The Overseas Report Monday 26 July 2021
by Mike Evans
“Some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm”
– Willa Cather
The Covid 19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on everyone’s lives. None more so that those who are devoutly religious and who in the past would get their solace from meeting and praying with their fellow worshippers. In this report we look at two of the world’s largest religions and how the followers have been affected by the pandemic.
This week the worlds most populous religion, The Muslim faith has been celebrating the festival of Eid. Muslims around the world on Sunday began celebrating Eid al-Fitr, a normally festive holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, with millions under strict stay-at-home orders and many fearing renewed coronavirus outbreaks.
The three-day holiday is usually a time of travel, family get-togethers and lavish daytime feasts after weeks of dawn-to-dusk fasting. But this year many of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims will have to pray at home and make due with video calls.
Some countries, including Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, have imposed round-the-clock holiday curfews. But even where many restrictions have been lifted, celebrations will be subdued because of fears of the pandemic and its economic fallout.
Saudi Arabia, home to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, is under a complete lockdown, with residents only permitted to leave their homes to purchase food and medicine.
In Jerusalem, Israeli police said they broke up an “illegal demonstration” and arrested two people outside the Al-Aqsa mosque, which Muslim authorities have closed for prayers since mid-March and will not reopen until after the holiday. Worshippers who tried to enter the compound scuffled with the police.
Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam and would ordinarily welcome tens of thousands of worshippers during the Eid. The hilltop compound is also the holiest site for Jews, who know it as the Temple Mount. The site has long been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Iran, which is battling the deadliest outbreak in the Middle East, allowed communal prayers at some mosques but cancelled the annual mass Eid prayers in Tehran led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has reported over 130,000 cases and more than 7,000 deaths.
In Indonesia, Muslims across Indonesia marked a grim Eid al-Adha festival for a second year Tuesday as the country struggles to cope with a devastating new wave of coronavirus cases and the government has banned large gatherings and toughened travel restrictions.
Indonesia is now Asia’s Covid-19 hot spot with the most confirmed daily cases, as infections and deaths have surged over the past three weeks and India‘s massive outbreak has waned.
Most of Indonesia’s cases are on the densely populated island of Java, where more than half of the country’s 270 million people live. Authorities in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation have banned many of the crowd-attracting activities that are usually part of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice that marks the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Authorities allowed prayers at local mosques in low-risk areas, but elsewhere houses of worship had no congregations, including Jakarta’s Istiqlal Grand Mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia. Officials also banned the huge crowds that usually fill the yards of mosques to participate in ritual animal slaughter for the festival. Religious leaders urged the faithful to pray inside their homes and children were told to not go out to meet friends.
Covid-19 infections in Indonesia are at their peak last week with the highest daily average reported at more than 50,000 new infections each day. Until mid-June, daily cases had been running at about 8,000.
Overall, Indonesia has reported more than 2.9 million cases and 74,920 fatalities. Those figures are widely believed to be a vast undercount due to low testing and poor tracing measures. The government put emergency restrictions in place on July 3 across Java island and the tourist island of Bali, limiting all nonessential travel and gatherings and shutting malls, places of worship and entertainment centers. They were set to end on Tuesday in time for the country to celebrate Eid al-Adha.
But with the wave of infections still expanding, the government’s Covid-19 task force issued a special directive for the holiday week that bans all public travel, communal prayers, family visits and gatherings across Java and Bali, and expanded the lockdown measures to 15 cities and districts outside the two islands that have recorded sharp increases in Covid-19 cases.
President Joko Widodo appealed to Muslims to perform Eid prayers and recitation of God is great at home with their families. “In the midst of the current pandemic, we need to be willing to sacrifice even more,” Widodo told televised remarks on the eve of Eid. “Sacrificing personal interests and putting the interests of the community and others first,” he said.
Police set up highway checkpoints and blocked main roads for non-essential vehicles. Domestic flights and other modes of transportation were suspended, blocking people from making traditional family visits.
