Table of Contents
Short end of the stick
- From public health challenge humanitarian crisis
- poorer segments of India’s urban population
- inter-State migrant worker community
- Their exodus, by foot along highways Home Ministry: States to open highway relief camps while observing physical distancing norms
- Enforce the lockdown strictly and prevent migrants from leaving cities.
- These belated steps can only work if implemented in a humane manner.
Ill-equipped quarantine camps
- Utilise the Public Distribution System to provide food
- The first infected Indian in the country was detected in late January.
- Better coordination with the States and a more transparent approach would have helped people prepare for the lockdown.
- Much could have been done better, but the focus now must be on what can be done.
Unusually inept
- March 30: USA had nearly 75% (1,43,527) more cases than China (82,198).
- America is yet to institute large-scale mitigation measures such as shutting down the three major hotspots —New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
- Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea acted early, enforcing strong containment measures together with large-scale testing; this is not the case with America.
- South Korea and the U.S. reported their first case on January 20. it was only by end-February that the U.S. had a reliable test kit, unlike South Korea, which had the tests by February first week
The hunt for a cure begins with telling the truth
- Indians who travelled abroad in recent weeks hid their travel histories.
- Some went to the extent of taking paracetamol to lower their body temperature, thereby bypassing tests at airports.
- We were shocked that bureaucrats, even doctors, helped relatives evade quarantine.
- Now things are at a pass that journalists are being threatened for revealing the truth about how illequipped doctors and health workers are, or how illorganised the state response is.
- Truth is often mocked as an inconvenience, as the domain of fools or saints. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi finds few takers.
- We use his tools, demonstrations, fasts, marches, but we shun his core principles.
- Matters have come to such a pass now that politicians can shrug off falsehoods uttered in public as ‘chunaavi jumla’, a tale told to win elections.
- We have grown inured to falsehood.
- The building of public character takes generations.
- India spends only 1.28% of its GDP on health.
- Over 55 million Indians were pushed below the poverty line in 2011-12 because of out-of-pocket health expenses.
- In 2014-15, the government led by Prime Minister Modi slashed an already pitiful health budget by 20%.
- Despite warnings from the World Health Organization, despite COVID-19 deaths being reported in China and Italy,
India continued to export protective medical equipment.
- Sanitation workers are not given any protective equipment but are not allowed to stay home. They are expected to handle infected masks with their bare hands. Nor are they given soap and water on the spot. Do we really believe that the government intends to control the pandemic?
- A lockdown is useless unless all citizens are guaranteed food and shelter and medical aid on call.
- Those of us who have access to diverse news outlets have watched the way Kerala, Cuba and South Korea responded to the pandemic.
- The simple truth is, systems work best when they work for all.
A threat to food security
- COVID-19 pandemic is putting an enormous strain on public health systems around the world.
- Millions of people are in some form of quarantine.
- The world must take immediate actions to minimise disruptions to food supply chains.
- We must prepare to face the enormous risk that food may not be made available where it is needed.
- Shortage of workers, fertilizers, veterinary medicines and other input could also affect agricultural production.
- Closures of restaurants and less frequent grocery shopping diminish demand for fresh produce and fisheries products, affecting producers and suppliers, especially smallholder farmers, with long-term consequences for the world’s increasingly urbanised population.
- We are experiencing a global problem that requires a global response.
Prevention costs less.
- COVID-19 forcefully reminds us that solidarity is not charity, but common sense.
- Testing for COVID-19 in India
- Real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)-based tests are recommended as diagnostic tests for COVID-19.
- The test detects the presence of viral RNA in human samples.
- PCR is a process where a few copies of DNA are amplified to produce millions of copies.
- In the test, first, the viral RNA is converted to DNA. The DNA is then amplified with the help of enzymes, primers, and probes.
- The main difference between tests done in a research lab and a diagnostic lab is that the results from the latter are used for clinical decision-making.
- RT-PCR results can vary from lab to lab due to many variables. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has approved 176 labs, including 47 private labs, to conduct the tests.
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved 20 manufacturers and kits for diagnostic testing for COVID-19.
- The first test kit that received FDA approval, the Cobas SARS CoV-2 kit from Roche, is also approved in India.
- The second, the TaqPath COVID-19 Combo Kit from Thermo Fisher, is in the process of getting validated by the ICMR labs.
- Both these kits are optimised with specific instruments. Additionally, ICMR has validated kits from three Indian manufacturers.
- India needs to develop the capability to mass-produce kits and all its components within the country.
- While developing and use of indigenous kits is beneficial in the current outbreak, it cannot take short cuts.
- Innovative tests will take interdisciplinary scientific effort and investment.
NEWS
- India still in local transmission: govt.
- Reiterating that India continues to be in the local transmission phase despite the country registering a spike from 100 to 1,000 cases in 12 days, the Union Health Ministry on Monday said India’s precautionary and early lockdown is proving to be a step in the right direction. India registered more than 60 new cases and four deaths in the past 24 hours, with a total of 1,071 cases and 29 deaths so far, the Ministry said, clarifying that no orders had been passed to “conduct large scale disinfection of people but protocol has been put in place for sanitising large public spaces, etc.” Migrant workers given mass disinfectant bath in Bareilly Action ordered against officials; those exposed to chemical to be examined
- ‘Moderate humidity may deter coronavirus’
- Earlier this month, a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States said that regions experiencing a monsoon might see a slowing — but not a stop — to the transmission of the virus and, therefore, could help mitigation strategies in tropical countries such as India.
- Rabi harvest to be affected for want of farm workers
- The lakhs of migrant workers streaming to their home villages due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have left many farmers across the country bereft of agricultural labour just before the crucial harvesting season of the rabi or winter crop.
- Lockdown: Assam police lauded for adopting ‘soft’ policing practices
- ‘Bag valve masks’ pitched as alternatives to ventilators
- B.S. Murty, Director of the Indian Institute of Technology – Hyderabad, has urged the government to consider the use of ‘bag valve masks’ as an alternative to meet any surge in demand for ventilators, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- “Our estimate is that it can be made for less than ₹5,000, or one-hundredth of the cost of a conventional machine. The cost is so low that it can be considered a single-use device that will be given over to a single patient, and never used again. It needs to be manufactured, however, on an industrial scale, in millions, within a short time of a few months. There have been several designs proposed within India itself, with IIT–H having at least one proposed design,” Prof. Murty said.
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