Five people among those arrested for the violence let lose on health workers in Padarayanapura, Bangalore last week have tested positive in a jail and consequently shifted to a hospital, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister Dr C N Ashwath Narayan said on Friday. A total of 126 people had been arrested in connection with the attack on health workers and police in minority- dominated Padarayanapura on April 19 and all of them were lodged in the district jail in nearby Ramanagara after being remanded to judicial custody by court. “We had tested all the inmates. During screening, five of them were tested positive for COVID-19. All the five have been shifted to the hospital,” Narayan told reporters here. Two of the remand prisoners tested positive late on Thursday and three more on Friday, he said. Health workers had gone to Padarayanapura for quarantining some people who were the primary and secondary contacts of coronavirus patients from the area when they were thrashed by a violent crowd.
An IIT-Roorkee professor claims to have developed a software which can detect COVID-19 within five seconds using X-ray scan of the suspected patient. The professor, who took over 40 days to develop the software, has filed a patent for the same and has approached the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for a review. Kamal Jain, a professor at the institute’s civil engineering department, claims that the software will not only reduce testing costs but will also reduce the risk of exposure to healthcare professionals. So far, there is no verification of his claim by a medical institution. “I first developed an artificial intelligence-based database after analysing over 60,000 X-ray scans, including those of COVID-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis patients to differentiate between the kind of chest congestion suffered in the three diseases. I also analysed the chest x-ray database of the United States’ NIH Clinical Center,” Jain said. “Using the software developed by me, the doctors can simply upload pictures of an individual’s X-ray. The software will not only classify whether the patient has any sign of pneumonia, it will be able to tell whether it is due to COVID-19 or other bacteria and also measure severity of the infection.
Developing countries’ repayments on their public external debt alone will soar between USD 2.6 trillion and USD 3.4 trillion in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN trade and development body has said. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in a new report has stressed that the pandemic has hit developing countries at a time when they have already been struggling with unsustainable debt burdens for many years as well as with rising health and economic needs. Developing countries now face a wall of debt service repayments throughout the 2020s, it said. In 2020 and 2021 alone, repayments on their public external debt are estimated at nearly USD 3.4 trillion — between USD 2 trillion and USD 2.3 trillion in high-income developing countries and between USD 666 billion and USD 1.06 trillion in middle- and low-income countries, the report said.
A four-month-old baby girl, who had tested positive for COVID-19 and suffering from congenital heart disease, died in a hospital in Kerala early Friday after suffering a cardiac arrest, officials said. This is the third COVID-19 death and the first infant fatality in the state where two elderly people had succumbed to the disease earlier. The baby was admitted to the Medical College Hospital here on April 21 with history of fever, cough, breathing difficulties and seizure after being treated at two other hospitals and the end came at 6 am, a medical bulletin said. State Health Minister K K Shailaja said doctors had made maximum efforts to save the life of the child, whose family belonged to Payyanad near Manjeri in Malappuram district. “Preliminary information which we have is that there has been some primary contact”, she told reporters in Thiruvananthapuram.
