Spain’s coronavirus death toll rose by 838 in one day, officials reported on Sunday, its largest increase during the pandemic.
Spain’s total number of coronavirus deaths climbed to 6,528, as the country enters its third week of almost total shutdown to stop the spread of the virus, Reuters reported. The number of infections also jumped by 6,549 overnight to reach 78,797.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced Saturday in a television address that all non-essential workers needed to stay home for two weeks between March 30 and April 9. While their salaries would remain the same, these workers would be expected to catch up on lost hours at a later time, according to Reuters.
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Unions approved the prime minister’s announcement, while business groups warned the decision would “generate an unprecedented huge impact on the Spanish economy,” the news service noted. It added that the business groups acknowledged they will obey the order.
Traffic typical of a Sunday morning reportedly was absent in Spain's capital, while police asked passengers of buses and cars why they were outside of their residencies.
Spain has the second-highest coronavirus death rate in the world, behind Italy, where 10,023 people have died.
Spain is fourth in the total number of infected individuals, following the U.S, Italy and China, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Worldwide, more than 679,900 people have been infected and more than 31,700 deaths have been recorded.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the nation's poor for forgiveness, as the economic and human toll from his 21-day nationwide lockdown deepens and criticism mounts over a lack of adequate planning ahead of the decision.
"I apologise for taking these harsh steps that have caused difficulties in your lives, especially the poor people," Modi said in his monthly address on Sunday, broadcast on state radio.
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"I know some of you will be angry with me. But these tough measures were needed to win this battle."
Modi announced an unprecedented three-week lockdown - the world's largest - which came into effect on March 25 to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
But the decision has stung millions of India's poor, leaving many hungry and forcing jobless migrant labourers to flee cities and walk hundreds of kilometres to their native villages.
The poor "would definitely be thinking what kind of prime minister is this, who has put us into so much trouble," he said, urging people to understand there was no other option.
"Steps taken so far … will give India victory over corona," he added.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in India rose to 979 on Sunday, with 25 deaths.
The government announced a $22.6bn economic stimulus plan on Thursday to provide direct cash transfers and food handouts to India's poor. A quarter of India's 1.3 billion people live below the poverty line.
In an opinion piece published on Sunday, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo - two of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 - said even more aid for the poor is needed.
"Without that, the demand crisis will snowball into an economic avalanche, and people will have no choice but to defy orders," they wrote in the Indian Express.
The lockdown is expected to exacerbate India's economic woes at a time when growth had already slumped to its slowest pace in six years.
'No contingency plans'
There still appears to be broad support for strong measures to avoid a coronavirus catastrophe in India, a country where the public health system is poor.
But opposition leaders, analysts and some citizens are increasingly criticizing its implementation. In particular, they say the government appears to have been caught off guard by the mass movement of migrants following the announcement, which threatens to spread the disease into the hinterlands.
"The Gov't had no contingency plans in place for this exodus," tweeted opposition politician Rahul Gandhi as images of migrant labourers walking long distances to return home dominated local media.
#ModiMadeDisaster was a top trending topic in India on Sunday on Twitter.
Police said four migrants were killed on Saturday when a truck ran into them in the western state of Maharashtra. Also on Saturday, a migrant worker collapsed and died in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, according to a police official.
"We will die of walking and starving before getting killed by corona," said migrant worker Madhav Raj, 28, as he walked along the road in Uttar Pradesh.
On Sunday, several hundred migrants in the town of Paippad, in southern Kerala state, gathered in a square demanding transport back to their hometowns.
The central government has called on states to provide marooned labourers with food and shelter, and Modi's supporters slammed state governments on Twitter for failing to properly implement the lockdown.
In India's cities, too, anger was rising.
"We have no food or drink. I am sat down thinking how to feed my family," said homemaker Amirbee Shaikh Yusuf, 50, in Mumbai's sprawling Dharavi slum.
"There is nothing good about this lockdown. People are angry, no one is caring for us."
MANILA — A plane used as an air ambulance by the Philippine health department to fight the coronavirus outbreak burst into flames as it took off from Manila’s airport for Japan on Sunday night, killing all onboard, the airport said.
The light aircraft was carrying eight people, including the pilot and two crew members, a doctor, a nurse, a flight medic and an American and a Canadian passenger, according to local radio reports, citing airport officials.
