NEW DELHI — Eleven people died after a fire broke out in a coronavirus intensive care unit in the western state of Maharashtra, the latest in a series of fatal disasters in Covid-19 wards in India.
Hospital staff tried to douse the fire that started Saturday morning with fire extinguishers, but the flames spread quickly in the airtight room, cutting the power out and forcing people to flee to safety, said Shankar Misal, the fire chief in the Ahmednagar district.
“It created huge, black smoke inside. It was completely dark,” he said.
Within minutes, firefighters had shattered windowpanes and lifted out 15 patients from the 17-bed facility. Most of the 11 patients who died suffocated from smoke, Mr. Misal said. The survivors’ medical condition was not immediately known.
The fire department is investigating whether an electrical short circuit caused the blaze. The Covid-19 ward was among many built hastily across India to accommodate a deluge of patients through the pandemic.
India’s infection curve is down sharply from the peak of its second wave in June, but the country is still reporting about 13,000 new cases daily.
Maharashtra’s top elected official, the chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, wrote on Twitter to express his “deep anguish over the incident.”
India’s health system — fragile and underfunded even in normal times — has experienced enormous strain during waves of the pandemic. In June, hospitals in the capital, New Delhi, and the state capital of Maharashtra, Mumbai, ran out of beds, medical oxygen and staff, and turned away patients who died outside the gates.
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ramped up the country’s health care infrastructure, but health is managed at a state level in India, and the standard of care and conditions at hospitals vary greatly from one region to the next.
GLASGOW — In a gathering with more than 20,000 people from nearly every country in the world, one of the biggest major international summits since the pandemic began, a Covid outbreak was always going to be a danger.
So far, organizers have not revealed the number of people who have tested positive. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles tested positive for the coronavirus days after arriving at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Days later, an aide to President Biden tested positive.
“You are being exposed to more Covid than you would want,” said Marcelo Mena Carrasco, a scientist and former environment minister of Chile.
At the venue, the percentage of people wearing high-quality, certified masks indoors is low, he said. Air circulation in the meetings rooms was so poor that when he measured it with an air quality monitor, levels were much higher than is recommended for indoor settings.
“This is supposed to be the COP based on science, and we’re supposed to be the ones who are basing decisions on science,” he said, “and this has shown that even the most basic things we’ve been hearing over the past two years haven’t really come through.”
The conference comes at a time when coronavirus cases in Britain are high. When asked about incidences of Covid-19 at COP26, a spokesman for Police Scotland said that it would not be releasing numbers of those isolating.
The White House aide who tested positive had traveled with Mr. Biden to Scotland and remains in quarantine abroad, an administration official said. The aide, who had not been in close contact with Mr. Biden, tested positive on Tuesday, but as of Thursday had not shown any symptoms.
The United Nations has put in place rules to limit the virus’s spread. All attendees are required to take a coronavirus test, although the system is based on the honor code, since results are self-reported. Masks are required almost everywhere, and there are limits on the numbers of people allowed to gather in meeting rooms.
But inside the venue, social distancing is limited or nonexistent, and many attendees have their masks lowered. There are lines for food, bathrooms and crowds of people in the conference venue halls.
John Swinney, Scotland’s deputy first minister, said this week that a rise in cases in Scotland was “very unsettling” and warned of a possible increase as a result of the climate summit.
Costa Rican officials said on Friday that they would require Covid-19 vaccinations for people under 18 “to safeguard the best interests” of children, becoming one of the first countries to implement such a mandate.
Costa Rica, which has authorized Covid shots for those 12 and over since Oct. 25, will procure vaccines for children under 12 by next year, the Health Ministry said in a statement on Friday. The statement did not mention a minimum age for vaccination and the ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request seeking comment.
Fifty-five percent of Costa Rica’s population has been fully vaccinated, higher than the global average of 40 percent, according to a University of Oxford data set. Its vaccination rate also exceeds those of several of its neighbors in Latin America, where vaccine access has been unequal. About 73 percent of Costa Ricans between 12 and 19 were fully vaccinated as of Tuesday, the government’s statement said, following the start of that vaccination effort since Oct. 25.
