The Covid-19 infection rate in this south-western coastal district jumped to 50 per cent as per samples tested in the past 24 hours till Sunday, officials said. Deputy Civil Surgeon Dr. Mohammad Habibur Rahman, said that 20 people tested positive for the virus from samples taken from 40 people during this period. With this some 7,125 people have tested positive for Covid-19 while 144 people died of Covid till Sunday in the district. A total of 6,935 people recovered from the virus, he said. Also read: Bangladesh reports 17 more deaths as Covid getting deadlier He said 63.19% people of the district have received the first dose of the Covid jabs, while 41.88% got second dose and 1.18% received booster or the third dose. Besides, one lakh 53 thousand 361 students aged between 12 and 17 have been given the first shot and 46 thousand 437 the second shot, according to health officials. Despite a surge in the virus people seemed indifferent to maintaining Covid safety masures like wearing masks in public places. Also read: Covid in Bangladesh: 11,434 more cases, 12 deaths and positivity rate rises to 28.49% In the city’s crowded areas of Sadhonar intersection, Main Road, Kitchen Market, fish market and other important places, people were seen moving without wearing masks.

India's COVID-19 tally rose to 38,218,773 on Thursday, as 317,532 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours across the country, showed the federal health ministry's latest data. This is the seventh consecutive day when more than 200,000 new cases and the first day when over 300,000 new cases were registered in a day in the country in more than eight months. Read: India reports 258,089 new COVID-19 cases Besides, as many as 491 deaths were recorded since Wednesday morning, taking the death toll to 487,693. Currently there are 1,924,051 active cases in the country with an increase of 93,051 during the period. This is the 23rd consecutive day when the number of active cases rose amid the third wave in the country. A total of 35,807,029 people have recovered and been discharged from hospitals so far, with 223,990 new recoveries. Read: India extends ban on political rallies till Jan 22 Meanwhile, the country's Omicron tally has reached 9,287, as an increase of 3.63 percent was seen since Wednesday. Most of the Omicron cases have been reported from the states of Maharashtra, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Delhi.

COVID-19 infections are soaring again at U.S. nursing homes because of the omicron wave, and deaths are climbing too, leading to new restrictions on family visits and a renewed push to get more residents and staff members vaccinated and boosted. Nursing homes were the lethal epicenter of the pandemic early on, before the vaccine allowed many of them to reopen to visitors last year. But the wildly contagious variant has dealt them a setback. Nursing homes reported a near-record of about 32,000 COVID-19 cases among residents in the week ending Jan. 9, an almost sevenfold increase from a month earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 645 COVID-19-related deaths among residents were recorded during the same week, a 47% increase from the earlier period. And there are fears that deaths could go much higher before omicron is through. Read:University of Michigan removes Schlissel as school president Despite the rising numbers, the situation is not as dire as it was in December 2020, when nursing home deaths per week topped out at about 6,200. Experts credit the high vaccination rates now among nursing home residents: About 87% are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. COVID-19 shots and boosters provide strong protection against severe illness, hospitalization and death, but the sick and elderly are uniquely vulnerable to the virus. Nursing home officials say they are responding to the outbreak by limiting visitors to common areas instead of allowing them into residents’ rooms, and by reinstituting social distancing. Some states, like New York, have put their own measures in place, like requiring proof of a negative test for visitors and providing all with surgical masks. Nursing homes are also working to drive up vaccination numbers, especially for boosters. Sixty-three percent of nursing home residents nationally have received an extra dose. Booster numbers are much worse for staff members. About 83% are fully vaccinated, but only 29% have gotten an extra dose. Nursing homes have been holding vaccine clinics and town hall meetings to stress the importance of the shots. They also got another tool to increase vaccinations Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Biden administration vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the U.S. About 57,200 nursing home workers — by far the highest number on record during the pandemic — had the virus in the week ending Jan. 9, a more than tenfold increase from a month earlier, according to the CDC. Sharon Wheeler was shocked to learn that her 88-year-old, dementia-stricken father recently contracted COVID-19 at a Naperville, Illinois, nursing home. She said she hopes the fact that he is fully vaccinated and boosted will help him pull through. She said she suspects visitors and residents coming and going around the holidays brought COVID-19 inside. Wheeler hasn’t been allowed to see her father, but the staff told her he had mild symptoms. “I worked so hard to make sure he never got (COVID-19), because I was so terrified,” she said. “He’s such an older man, and I don’t want to lose him this way.” Vaccines are just one of the many tools that should be used to defend the elderly against omicron, said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. He also recommended testing of visitors, mandatory boosters and the use of medical-grade masks like N95s and high-efficiency air filters. “We need to build a Fort Knox around protecting nursing homes, but we’re not doing that right now, and that’s why cases are surging,” Feigl-Ding said Thursday. “We’re going to have exponential numbers of hospitalizations and deaths.” Read:Chicago students stage walkout, say COVID protocols lacking The virus dealt a devastating blow in late November to the New Hampshire nursing home Todd Fernald runs, called Webster at Rye, where 100% of residents and staff were vaccinated — but not boosted. “COVID ripped through this building in 10 seconds,” Fernald said, recalling how, on the day that extra shots were scheduled to be administered, an outbreak occurred that would ultimately kill six residents, infect dozens of others and sicken 20 employees.  Since then, nearly all residents have been boosted, and employees are getting their third shots. “I only lost one employee who didn’t want to be vaccinated and chose to resign their job,” Fernald said. “I’m having more and more people each and every week that I see are getting boosted and bringing me their booster cards.” Making sure that facilities have supplies like tests is crucial too, said Lisa Sanders of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services, including nursing homes. “Older adults and the people they care for should be prioritized for support and supplies as they become available,” Sanders said.

