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From Our Own Correspondent

Can India cope with Covid-19?

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

India now has the second highest number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the world, having overtaken Brazil. This is placing huge demands on hospitals and ambulances. The medical services, particularly in smaller cities and rural areas, can find it hard to cope, sometimes leading to what relatives think were preventable deaths, as Yogita Limaye reports. Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is retiring. His politically conservative party will elect his successor on Monday. Mr Abe has taken his observers by surprise more than once. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo looks at the effect of those surprises, and at his legacy. In Poland, some politicians’ hostility to gay rights has become a flash-point in a culture war pitting the religious right against the more liberal-minded. Last month the EU denied funding to six Polish towns which had declared themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones”. Lucy Ash has been to one of them, Tuchow. Wildfires have raged through central and northern Argentina for most of the year. Apart from forests and grasslands, about half a million acres of wetlands next to the mighty Parana river have been lost in the worst fires in over a decade. This has endangered livelihoods and sparked concern among environmentalists, as Natalio Cosoy reports. Cap d'Agde on the French Mediterranean coast is home to the biggest nudist resort in Europe. But with France’s recent surge in coronavirus cases, how have the naturists and also the considerable number of swingers there fared with the restrictions? Chris Bockman went to find out.

Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:05.0

Good morning.

0:06.4

Today, a Prime Minister whose spring surprises.

0:09.8

It's Shinso Arbe and Japan,

0:12.1

and we look at the effect his surprises have had as he finally retires.

0:17.0

Hostility to gay rights in Poland and six towns who've declared themselves LGBT ideology free zones. So we meet a cake baking

0:27.6

campaigner. Dryers tinder forests burning in the American West with the Bay Bridge in San Francisco

0:35.0

shrouded in smoke, but wetlands in Argentina along the Paranar River have been

0:40.9

burning too, the smoke reaching Buenos Aires 200 miles away.

0:46.0

And a last hint of a strange COVID-ridden summer,

0:51.0

as we go skinny dipping at Europe's biggest nudist resort.

0:56.0

First to India, it now has the second highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world overtaking Brazil. The government

1:06.2

says it's ramping up testing but it's the smaller cities and the rural areas

1:10.9

where health care facilities are struggling to cope, says Yogita LeMay,

1:16.0

who's had a brush with the virus herself in Mumbai.

1:20.0

Whenever I see a message on my phone from my parents asking me to give them a call,

1:25.0

I'm filled with fear.

1:27.0

They're elderly, they both have high blood pressure,

1:30.0

and I'm worried that one of them has got COVID-19 symptoms.

1:34.0

I'm sure millions of people around the world can relate to this anxiety.

1:39.0

My parents live in Pune, a sprawling city in Western India not far from Mumbai, and it now has the highest total number of coronavirus cases having overtaken bigger cities like Delhi, this in a country where the infection is

1:56.0

spreading faster than anywhere else in the world. And from the stories I'm hearing

...

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