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Union Budget 2025: Enhancing Health Insurance Accessibility and Affordability
The deduction limits for health insurance premiums have remained...
Allianz Risk Barometer: Cyber continues as top Indian business risk
“In addition to cyber incidents as the top risk in India, the...
International hunt for Covid’s origin points to China animal trade
The scientists’ report, week after delays due to political wrangling, is likely to be far from conclusive. More studies are planned, including outside China, with deciphering Covid-19’s creation story vital to understanding how best to thwart its resurgence, and to help avert similar catastrophes in the future.
World’s fastest recovery outlook at risk as coronavirus sweeps India
That uncertainty doesn’t look to be going away in a hurry, with India adding more than 300,000 cases daily for at least three consecutive days last week, pushing the total infections to more than 16.5 million. While the outbreak has overwhelmed the nation’s hospitals and crematoriums, it’s also hit consumer confidence in an economy that was only beginning to recover from an unprecedented recession last year.
Why India is shattering global infection records
Despite warnings and advice that precautions were needed, authorities were unprepared for the magnitude of the surge, said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
Critics have pointed to the government deciding to not pause Hindu religious festivals or elections, and experts say that these may have exacerbated the surge.
“Authorities across India, without exception, put public health priorities on the back burner,” Reddy said.
Covid-19 pushes India’s middle class toward poverty
Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide.
Has China’s $16 trillion economy fully recovered?
A report by British think tank, the Centre for Economics and Business Research, forecast China will overtake the United States to become the world’s biggest economy by 2028 – five years earlier than previously estimated.
Latest Covid-19 wave deadlier in Brazil than India: No one knows why
It’s too early to say if India can continue to avoid the more lethal fate of Brazil. While some parts of the country have imposed targeted lockdowns, elections are being held in five states — seeing thousands of voters pack campaign rallies — along with a month long Hindu pilgrimage that brings throngs to the banks of Ganges river.
With poor data on variants, India’s Covid surge remains a mystery
India has enough laboratory capacity for genome sequencing, but getting a wide spread of regular samples from across the country — including the rural hinterland and potential super-spreader events — has been a problem, said Rakesh Mishra, the director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, one of the labs working to sequence positive virus samples.
As U.S. cities embrace tech, cyberattacks pose real-world risks
“Digital transformation has a soft underbelly, which is digital risk,” said Grant Geyer, chief product officer of Claroty, an industrial cybersecurity firm headquartered in New York.
“The same connections that enabled new emerging technologies to help the world also provide the perfect venue for cyber criminals and nation-state-sponsored actors to conduct malfeasance, not just in the cyber world but (also) in the physical world,” he said in a phone interview.
That means it is not only private digital information which could be at stake, but also the water people drink, the energy they use and even their lives.
How can we vaccinate the world? Five challenges facing the UN-backed COVAX programme
The aim of the UN-backed COVAX scheme is to get two billion vaccine doses into the arms of around a quarter of the population of poorer countries by the end of 2021. What are the main challenges that need to be overcome, if this historic global effort is to be achieved?
India’s on its way to become the world’s pharmaceutical hub
At present, India is the largest provider of generic drugs globally. Indian pharma companies cater to over half of the global demand for various vaccines, along with 40 per cent of generic drugs demand in the US.
Notably, data from container logistics company Maersk showed that among the refrigerated cargo, pharmaceuticals export out of India rose steeply during 2020, with Q4 alone recording 47 per cent higher volumes as compared to the same period in 2019.