New Delhi:
India’s spiraling Covid-19 crisis has hit the Supreme Court in a big way with up to 50 per cent of its staff testing positive for the disease. The hearings will now be held via video conferencing from home, sources have informed NDTV. The entire court premise, including courtrooms, is now being sanitised, they said. The various benches will now sit an hour later than their scheduled time.
“Most of my staff and law clerks have tested positive,” one judge told NDTV. Some judges had contracted Covid earlier but recovered subsequently.
India is experiencing a ferocious new wave of the pandemic with around 10 lakh new cases being reported over the past week. On Sunday alone, the country added 1,52,879 new infections. It currently leads the world in the daily average number of new infections reported in more than two weeks, accounting for one in every six infections reported globally each day.
The number of deaths has also surged, with the health ministry reporting 839 fatalities on Sunday — the highest in over five months — taking the total to 1,69,275.