Bangladesh reported 775 more Covid-19 infections with six more deaths linked to it in 24 hours till Tuesday morning. The country’s daily cases crossed 700 last on October 6, 2021 with the logging of 703 cases and 23 deaths. With the detection of fresh cases after testing 19,740 samples, the daily case positivity rose to 3.91 per cent from Monday’s 3.37 per cent during the period, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS). Raed:New restrictions soon to fight off Covid: Health Minister The fresh numbers took the country’s total fatalities to 28,087 while the caseload mounted to 15,87,915. Meanwhile, the mortality rate remained static at 1.77 per cent during the period. Besides, the recovery rate further declined to 97.61 per cent with the recovery of 185 more patients during the 24-hour period. Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s total tally of Omicron cases stood at 10 with detection of three cases on Friday, according to GISAID, a global initiative on sharing all influenza data. On December 9, Bangladesh again logged zero Covid-related death after nearly three weeks as the pandemic was apparently showing signs of easing. The country reported this year’s first zero Covid-related death in a single day on November 20 along with 178 infections since the pandemic broke out in Bangladesh in March 2020. Bangladesh reported the highest number of daily fatalities of 264 on August 10 this year, while the highest daily caseload was 16,230 on July 28 this year. Read:Women more vulnerable to Omicron than men: DGHS Restrictions Meanwhile, the government is going to put some restrictions amid the surge in Covid-19 cases, including plying public transport at their half capacities and closing shops and markets by 8pm, said Health Minister Zahid Maleque on Tuesday. “Public buses will operate at half of their capacities while shops and shopping malls will have to be closed by 8 pm instead of 10 pm,” Maleque said while talking to reporters at the Secretariat. Deputy Commissioners have been asked to enforce the directives within seven days, he added. However, the government is not considering any lockdown in the country right now and it will think about it if the infection rate goes up further, said the health minister.

