India's top tourist attraction the Taj Mahal is set to reopen more than six months after it was shut, officials said, even as the vast nation battles soaring coronavirus infections.
“The Taj Mahal will reopen on September 21. All Covid-19 protocols, like physical distancing, masks will be followed,” northern Uttar Pradesh state's tourism department Deputy Director Amit Srivastava told AFP. Visitors will be limited to 5,000 a day, down from the usual daily average of 20,000, he added.India has opened the iconic Taj Mahal - a UNESCO World Heritage Site - to visitors from Tuesday it was closed on March 17 to visitors as part of measures to try and combat the coronavirus pandemic, the tourism ministry said on Tuesday.
"All ticketed monuments and all other museums have been directed to be opened on September 8," Tourism Minister Prahlad Patel tweeted late on Tuesday.
Most schools and entertainment facilities, including cinemas, have already been closed across India, the world's second-most populous country with 1.3 billion people, according to the AFP news agency.
India has registered more than 72,775Covid-19 deaths, overtaking the UK to become the fourth-worst-affected country for fatalities. While total infected people swelled to 42,40,422
But the number of deaths per million people stands at 34 - far lower than what has been reported in Europe or North America.
The case fatality rate or CFR, which measures deaths among Covid-19 patients, is just around 2%. Even in badly-hit state like Maharashtra the number of deaths is doubling only in about 40 days. "The death rates have kept low all along, even as cases rose," K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India think tank, told me.
Many epidemiologists attribute this relatively low fatality rate to a young population - the elderly are typically more vulnerable. It is not clear whether other factors, such as immunity deriving from previous infections from other coronaviruses, are also responsible. Also, they point to a pattern of low mortality in South Asian countries that share a similar demographic of a younger population: reported Covid-19 deaths per million are 22 in Bangladesh and 28 in Pakistan.
Clearly, corrected for population size, India is doing far better than Europe and the United States. Yet, as Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, says: "It is irresponsible to treat this as consolation".
Prof Basu told me there are limits to the value of geographical comparisons.
"As soon as you do that, you realise India is doing very poorly. In China, Covid-19 deaths per million population is 3. In India it is 34. Within South Asia, the only country doing worse than India is Afghanistan and going by the trends, India will overtake Afghanistan."
Experts say India's already overstretched medical system would struggle to deal with a major rise in serious cases.
Quarantine stamp
Mumbai, a densely populated metropolis of 18 million, also authorised hospital and airport authorities to stamp the wrists of those who have been ordered to self-isolate with indelible ink reading "Home Quarantined" and displaying the date until which the person has been ordered to self-quarantine, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
On Sunday, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposed setting up an emergency fund to fight the coronavirus pandemic in South Asia, with New Delhi offering $10m to get it going, Reuters news agency reported.
"Any of us can use the fund to meet the cost of immediate actions," Modi told the other leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations - Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - via video conference.
Though coronavirus infections have remained low in South Asia so far, Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases in recent days, with 184 infected with the virus.
Worldwide, the number of deaths has passed 6,500 with more than 168,000 infections in 142 countries and territories.
