50% Supreme Court staff test positive, judges to work from home

NEW DELHI: India's spiralling 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 today sit an hour later than their scheduled time.

On Saturday alone, 44 staffers tested positive, the Supreme Court source said.

"Most of my staff and law clerks have tested positive," one judge said. 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. Today was the sixth consecutive day it reported over a lakh daily cases with 1,68,912 new infections -- the highest ever daily surge till now. Up to to 904 people died of Covid-related issues in the past 24 hours, according to the latest Health Ministry data published this morning.

The country 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.