Facing a cold-weather surge in COVID-19 infections, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Friday that masks will be required in all indoor public places unless the businesses or venues implement a vaccine requirement. Hochul said the decision to reinstitute a mask mandate was based on a rising number of cases and hospitalizations, which has been especially pronounced in parts of upstate New York. New York enacted a mask mandate at the beginning of the pandemic in April 2020 that ended in June 2021 for vaccinated individuals. The new mask mandate applies to both patrons and staff and will be in effect from Monday to Jan. 15, after which the state will reevaluate. “We’re entering a time of uncertainty and we could either plateau here or our cases could get out of control,” Hochul warned at a public appearance in New York City. New York joins several states with similar indoor mask mandates, including Washington, Oregon, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada and Hawaii. Mask mandates have become a hot-button issue. For weeks, Hochul has said local governments will decide whether to reimpose COVID-19 protocols. She’s expressed caution about whether resistant communities would follow stricter rules. Hochul’s announcement Friday was cheered by some fellow Democrats and a union representing retail and grocery workers, even as Republicans called it an overreach and an unnecessary burden on businesses. Violators could face civil and criminal penalties, including a maximum fine of $1,000. While Hochul said local health departments will be in charge of enforcing the requirements, Republican Rockland County Executive Ed Day said the governor’s staff was unable to provide detailed information about the new requirement. Also read: US expands Pfizer COVID boosters, opens extra dose to age 16 “I told the governor’s staff that we cannot and will not enforce this requirement as it currently stands,” Day said in a prepared release. Niagara County Legislature Chair Becky Wydysh, a Republican, said local officials don’t believe a mandate is the best use of resources. The county will take an “educate to cooperate approach” to enforcement, Wydysh said in a statement. News of the mandate was welcome at the Lake Placid Christmas Company, a shop on Main Street in the tourist-friendly Adirondack village. “Our employees all wear masks, but we stopped requiring all of our customers to wear masks because it was too hard to enforce,” said manager Scott Delahant. “Quite frankly, I got sick of arguing with people.” He said many shoppers browse barefaced, despite a sign on the door encouraging mask wearing and a basket of free disposable masks. Also read: Bangladesh again reports zero Covid fatality in nearly 3 weeks Hochul announced the mask mandate at a social service agency in Manhattan, where most people already wear masks. New York City requires vaccinations for indoor restaurant dining, entertainment and gyms, and those vaccine-requiring venues will be unaffected by the new rule. The state recorded more than 68,000 positive tests for the virus in the seven-day period that ended Wednesday. That’s the most in any seven-day stretch since the start of February, and rates are rising in nearly all counties. “We are heading upward in a direction that I no longer find sustainable,” Hochul said. Nearly 3,500 people are hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 cases in New York — nearly double from 1,794 on Nov. 7. The surge is especially pronounced in some areas of upstate New York, which has accounted for nearly three-fourths of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in hospitals since August. Several upstate counties have recently enacted mask mandates, including Erie County, which includes Buffalo. In Sullivan County in the mid-Hudson Valley, public health director Nancy McGraw said people have become complacent about the virus and she supports the mask mandate. She said vaccination rates are disappointingly low in remote areas including Woodbourne, where only 36% of roughly 3,000 residents are fully vaccinated. “We have very limited resources for enforcement and people need to do the right thing,” McGraw said. “Public responsibility is key here.” New York has the seventh highest rate of fully vaccinated residents: 70.1% as of federal data updated Friday. But fewer than 60% of residents are fully vaccinated in more than 500 zip codes throughout New York, according to data for about 1,300 zip codes provided by the state health agency. Thirty-two upstate hospitals in Niagara and elsewhere had to limit performing nonessential elective surgeries starting Thursday because of capacity issues. One of the state’s worst hit hospitals, Glen Falls Hospital in Warren County, said 50 out of 165 patients had COVID-19 as of Wednesday. That’s the most infected patients the hospital’s ever reported, according to state data. “We remain very busy across all units in the hospital,” hospital spokesperson F. Raymond Agnew said. He said 70% of COVID-19 admissions are unvaccinated people.

A cruise ship that carried at least 17 passengers and crew members with breakthrough COVID-19 infections when it docked in New Orleans has set sail again with new passengers. Nine crew members and eight passengers were infected when the Norwegian Breakaway arrived on Sunday, a Louisiana Department of Health spokeswoman said Monday. None had any symptoms and only fully vaccinated people are allowed on board, Norwegian Cruise Line said. The cruise line said all passengers who boarded the Norwegian Breakaway on Sunday were offered a chance to cancel without penalty. The company did not immediately respond to questions about whether any did cancel or how many passengers the ship now carries.  Also read: Study suggests past COVID infection may not fend off omicron "Guests who opt to sail must wear masks while indoors except while actively eating or drinking and will be tested twice during the cruise," the statement said. The Breakaway can carry up to 3,963 passengers. Its Caribbean route from New Orleans includes Cozumel and Costa Maya in Mexico; Roatán, in the Bay Islands of Honduras; and Harvest Caye, Belize. An earlier statement from Norwegian Cruise Line said that any passengers who tested positive would either drive themselves home or "self-isolate in accommodations provided by the company.” Some people who left the ship on Sunday told WVUE-TV that they had been told that people on board had tested positive for COVID-19, but others said they hadn't. Don Canole of North Carolina said he got first word from overhearing the station's interview with someone nearby. "It would have been nice to have known. We would have taken maybe a few more precautions," he said. Passengers said they were tested for COVID-19 exposure on Saturday. The cruise line also gave passengers take-home rapid tests as they left the ship, according to WVUE. Also read: US panel backs first-of-a-kind COVID-19 pill from Merck Cruise ships were an early source of outbreaks at the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year, and some ships were rejected at ports and passengers were forced into quarantine. The CDC issued a no-sail order in March 2020, prompting a standstill that ended last June as cruise ships began to leave U.S. ports with new health and safety requirements.

