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Did you know that most Covid-19 deaths take place in the hours between midnight and dawn, extending up to when a new workday begins with a change of doctors and nurses and other hospital staff? Late in the night hospitals and patients are left to the care of junior doctors, including PG students, who have little or no powers to take critical decisions required to save the lives of the critically ill at their life's end. Hence the relatively more deaths in the hours after midnight, the “doldrums of the day.”

The catastrophic damage caused by the COVID pandemic has put every person on physical and mental strain. Several families have lost their members. Losing kith and kin leads to the biggest stress on one’s mind. No person unless totally emotionless can avoid crying with sorrow and pain of others. The process began from the abruptly announced lockdown one year back without consulting anyone or considering the damage to the jobs and livelihood it would cause. The number of people in reverse migration was beyond imagination. People walked on foot, bicycles, rickshaws, autos or any other means they could get. They were herded in the vehicles on exorbitant charges like the animals are carried by the butchers. It is not easy to forget the video of a two years baby whose mother had died on the railway station and the baby was covering her with sheet. The scene was not less heart-rending than the photo of a Syrian child dead at sea shore or the picture of a vulture waiting for the child to die so that it could eat the dead baby during civil war in Somalia. None in the government at the Centre was moved by such events albeit the Prime Minster termed the sufferings of the working people as ‘Tapasya’. It is an addition to the vocabulary that sufferings caused due to some other person’s acts are Tapasya.

Even as the post-poll violence and vendetta politics continue in West Bengal, one more flashpoint has emerged between the Centre and the state with chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s cabinet deciding to revive the Legislative Council last week. Revival of the second chamber is one of Mamata’s campaign promises. Banerjee had said that eminent people and veteran leaders who were not nominated for the assembly elections would be made members of the Vidhan Parishad. In other words, she wants some more leeway for her patronage.

After an 11-day war that killed more than 240 Palestinians and 12 Israelis, a fragile ceasefire between the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Islamist Hamas militants that rule Gaza took hold early Friday morning. Activists inside Israel—Jewish and Arab alike—hailed the cessation of open fighting but said the conditions for a permanent peace are still lacking.

Mitesh Prajapati, a 30-year-old diamond polishing worker in Surat, Gujarat, was the sole earner of his family of four. Post lockdown last year, like many workers in the diamond industry, he could not manage to get a job. For seven months, Prajapati had no job, which pushed his family into acute economic distress. Prajapati, a resident of Nana Varachha area of Surat, had to provide treatment for his ailing mother, his wife and daughter. In early July last year, he consulted a local doctor in his area after being sick with fever. He was advised to get tested for COVID-19. However, Prajapati, unable to bear the added expense of his treatment, jumped into a river on July 4, 2020.

New Delhi: The World Championships bronze medallist Simranjeet Kaur, Sakshi (54kg), Jasmine (57kg) and Sanjeet (91) open their campaign with a hope to confirm medals as they will fight in the quarter-finals on second day at the 2021 ASBC Asian Boxing Championships in Dubai on Tuesday.

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who called ‘allopathy’ “stupid science” and held allopathic practice/medicine responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indians, got a taste of his own medicine the other day! This man, who does belly-squirms every time he’s invited to demonstrate Yoga on TV, got a call from allopath Union Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan and was forced to eat crow.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It was a bold surgical strike from the Congress High Command. It came a bit late in the day. An earlier execution could, perhaps, have prevented the Congress in Kerala from facing a humiliating electoral defeat. But as the saying goes, better late than never.

Malayalam news channel Asianet has come under Right-wing attacks for ignoring the Bengal post poll violence. The phone call was one of the many similar calls made to media offices in other states. The BJP and Sangh parivar have launched a nationwide campaign to malign and harass Mamata Banerjee. This strategy has acquired momentum after the news of Mamata being projected as the challenger to Modi started making the rounds at the national level.

India completes 14 months of the first lockdown, announced on March 24, 2020, that had created unprecedented chaos among the migrant workers, millions of them leaving their working places on foot in the absence of any means of transportation, without food to eat, without water to drink, and with little hope of getting them through deserted streets and closed doors. Thousands of them, with their women folk and children, travelled over thousands of miles, and in the way hundreds of them lost their lives. The scene had pricked the conscience of the world, save Modi government, if inaction is of any indication. Eight lakh migrant workers leaving the national capital last month is a proof.