Indonesia’s current wave was fueled by travel during the Eid al-Fitr festival in May and by the rapid spread of the more contagious delta variant that emerged in India. Hospitals are swamped and oxygen supplies are running out, with growing numbers of the ill dying in isolation at home or while waiting to receive emergency care. With the health care system struggling to cope, even patients fortunate enough to get a hospital bed are not guaranteed oxygen.
In India, home to the Hindu religion there have also been a number of cancellations of religious festivals. Kumbh Mela, also called Kumbha Mela, in Hinduism, religious festival that is celebrated four times over the course of 12 years, the site of the observance rotating between four pilgrimage places on four sacred rivers—at Haridwar on the Ganges River, at Ujjain on the Shipra, at Nashik on the Godavari, and at Prayag (modern Prayagraj) at the confluence of the Ganges, the Jamuna, and the mythical Sarasvati. Each site’s celebration is based on a distinct set of astrological positions of the Sun, the Moon, and Jupiter, the holiest time occurring at the exact moment when these positions are fully occupied. The Kumbh Mela at Prayag, in particular, attracts millions of pilgrims.
The 2021 festival went ahead in Haridwar amid the second wave with over 200,000 pilgrims attending but this has been said to have brought on an even higher number of infections and subsequent deaths. When the devotees returned home in crowded buses and trains, they spread the infection in villages and towns, prompting officials in some states to track and quarantine them. But many did not turn up for coronavirus tests, despite officials making public announcements urging devotees to report and be screened.
An official in Madhya Pradesh’s capital Bhopal told Al Jazeera that 83 people from Gyaraspur and adjoining villages had gone for Kumbh and only 61 turned up for the tests while the remaining allegedly went into hiding. Sixty out of 61 tested positive for the virus, he said, requesting anonymity. “After a hectic drive to trace the missing, the remaining 22 people were also tested and sent for quarantine.”
The results from Gyaraspur sent alarm bells ringing in the central Indian state as health officials felt that if positive cases were left untraced, they could turn into “super-spreaders” of the virus.Many prominent figures including former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state Akhilesh Yadav, Nepal’s former King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah and Queen Komal Rajya Laxmi Devi Shah, and Bollywood composer Shravan Rathod tested positive after they attended the Kumbh. Rathod died on April 22 in Mumbai.
The virus also killed at least nine Hindu seers who participated in the festival, including Swami Shyam Devacharya Maharaj in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur town on April 16 and Mahant Vimal Giri in Uttarakhand last week. Coronavirus cases linked to the Kumbh Mela have also been reported from other Indian states, including Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha. Uttarakhand itself registered 806 deaths a week after the festival ended, while its number of COVID-19 cases doubled in April.
It is widely thought that this one festival started the new wave of infections that swept across India and spawned the new Delta variant which is now worldwide. Since the start of the pandemic India has reported almost 31.4 million cases and 420,585 deaths although half od all these deaths occurred during the April and May following the festival. The NCDC said that of the total 329,065 Covid deaths between April 2020 and May 2021, 166,632 took place in April and May 2021. As many as 120,770 people died in May and 45,882 in April, the two months with highest Covid deaths since April 2020.
According to a report in The Guardian newspaper, The number of excess deaths in India during the Covid-19 pandemic could be 10 times higher than the official death toll, according to a study that estimates that between 3 million and 4.7 million more people died than would be expected between January 2020 and June 2021.
The study, carried out by the US-based Center for Global Development, examined three different sources of data to piece together one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of the pandemic in India. “India’s official Covid death count as of end-June 2021 is 400,000,” the report says. “The reality is, of course, catastrophically worse … What is tragically clear is that too many people, in the millions rather than hundreds of thousands, may have died.”
Whatever the true figure it is plain to see that big crowds are the main way that the virus can infect masses of people.
So until the next time Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 194,608,216
Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,171,922
Total Recovered Worldwide – 176,628,307
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 13,807,987 (7.0% of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 180,800,229
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