The recent floods in parts of East Africa have killed nearly 300 people and displaced 500,000, slowing locust-control work and increasing the risk of the virus' spread, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Agencies - Xinhua