It was not clear whether the passengers were being airlifted for treatment of the viral disease.
“Unfortunately, no passenger survived the accident,” the Manila International Airport Authority said in a statement, adding that the runway had been closed and an investigation was underway.
The Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, the Philippine agency at the forefront of combating the disease, uses the same aircraft from a Philippine charter flight company called Lionair to transport supplies to the medical workers on the front line in the provinces across the archipelago, the government said.
Lionair is separate from Lion Air, the Indonesian carrier that is one of the world’s fastest-growing airlines. The budget carrier has racked up several major accidents, including the fatal crash in 2018 of a 737 jetliner.
Senator Richard Gordon, the head of the Philippine Red Cross, said that medical teams had been dispatched to the airport to respond to the crash involving Flight 5880.
“Eight passengers — consisting of a flight medic, a nurse, doctor, three flight crew, one patient and its companion were onboard,” he said. “The airplane caught fire and exploded as it was taking off the NAIA runway 24, he added, referring to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. “The fire was enormous.”
Lionair Inc., a Philippine-based firm, flies charter flights and has contracts with the government. It operates air ambulances too and is helping the government in its anti-coronavirus program, transporting medical supplies.
In September a light aircraft also operated by the charter company crashed in Laguan, a suburban province just south of Manila, killing nine people aboard.
Donald Mendoza, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, said the crash the firm’s fleet would be grounded after the crash.
“It’s quite alarming, but we’re looking into the records of this unfortunate event that happened to Lionair. Definitely, we’ll have a thorough investigation,” he said.
India's prime minister has asked for his country's forgiveness after imposing a sweeping lockdown that he said had hurt millions of poor people.
Criticism has mounted over the lack of planning ahead of the coronavirus shutdown, which was introduced with less than four hours' notice.
Many of India's 1.3 billion citizens have been left jobless and hungry.
Tens of thousands of migrant labourers have been forced to walk hundreds of kilometres to their native villages.
In his weekly radio address PM Narendra Modi apologised for the impact of the strict stay-home-home measures.
But he said there was "no other way" to stop the rapid spread of the virus.
"Especially when I look at my poor brothers and sisters, I definitely feel that they must be thinking, what kind of prime minister is this who has placed us in this difficulty?
"I especially seek their forgiveness," he said.
"Possibly many would be angry at me for being locked in their homes.
"I understand your troubles but there was no other way to wage war against coronavirus... It is a battle of life and death and we have to win it."
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People are banned from leaving their homes for three weeks under the "total lockdown" measures announced on Tuesday. All non-essential businesses have been closed and almost all public gatherings are banned.
It has sparked an exodus from major cities such as Delhi, where thousands of migrant workers are setting out on long journeys back to their home villages after transport was stopped.
One worker died on Saturday after he attempted to walk a 168 mile (270km) journey back home, a police officials told Reuters news agency.
India announced a $22bn (£19bn) bailout for the country's poor on Tuesday, including free food and cash handouts, but there are concerns this might not reach those most in need.
In an opinion piece published on Sunday, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo - two of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 - said even more aid for the poor was needed.
"Without that, the demand crisis will snowball into an economic avalanche, and people will have no choice but to defy orders," they wrote in the Indian Express.
India has reported about 1,000 cases of coronavirus and 25 deaths.
However, experts worry that the real number of infections could be far higher. India has one of the lowest testing rates in the world, although efforts are under way to ramp up capacity.
There are fears that an outbreak in the country - one of the world's most densely populated - could result in a catastrophe.
The country's economy was already in the midst of a severe slowdown before the country went into lockdown.
BARCELONA—In Spain, the country with the world’s second-highest death toll from the new coronavirus, the pandemic is leaving health services on the brink. Infected patients are left for days in wheelchairs because there are no beds, and protective equipment for medical personnel is so scarce that some are fashioning gowns out of garbage bags.
Over the past two weeks, Spain has suffered one of the fastest-growing outbreaks of the coronavirus. That has caught its health sector largely unprepared, say medical personnel, echoing similar problems in Italy and offering a cautionary tale of what other countries could face as the pandemic accelerates.
“We didn’t learn the lessons from Italy. We didn’t prepare for the epidemic and the system is now overloaded,” said Ángela Hernández, deputy general secretary of Madrid’s Amyts, a doctors’ union.
