The city has no plans to shut down even as the cases continue to surge, Bloomberg News reported, quoting Mumbai’s Municipal Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal."Mumbai has already banned large gatherings and also put restrictions on the number of people that can attend events. No lockdown and no further restrictions are planned even if cases were to rise," Chahal told Bloomberg News in an interview.
Among the newly reported cases, only 5 percent of patients required medical help and most recovered faster. Most patients who needed medical help were were not vaccinated, the report said.
“Yesterday, we got more than 15,000 cases. Of this only 80 patients went on oxygen beds and only around 35” needed intensive care, the report said quoting Chahal. “There is no case for a lockdown.”With that the state government also ruled out shutting down local trains in the Mumbai metropolitan region (MMR). Shutting Mumbai's local trains is not under discussion state public health and family welfare minister Rajesh Tope was quoted as saying by The Times of India. Tope however said night curfew and weekend curfew were being discussed as measures to control the spread. He further added that any such restriction will be announced by the chief minister.COVID-19 cases in the city reached a fresh all-time single-day high and up 5,015 infections, or 33.06 percent, from a day ago, while four more patients succumbed to the disease, said the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on January 6.
Meanwhile, BMC also said the COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms can stay in home isolation instead of institutional quarantine or hospital, reported news agency PTI.Amid an exponential rise in cases in Mumbai, the BMC also reduced the minimum period of home isolation to seven days from the earlier 14 days.
On January 4, Mumbai Mayor Kishori Pednekar had said if the daily COVID-19 cases cross the 20,000-mark, a lockdown will be imposed in Mumbai as per the Union government’s rules.Citigroup Inc on Friday told its staff that it would terminate employees who are unvaccinated as of January 14, enforcing a policy previously announced last year, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Citigroup said in October it would require U.S. employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of their employment.The bank said at the time it was complying with the Biden administration policy requiring all workers supporting government contracts to be fully vaccinated, as the government remains a "large and important" client of Citi, said Sara Wechter, head of human resources, in a LinkedIn post.
Bloomberg first reported the bank's January 14 deadline on Friday.The daily COVID-19 cases continued to rise unabated in Delhi on January 7. The national capital has registered 17,335 new cases in the last 24 hours. The tally is close to what the city had seen at the peak of the second COVID wave, when on May 8, 2021, 17,364 cases were reported with a positivity rate of 23.34 percent. The current positivity rate stands at 17.73 percent.
Nine people have died due to the virus in the last 24 hours, bringing the death tally to 25,136 since March 2020. The tally of active cases in Delhi stands at 39,873 with a case fatality rate of 1.67 percent.
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