COVID-19

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) prioritised healthcare infrastructure in Mumbai. In 2022-23, BMC allocated Rs 6933.75 crore for the health budget, marking a 46% increase from the previous year (2021-22). BMC increased the share of the total budget dedicated to health up to 15%, the highest in the decade. Moreover, BMC invested Rs 2660.65 crore for health capital expenditure, more than doubling the prior year's allocation. These funds were primarily focused on completing delayed hospital redevelopment projects, upgrading dispensaries and maternity homes, procuring medical equipment, and expanding health infrastructure across the city.  Health actual budget expenditure…

For the past three years, Anjana’s family of seven has had only one earning member. Anjana and her father, both workers at India United No. 5, a National Textile Corporation (NTC) mill in Mumbai, have been without work ever since the mills closed down during the COVID pandemic. Her brother works at a vegetable store. Expectedly, the income is not sufficient to run the household. “I dropped out after class 9 and started working at the mill in 2019 because the family needed more income. Once COVID happened, the mill closed down. We got full salaries for two to three…

"I stay near Kapurbawdi, but travel to Kalyan, Bhiwandi or even Badlapur or Karjat for work", says Anil, a construction worker from Gulbarga, Karnataka. He's been a painter for the last 22 years. Anil is among hundreds of construction workers who gather at 7 am every morning at the labour naka (a stand or intersection of roads) at Kapurbawdi junction in Thane seeking work. The unskilled and semiskilled workers include masons, painters, plumbers, carpenters, tile polishers and loaders, among others. Mostly temporary or seasonal migrants from Maharashtra and surrounding states, they're informal workers who receive wages in exchange for short…

Rakhi Sahu, a kindergarten teacher in Bhopal, is pleased that children are happy to be back in school. But where she sees worrying learning gaps from the two years of school closure is in basic manners or etiquette. “It has been difficult to teach them basic manners like sharing toys with other children or how to sit or conduct themselves in classrooms,” says Rakhi. “The children who are coming to school now after the lockdown have a blank slate in terms of social or behavioural skills”. “Many children have had a hard time adjusting to being back in school full time,”…

On February 25th, a meeting of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority chaired by Lt Governor Anil Baijal decided to lift all COVID related restrictions, and announced that schools will be fully offline from April 1st. In less than 24 hours, Baijal received a representation from the National Progressive Schools' Conference — an association of senior secondary schools across the country — welcoming the reopening of schools, but wanted him to advance the opening date. Open the schools fully by March 2nd, they said, as they had observed a “huge learning gap in children from nursery to class 8”. In the letter,…

Omicron, named by the WHO after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, continues to fuel the third wave of Covid-19 pandemic in India.  On Jan 20th, the country witnessed a whopping 3.47 lakh cases, the highest in the last eight months. Globally, India is the second worst-hit country after the US.  The Omicron variant, which has over 30 mutations on its spike protein, hit the country at a time when people believed that the pandemic was nearing the end. It has so far been found in 29 states. In fact, Omicron is fast becoming the dominant variant which, experts say, is…

Since the onset of the third wave, a surge in home testing for COVID-19 in Mumbai has brought new challenges for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Mylab Discovery Solutions, the manufacturer of 'CoviSelf', a self-testing kit, which sold about 25,000 kits in Mumbai in December, saw its sales jump to about five lakh on January 7th. By January 11th, 96,000 people in the city had tested themselves using home testing kits. Of these, 3,000 had tested positive according to Mumbai's mayor Kishori Pednekar. And with no rule or law in place at that time making it mandatory for those doing home testing to report…

In the first two waves of COVID-19 in Mumbai, the standard protocol to prevent the spread of the virus was stringent. Strict night curfews were implemented, public spaces were closed and buildings were sealed if five or more positive cases were found. This helped control the spread of what was deemed to be a more lethal variant of Coronavirus, Delta. But, citizens raised an objection to the rule of sealing buildings, claiming that it was impractical, inconvenient and didn’t do much to contain the infection. With the onset of the Omicron variant, the city witnessed a sudden surge in COVID-19…

The first doctor to report the Omicron variant on November 18th, 2021 was Dr Angelique Coetzee, National Chairperson of South African Medical Association. “On that day, I saw seven patients with similar symptoms of myalgia, headache, fatigue who tested positive for COVID-19 with rapid tests at my consulting rooms,” Dr Coetzee said in an email interview with Citizen Matters. “Their symptoms were different from Delta and I alerted the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on Vaccines of which I am a part. It took our scientists six days to announce to the world that there’s a new variant.”  Subsequently, on…

The third wave of COVID-19 in Mumbai has mobilised another round of crowdsourcing for hospital beds, akin to the second wave, when citizen action kept the country afloat. Among them, one citizen, Vikram Tuteja claims multiple people have asked him for help in their hunt for ICU beds. Even Iqbal S Chahal, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)'s commissioner, acknowledged complaints about the shortage of COVID-19 beds in private hospitals. But, the BMC's daily updates have continuously shown ample availability of hospital beds. The percentage of occupied beds has not exceeded 22% (7,500), even when there have been over a lakh active…