Health-care workers at University Hospital in Coruna, in northwestern Spain.
Photo:
miguel riopa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
In the past week alone, total infections in Spain almost tripled, reaching 79,000 on Sunday, while deaths have almost quadrupled to 6,528, the world’s second-highest death toll from the disease after Italy.
Two weeks ago, Spain’s government placed the country under lockdown in an attempt to stop the virus’s spread. Spaniards were barred from leaving their homes except to buy food, medicine and other essentials—with exceptions for those who had to go to work and for other emergencies.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced his government would tighten lockdown measures, by forcing all workers in nonessential sectors to stay at home for two weeks starting on Monday.
The outbreaks are largely clustered around Madrid and Catalonia, which together account for half the total infections and more than two-thirds of deaths. In those areas, the pressure on hospitals is intense. By Sunday, nearly 4,900 people were in intensive care, a sixfold increase from 10 days earlier.
The regions of Madrid and Catalonia each had roughly 600 beds available in intensive-care units before the outbreak, but are now treating double that in these units, according to Spain’s health ministry and the Catalan Society of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine.
At some hospitals, patients are kept waiting for up to 24 hours on gurneys in corridors and on the floor, according to medical personnel working in the most stretched hospital. María José García, a spokeswoman at nurses’ union Satse, confirmed that nurses have reported such incidents to the union.
One Madrid hospital was so overwhelmed that personnel had to leave coronavirus patients for as many as three days in wheelchairs because they lacked beds, said a nurse working in the hospital. Ms. Garcia confirmed that nurses have reported such incidents to the union.
“The ministry is working to cooperate in providing materials to all regions,” said Spain’s health ministry.
The ministry didn’t comment specifically on the severe lack of space in some hospitals.
The health department for Madrid’s region didn’t reply to a request for comment. The health department of Catalonia, the region that is home to Barcelona, reiterated it is working to equip health-care professionals properly and ordered protective equipment as soon as the first coronavirus case was detected in the region in February.
The Catalan health department also said sports centers near four main hospitals in Barcelona would be adapted to accommodate up to 600 patients.
La Paz Hospital in Madrid has doubled its emergency room by taking over the hospital gym and the waiting room, where doctors now attend to patients. New patients now wait outside in a temporary tent set up in the ambulance parking lot.
“Patients keep coming every day more and more. I just can’t imagine how we are going to deal with them in a few days,” said Guillén del Barrio, a 30-year-old emergency room nurse at La Paz Hospital. “There are many of us going home crying every day.”
Authorities in Spain have taken over private hospitals and turned some hotels into makeshift health-care facilities. In Madrid, authorities are setting up a 5,500-bed military facility in a conference center.
Meanwhile, doctors and nurses say there has been a serious shortage of medical equipment and personal protective equipment such as masks, visors and special gowns designed to protect against infection.
The shortage of masks and of protective visors is such that nurses have to keep them on for their entire shifts, sometimes lasting 14 hours, meaning they cannot eat or drink for the whole time, according to Satse, nurses and doctors.
They sometimes end their shift with bruises on their face from having kept the equipment on for such a long time.
In some of Madrid’s hospitals, personnel have used red, blue and yellow plastic ponchos donated by local amusement parks because they didn’t have proper gowns, according to Satse and a nurse working at one of the affected hospitals.
In other hospitals nurses made their own gowns with plastic garbage bags and used shower caps to cover their hair.
Two Clusters
Hospitals in Madrid and Catalonia are under severe pressure due to the sheer number of cases they have to treat
Covid-19 cases
CATALONIA
Barcelona
Madrid
Cases
Hospitalized
ANDALUCIA
20,000
Sevilla
10,000
Canary Islands
1,000
Cases
CATALONIA
Barcelona
Madrid
Cases
Hospitalized
ANDALUCIA
20,000
Sevilla
10,000
Canary Islands
1,000
Cases
Canary Islands
CATALONIA
Barcelona
Madrid
ANDALUCIA
20,000
Sevilla
10,000
1,000
Cases
Cases
Hospitalized
Canary Islands
CATALONIA
Barcelona
Madrid
ANDALUCIA
20,000
Seville
10,000
1,000
Cases
Hospitalized
Cases
Source: Spanish government
“This is absolute chaos. The situation is devastating. There was no preparation whatsoever, so when the outbreak began, we ourselves found that the protective equipment we had was insufficient or not of adequate quality,” said Ms. García.
