Acting to curb hoarding of essential items amid rising COVID-19 cases in Mumbai, police raided a godown in the city and seized four lakh masks, valued at Rs one crore, an official said on Wednesday. The raid was conducted at the Shah Warehousing and Transport Godown in suburban Mumbai, the official said. The Vile Parle Police received information on Tuesday night that a large quantity of face masks was stored in the warehouse. Police reached the spot and found 200 boxes of face masks valued at around Rs one crore, the official said. Police registered an FIR against five people including owner of the godown, agent and supplier at the Sahar police station but no arrest have been made, the official said.

India has been put in lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. People have been told to stay indoors, but for many daily-wage earners this is not an option. The BBC's Vikas Pandey finds out how they were coping in the days leading up to Tuesday's announcement.

Geneva/New Delhi: The United States could become the global epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday. The US has the third-highest number of confirmed case globally, behind China and Italy. Six hundred people have died from the new coronavirus in the United States, while the number of conffirmed cases now stands at 49,768, a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University showed Tuesday.

"Tamil Nadu Health Minister C Vijayabaskar said the Covid-19 patient died at Rajaji Hospital and "had a medical history of prolonged illness with steroid dependent COPD, uncontrolled diabetes with hypertension".

Tamil Nadu Health Minister C Vijayabaskar took to Twitter to announce the death of a Covid-19 positive patient at a state hospital in the wee hours of Wednesday. The death toll due to novel coronavirus or Covid-19 in India now stands at 11. Vijayabaskar said the 54-year-old patient died at Rajaji Hospital in Tamil Nadu and "had a medical history of prolonged illness with steroid dependent COPD, uncontrolled diabetes with hypertension" .

As India takes war-like measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it is important to understand the risk that we face if no mitigating measures are taken to deal with an unprecedented health crisis.

If Covid-19 cases keep multiplying at the current rate, and do so for a sustained period, India’s hospitals may be overwhelmed by the end of May, even sooner in an extreme scenario. Further, some states will reach the point where they don’t have enough hospital beds to treat critical Covid-19 patients much sooner than others, notably Kerala, Maharashtra, Delhi and Punjab.

To study how various states and union territories (UTs) are equipped to deal with the Covid-19 outbreak under six case-growth scenarios, we have developed a basic model that is built on three variables.