As Covid-19 continues to claim thousands of lives daily in India, Catholic leaders have called on the federal government to deploy the military to deal with the crisis before it worsens.
“The second wave of Covid-19 is surely a national calamity and the entire nation is struggling as thousands are dying and hundreds of thousands are getting infected daily,” said Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, former secretary-general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI).
“The federal government should consider deploying military personnel to assist the civil administration to effectively deal with this alarming situation of people living in fear,” he told UCA News on April 27.
Since mid-April, India has been reporting more than 300,000 new Covid-19 cases and 2,000 deaths daily.
Several states and cities have resorted to lockdowns and night curfews and several other restrictions on socio-religious gatherings to break the chain of the pandemic’s spread.