The Spanish Health Ministry declined to comment on specific shortages of protective gear but said it continues to work to ensure the supply of such materials to all regions. The government has recently bought almost 700 million masks and 11 million gloves, as well as 950 ventilators, machines that are critical to treating the most serious cases of coronavirus infections.
Health workers worry that the shortage of adequate protection may help explain why the virus has infected so many health workers in Spain, which in turn has reduced the number of available medical personnel.
According to authorities, around 15% of known cases in Spain—or about 9,400—are health workers, compared with roughly 8% in Italy.
Last week, the Spanish government said it was adding 50,000 additional medical workers, including retired doctors, recently graduates and students.
Health-care workers hug each other as they are cheered on by people outside La Fe hospital in Valencia.
Photo:
jose jordan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
“No one smiles anymore. Everyone works tons of hours,” said Anna Serrabou, a doctor at the emergency unit in Moisès Broggi Hospital near Barcelona. “People call us heroes, but in fact we feel powerless.”
A 42-year-old person infected with the virus recently was brought to the emergency room at a hospital in Barcelona, only to find there was no space in its intensive-care unit.
Susan Judas, a doctor at the hospital, and her team called hospitals in the surrounding area. One had a free bed, but was too far to bring the patient in time.
Finally, a bed in a nearby hospital became available when another coronavirus patient died.
“I have the feeling of living in a nightmare, that this is not happening in reality,” said Dr. Judas. “But then, after finishing your shift and resting, you realize that yes, this is really happening.”
MUMBAI, March 29 (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the nation’s poor for forgiveness on Sunday, as the economic and human toll from his 21-day nationwide lockdown deepens and criticism mounts about a lack of adequate planning ahead of the decision.
FILE PHOTO: Migrant workers crowd up outside a bus station as they wait to board buses to return to their villages during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Ghaziabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, India March 28, 2020. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis/File Photo
Modi on Tuesday announced a three week-lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus. But, the decision has particularly stung millions of India’s poor, leaving many hungry and forcing tens of thousands of jobless migrant laborers to walk hundreds of kilometers from cities to their native villages. (Full Story) (Full Story)
“I would firstly like to seek forgiveness from all my countrymen,” Modi said in a nationwide radio address.
The poor “would definitely be thinking what kind of prime minister is this, who has put us into so much trouble,” he said, urging people to understand there was no other option.
“Steps taken so far… will give India victory over corona,” he added.
Modi, whose government on Thursday announced a $22.6 billion economic stimulus plan to provide direct cash transfers and food handouts to India’s poor, however, did not offer any clarity on future plans.
In an op-ed published on Sunday, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo - two of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 - warned that even more aid for the poor is needed.
“Without that, the demand crisis will snowball into an economic avalanche, and people will have no choice but to defy orders,” they wrote in the Indian Express.
There is still broad support for strong measures to avoid a coronavirus catastrophe in India, a country of some 1.3 billion people where the public health system is poor.
But opposition leaders, analysts and even some citizens are increasingly criticizing its implementation.
“It’s shameful that we’ve allowed any Indian citizen to be treated this way & that the Gov’t had no contingency plans in place for this exodus,” tweeted opposition politician Rahul Gandhi as images and footage of migrant laborers walking long distances to return home dominated newspaper headlines and news bulletins.
Police said four migrants were killed on Saturday when a truck ran into them in the western state of Maharashtra.
On Saturday, a migrant collapsed and died in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh while on a 270 kilometers (168 miles) walk home, according to a police official.
“We will die of walking and starving before getting killed by corona,” said migrant worker Madhav Raj, 28, as he walked by the road in Uttar Pradesh.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in India rose to 979 on Sunday, including 25 deaths.
Slideshow (2 Images)
Although experts largely agree that a stringent lockdown in India is necessary to keep the spread of the virus in check, the economic fallout of the move is causing anger among the poor.
“We have no food or drink. I am sat down thinking how to feed my family,” said homemaker Amirbee Shaikh Yusuf, 50, in Mumbai’s sprawling Dharavi slum, around lunchtime on Saturday.
“There is nothing good about this lockdown. People are angry, no one is caring for us.”
Additional reporting by Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
