- Tuesday, March 04, 2025
By: Pramod Kumar
PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi on Tuesday (13) warned against overcrowding at tourist sites as it may lead to surge in Covid-19 cases.
He also urged people to take vaccine against the coronavirus even as official figures indicated a slower spread of new infections.
The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has said that it feared gathering of tourists and pilgrims could become super spreader events that fuel a deadly third wave of infections and it warned against complacency.
“I will say very emphatically that it is not OK to have huge crowds in hill stations, markets, without wearing masks,” Modi said in comments posted on Twitter while acknowledging the tourism industry has been badly hit by lockdowns.
India’s coronavirus caseload of 30.91 million infections is the world’s second-highest behind the US.
Its official tally of deaths is 410,784, many of them coming in a brutal second wave of infections in April and May when people died outside hospitals as they waited for beds and bodies were washing up on the banks of the holy Ganges river.
The government last month launched a campaign to inoculate all adults, with a target of 950 million people by the end of the year.
However, the pace of vaccination has faltered because of shortages of vaccines and various logistical hurdles, and only eight per cent of the target is fully vaccinated.
Modi called for vigilance against new variants of the virus and a faster campaign to get the population protected.
“To combat the third wave, we have to keep speeding up the process of vaccination,” Modi said.
Last week, the government administered fewer than 4 million vaccine doses a day compared with a record 9.17 million on the day Modi launched the campaign.
India reported 2,020 new COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday but that tally included a backlog of hundreds of previously unreported fatalities in the central state Madhya Pradesh, according to health ministry data.
The state’s revision of its death toll comes less than a month after Maharashtra and Bihar, India’s two most populous states, revised their death tolls up sharply, leading to concern about under-reporting and calls for a wide review.
