New Delhi will impose a nighttime curfew on its 25 million people starting Tuesday evening, a day after India recorded a new record of coronavirus cases.
The time has come for concern in India, where the number of cases has exceeded the 100,000 threshold for the first time in 24 hours.
The Indian capital government has estimated that the “sudden rise in Covid-19 cases” and “the high rate of positivity” made it necessary to impose a nighttime curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Only people providing services deemed essential or those going to vaccination centers will be allowed to circulate in the streets in the meantime.
Delhi recorded 3,548 new positive cases on Monday, which remains well below the peak of nearly 9,000 which was reached in November. At that time, it was the city most affected by the epidemic in the country of 1.3 billion inhabitants.
The Indian government has at this stage refused to reimpose a national lockdown, as was the case in March 2020, so as not to plague the economy.
But the richest state in the country, Maharashtra, which includes Bombay, decided on Sunday to bring the curfew in effect from 8 p.m. to 7 p.m., to apply a lockdown on weekends, to close no only bars and restaurants, cinemas, swimming pools, places of worship and public places, but also private offices, and to prohibit any meeting of more than four people.
Populated by 110 million people, Maharashtra currently has more than half of the new cases of coronavirus recorded every day across the country.
India is after the United States and Brazil the third country with the highest number of cases since the start of the pandemic.
Officially, 12.7 million people in India have been infected, and 165,000 have perished from Covid-19.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Health announced that 83 million doses of the vaccine had already been administered, as part of an ambitious campaign to vaccinate 300 million people by July.
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