The overall number of global Covid cases has crossed the 239 million-mark even though mass vaccination is underway in many countries of the world. According to Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the total case count mounted to 239,573,207 while the death tally from the virus reached 4, 881,197 on Friday morning. The US has recorded 44,766, 965 cases to date and more than 721,562 people have died so far from the virus in the country as per the university data. Also read: India's Everest Organics starts making ingredient for Merck's COVID-19 pill Brazil, which has the world's second-highest death toll from COVID-19 behind the United States, saw its death toll exceed 600,000 a week before. The South American country has registered 21,612,237 cases as of Thursday, while its Covid death toll has risen to 602,201. India's Covid-19 tally rose to 34,036,687 on Thursday as 17,004new cases were registered in 24 hours across the country, according to the federal health ministry. Besides, 378 deaths were reported across the country in the past 24 hours, taking the total death toll to 451,847. Situation in Bangladesh Covid-19 claimed 7 more lives in Bangladesh and infected 466 others in 24 hours till Thursday morning. With the fresh numbers, the Covid-19 fatalities reached 27,737 in the country while the caseload rose to 15,64,485, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS). Of the latest deceased, four were women and three men. Also read: Covid-linked deaths in Bangladesh fall to 7 Three of them died in Dhaka division, two in Chattogram and one each in Khulna and Barishal divisions. Bangladesh last logged seven Covid-19 deaths on October 8, the lowest since March 17 this year when the country recorded 11 such deaths. The fresh cases were detected after testing 21,568 samples. With this, the daily-case positivity rate declined slightly to 2.16% percent. However, the mortality rate remained static at 1.77%. Besides, the recovery rate increased slightly to 97.56 %, with 695 more patients getting cured during the period. So far, 15,26,368 people have recovered from the deadly virus infections, the DGHS added.

The U.S. was averaging about 11,000 cases a day in late June. Now the number is 107,143. It took the U.S. about nine months to cross the 100,000 average case number in November before peaking at about 250,000 in early January. Cases bottomed out in June but took about six weeks to go back above 100,000, despite a vaccine that has been given to more than 70% of the adult population. The seven-day average for daily new deaths also increased, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. It rose over the past two weeks from about 270 deaths per day to nearly 500 a day as of Friday. The virus is spreading quickly through unvaccinated populations, especially in the South where hospitals have been overrun with patients. Also read: Thousands jam Philippine vaccination sites over false news Health officials are fearful that cases will continue to soar if more Americans don’t embrace the vaccine. “Our models show that if we don’t (vaccinate people), we could be up to several hundred thousand cases a day, similar to our surge in early January,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said on CNN this week. The number of Americans hospitalized with the virus has also skyrocketed and it has gotten so bad that many hospitals are scrambling to find beds for patients in far-off locations. Houston officials say the latest wave of COVID-19 cases is pushing the local health care system to nearly “a breaking point,” resulting in some patients having to be transferred out of the city to get medical care, including one who had to be taken to North Dakota. Also read: US plans to require COVID-19 shots for foreign travelers Dr. David Persse, who is health authority for the Houston Health Department and EMS medical director, said some ambulances were waiting hours to offload patients at Houston area hospitals because no beds were available. Persse said he feared this would lead to prolonged respond times to 911 medical calls. “The health care system right now is nearly at a breaking point ... For the next three weeks or so, I see no relief on what’s happening in emergency departments,” Persse said Thursday. Last weekend, a patient in Houston had to be transferred to North Dakota to get medical care. An 11-month-old girl with COVID-19 and who was having seizures had to be transported on Thursday from Houston to a hospital 170 miles (274 kilometers) away in Temple. In Missouri, 30 ambulances and more than 60 medical personnel will be stationed across the state to help transport COVID-19 patients to other regions if nearby hospitals are too full to admit them, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson announced Friday.

As Bangladesh races to head off a surge in Covid-19 cases driven by the Delta variant, the country added 212 fatalities to its national tally on Friday, up from 166 logged a week earlier. The country has been shattering the records of daily cases and deaths almost every other day, reporting over 200 single-day fatalities for the last six days as it tries to prevent the spread of the Delta variant.  The rapid rise in cases and fatalities in July is enough to set off alarm bells, showing the pandemic is far from slowing down in Bangladesh. The Covid-19 infections are at their peak now, with 12,293 new cases reported on average each day, plunging the country into uncertainty. As the worst days of the pandemic are not over, Bangladesh recorded 13,862 new cases on Friday after testing 45,044 samples, up from 6,364 logged a week earlier on 23 July.

The government has again extended the ongoing closure of all the educational institutions of Bangladesh until July 31 as the coronavirus situation keeps worsening in the country. The decision has been taken considering the overall Covid-19 situation, imposition of lockdown and safety of teachers, students and staff, Mohammad Abul Khayer, public relations officer of the Education Ministry, told UNB on Tuesday. Read:Rajshahi hospital sees record 25 Covid deaths in single day On May 26, the government had decided to reopen the educational institutions, particularly primary, secondary and higher secondary ones, in the country on June 13 depending on the Covid situation. But the situation keeps worsening in the country, particularly in bordering districts.  The decision has been taken as per the directives of the National Technical Advisory Committee formed to fight Covid-19 in the country and it will remain applicable for Ebtedayee and Qawmi madrasas, too. On March 16 last year, the government closed all the educational institutions to prevent the spread of coronavirus. No classes have been held since then. Then the closure was extended several times, most recently until June 30, 2021. Read:Covid-19: Bangladesh sees record 8,364 daily cases; loses 104 more lives