Agra: As many as 97 new coronavirus cases, including four doctors and six health workers, were reported in Agra, apart from two more deaths in the last 24 hours, official sources said on Friday.
District Magistrate PN Singh said that of the total 5,326 corona cases, 4,229 patients had recovered so far.
Courts in Agra as well as offices of Municipal Corporation and district administration have been reporting thin attendance, with a number of city organisations now demanding a weekend lockdown to control the infection spread.
Agra Development Foundation Secretary KC Jain sought voluntary closure of city markets for two days in a week while social activists urged the district administration to punish those found without face masks and not observing social distance.
The Agra Municipal Corporation has even banned the entry of outsiders in the complex even as educational institutions are having second thoughts on the early resumption of physical classes.
The dilemma was, health experts pointed out, whether to reopen and resume normal activities to prevent an economic collapse or to insulate people from infections by halting the unlock process.
The experiment with reopening of historical monuments like the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort to the public has also not been very encouraging so far due to very few visitors. City hotels too have not seen any increase in footfalls.
“In the past few days, many cases have come to the fore where patients have been been forced to move from nursing homes to testing centres to government hospitals,” claimed health activist Jugal Kishore Pandit.
The Health Department officials, on the other hand, maintained that the overall situation was under control. They claimed that sample testing rate had gone up and the recovery rate continued to remain steady at around 79-80 per cent.
So far, officials claimed, 176,032 samples have been tested.
An official said that most patients visited government hospitals only when the situation got out of hand. “If they get tested promptly, treatment can start early to increase their chances of recovery, as has been the case so far,” he remarked.