Since a surge of cases in September, when Costa Rican officials recorded 17,667 cases in one week, weekly cases have dropped steadily, reaching 3,411 last week, according to government data. Officials reported 291 new hospitalizations last week, a decrease of 21 percent from the week prior.
This is not the first time Costa Rica has required a large number of its residents to get vaccinated. In February, health care workers were ordered to get shots. Two months ago, Costa Rica mandated them for all public sector workers. It has also empowered private companies to require their employees to get vaccinated.
Starting Jan. 8, the country will require proof of vaccination to enter places like hotels, restaurants, bars, casinos, museums and gyms, according to President Carlos Alvarado Quesada’s office. Currently, those establishments can either operate at 50 percent capacity without a vaccination requirement for customers, or operate at full capacity with one.
Costa Rica, whose economy relies on tourism, has opened its borders to visitors regardless of vaccination status, according to the government’s official tourism website. Unvaccinated tourists must purchase insurance that covers medical expenses and lodging expenses for quarantine in case of a Covid infection.
The health ministry said Covid vaccines were joining a list of other shots that were already mandatory for children in Costa Rica, including vaccines against chickenpox, polio and the human papillomavirus.
The country has acquired about nine million doses of Covid vaccines, according to the Costa Rican National Emergency Commission. About 998,000 of those came through donations from the United States, Canada, Spain, Austria and the Dominican Republic, the commission said. An additional 259,000 are from Covax, the global vaccine-sharing program backed by the United Nations, it said.
Parents or legal guardians, as well as the public education system and children’s advocacy agencies, are responsible for making sure children get vaccinated, health officials said. But children over 15 can receive a Covid-19 shot without being accompanied by an adult, they added.
Austria is tightening the rules of a national vaccine pass program starting Monday as it attempts to stem a coronavirus surge that has brought cases to levels unseen in almost a year.
Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced the changes Friday night, telling reporters after a meeting with state governors: “It is simply our responsibility to protect the people of our country.”
Austrians will need proof of vaccination or a past infection to be seated at a restaurant, enter a bar, visit a hairdresser or join any gathering of more than 25 people. Up until now, documentation of a negative test was also accepted.
The new federal rules match ones that the capital, Vienna, had planned to introduce a few days later, when it will also begin offering the Pfizer vaccine for children of ages 5 to 11, pre-empting a decision by the European medical regulator.
The country’s national health agency reports 522 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people over the past week — a rate not seen since November of last year, when Austria was forced to go into a full lockdown. Hospitalizations remain below what they were then, however, with about half as many Covid patients in intensive care as during the peak in November 2020, according to health agency figures.
Around 63 percent of people in Austria are fully vaccinated — more than in the United States, but less than in most European Union countries, according to government figures collated by the Our World in Data project.
At the news conference in Vienna on Friday evening, Mr. Schallenberg tried once more to convince Austrians to take the shot.
“With a vaccination we protect not only ourselves, but also our friends, family and colleagues,” he said.
During the pandemic, New York City permitted bars and restaurants to set up on sidewalks and in the streets as an emergency measure to save a devastated industry vital to the economy.
But it is the nature of things in a place where space is so scarce that a munificent policy gesture over here so quickly comes to seem like a shaft over there.
Ellen Koenigsberg has owned a vintage clothing store on the Lower East Side for 20 years.
“Does this look like Paris?” Ms. Koenigsberg asked one recent morning, as we were standing outside her shop on Ludlow Street, which was flanked on both sides by plywood dining sheds extending deep into the street, one of them with graffiti that skewed on the side of aimless vandalism over any attempt at art.
Shopping was once an animating pastime on the Lower East Side, but at some point a frat-boy style of barhopping superseded it as the reigning recreation. “It was really bad before Covid, but this has made things unlivable,” Ms. Koenigsberg told me, the “this” being a party that has poured into the streets with no apparent closing hour. Often she will arrive at her store in the morning to find greasy napkins, cockroaches, stamped out cigarettes and evidence that last night’s celebrants elected to relieve themselves at the most convenient point possible.
The garbage, the indifferent foot traffic, the music pumped into the streets all led Ms. Koenigsberg to join 21 other plaintiffs in a suit filed against the city in New York State Supreme Court last month, demanding that a serious impact study be conducted before the outdoor dining program is made permanent and expanded.
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