(TibetanReview.net, Oct08’20) – Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic that broke out of the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, up to 150 million people across the world could get pushed into extreme poverty by the end of 2021, wiping out more than three years of progress in poverty reduction, the World Bank has said Oct 7.
Releasing its flagship biennial report on poverty and shared prosperity, the multilateral development lender has said that an additional 88 million to 115 million people will fall into extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1.90 a day – in 2020. This could grow to 111 million to 150 million by the end of 2021, the timesofindia.com Oct 7 cited the report as saying.
The effect is expected to be acutely felt in India too where the World Bank expects that the country’s GDP will shrink by 9.6 per cent this fiscal year.
China, the world’s largest creditor, is increasingly coming under pressure to cancel its huge debet to Covid-19-hit poor countries under the Group of 20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI). Making the call, World Bank president David Malpass has on Oct 5 accused China’s well capitalized official lenders of not fully participating in the DSSI, reported the timesofindia.com Oct 7.
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The latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 78,524 new cases and 971 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Oct 08 at 8AM, taking their totals to 6,835,655 cases and 105,526 deaths.
A total of 5,827,704, or 85.25 %, had recovered while the number of active cases was 902,425, or 13.20% of the total. The case fatality rate was 1.54%. These were all improvements over the previous day’s figures.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 78,524, was less than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 83,011, leading to a decrease in the number of active cases by 5,458. The country has registered a dip in active cases for the fifth consecutive day, although the latest number of new cases was more than that on the day before.
India is currently the country with the world’s second highest number of Covid-19 cases and the third highest number of deaths.
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Four states, namely Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu have accumulated more than 630,000 cases each in that order.
Fourteen other states, namely Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, Kerala, Odisha, Telangana, Bihar, Assam, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chattisgarh, and Punjab had reported more than 120,000 cases each so far in that order.
Three other states/ Union Territories, namely Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, and Uttarakhand had reported more than 52,000 cases each so far in that order.
Seven more states/Union Territories, namely Goa, Puducherry, Tripura, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh, reported more than 11,000 cases each in that order.
Besides, there were seven other states/Union Territories with a total more than 2,000 cases each, namely Meghalaya, Nagaland, Ladakh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Sikkim, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Mizoram in that order.
Maharashtra also had the most number of deaths at 39,072 (↑344); followed by Tamil Nadu and Karnataka with more than 9,500 deaths each, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh with more than 6,000 deaths each; Delhi, and West Bengal with more than 5,300 deaths each; Punjab and Gujarat with more than 3,500 deaths each; Madhya Pradesh with more than 2,500 deaths; Rajasthan, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Telangana, and Chattisgarh with more than 1,100 deaths each; Odisha, Bihar, Kerala, Assam, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand, with between 958 and 688 deaths each, and so on in that order.
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The total number of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan had remained unchanged for the second day at 403 (↑0), of whom 175 were active, 214 had recovered and 14 (↑0) had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as of Oct 08.
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Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 36,194,507 and the deaths 1,056,408, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 2:53 PM on Oct 8, 2020.
