R Sukumar
Sukumar Ranganathan is the Editor-in-Chief of Hindustan Times. He is also a comic-book freak and an amateur birder.
Articles by R Sukumar
Dispatch X: A columnist looks back
By R Sukumar, New Delhi
UPDATED ON MAR 01, 2021 06:04 AM IST
We knew little about coronaviruses (although they weren’t unknown) before the pandemic. We would have known a lot less if not for Sars, which emerged in 2002-03, flared up, and then died out.
Nirmala Sitharaman interview: ‘Important to back asset creation’
By R Sukumar, New Delhi
UPDATED ON FEB 02, 2021 09:30 AM IST
- In conversation with HT's R Sukumar, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman explained how —via Union Budget for 2021-2022 — the government wanted to give a boost to public expenditure through good quality expenditure for asset creation such as roads, ports, and other infrastructure.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON JAN 02, 2021 04:53 AM IST
India’s approval of a vaccine comes even as the seven-day average of daily cases has fallen to 19,828, and the number of active cases in the country is 255,584, the lowest since July 5, according to the HT dashboard.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON JAN 01, 2021 04:11 AM IST
It was the year of the health care worker. Through the year, around the world, doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health care givers worked around the clock, putting themselves at risk.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 31, 2020 04:46 AM IST
The new year will be more about vaccines and vaccination than anything else (even the new strain, which, as expected, has surfaced in more places and people in India).
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 30, 2020 06:12 AM IST
The new strain is the predominant one in the UK, especially London; there have been 70 flights a week from the UK to India since May; and until last Monday, when it was tightened, the screening process for passengers arriving in India was a sham.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 29, 2020 04:40 AM IST
October is one of the unkindest months in India’s commercial capital, with the heat and humidity combining to make it very uncomfortable, and also extremely conducive to the propagation of the diseases named above, but this time, the city seems to have been spared, courtesy an unlikely savior – Covid-19.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R. Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 28, 2020 05:12 AM IST
Last week, scientists, including some from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study that showed the new variant to be 56% more infective. But there is still no evidence of it causing more severe Covid-19 cases, or resulting in more deaths.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 24, 2020 05:08 AM IST
India hasn’t put out in the public domain details of the number of viral genomes it has sequenced from Covid patients, but this writer learns that this number is just around a few thousand, and also that the number of cases sequenced since October is next to nothing.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times
UPDATED ON DEC 23, 2020 04:53 AM IST
Indian health officials insisted at a briefing on Tuesday that the new strain hasn’t been spotted in India, but this is one of those statements that is economical with the truth.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 22, 2020 04:57 AM IST
Between the time I wrote Dispatch 229 on Sunday and the time I am writing this, scientists have figured out even more about this strain, and the bad news would appear to be that, at least in a laboratory setting, it is more infective than the older strain.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 21, 2020 04:59 AM IST
The UK is now seeing its third wave of infections — or, a second wave which appeared to be waning till it suddenly gathered momentum — with the country recording around 35,000 new infections on December 17, the highest in one day.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 18, 2020 05:09 AM IST
India remains among the 10 most affected countries currently, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And it is among the six countries in this list where the average of daily cases is trending down.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 17, 2020 05:09 AM IST
While the Pfizer vaccine awaits regulatory clearance in India, it is likely that most Indians will not receive it.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 16, 2020 05:07 AM IST
India saw 352 deaths from Covid-19 on Monday. The last Monday on which it saw fewer deaths was back on June 22 (311 deaths).
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 15, 2020 05:08 AM IST
We may have come up with vaccines that effectively prevent Covid-19, but we are still learning about the disease.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 14, 2020 02:18 AM IST
In every country in the world, events and gatherings— from parties to a large motorcycle rally to even a biotech conference — have all been super-spreader events. Yet, over the past two months, India has bucked the trend.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 11, 2020 02:06 AM IST
It is important to note that SEC doesn’t approve vaccines, as some have suggested. It just recommends a course of action after looking at the data on hand.
‘We may be back to normal in 2022’: Bill Gates
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 11, 2020 10:30 AM IST
The conversation ranged from the development of vaccines to the stuttering progress of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance’s Covax programme, which aims to ensure Covid-19 vaccines are accessible and affordable for poor countries, to the timing of the world’s return to normalcy.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 10, 2020 07:11 AM IST
Neither Moderna, nor Pfizer/BioNTech has published a peer-reviewed paper on the findings of the Phase 3 trials of their vaccines.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 09, 2020 05:05 AM IST
It has been a year and 10 days between the first published account of the strange illness in Wuhan, China, and the administration of a vaccine that has cleared Phase 3 trials to a member of the general population, so the authors of that article got that right. But they got the drugs bit completely wrong.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 08, 2020 05:02 AM IST
Companies that were pioneers in outsourcing work to India – and tech firms are on top of this list by a long distance – are figuring out that if they are anyway going to move to remote working for many of their employees, then they might as well – provided the right kind of people are available – move those jobs in India, where they could be remote, or not.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 07, 2020 05:04 AM IST
Daily case numbers through the first six days of last week, Monday to Saturday, were: 31,182; 36,421; 35,414; 36,653; 36,212; and 36,439. That works out to a six-day average of 35,387. All these numbers are from the HT dashboard. The average is the lowest India has seen in four-and-a-half months.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 04, 2020 04:59 AM IST
The US registered 2,760 deaths on Wednesday, according to the New York Times. This is the highest daily death toll in the country since the beginning of the pandemic (caveat: just like the death toll on any other day, this does not mean 2,760 people died from Covid-19 on Wednesday, just that their deaths were recorded on that day).
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 03, 2020 01:32 AM IST
The UK, which has a patchy record in managing the coronavirus disease — it was, after all, the first country to decide to bank on herd immunity before it realised the folly of the approach — became the third country (after China and Russia) and the first Western one to approve a vaccine for Covid-19.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 02, 2020 05:52 AM IST
India has seen almost 9.5 million cases of the coronavirus disease to date (it is second in terms of the number of cases after the US).
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON DEC 01, 2020 03:11 AM IST
India has prioritised agricultural and industrial activities, political activities (replete with large-scale public meetings and rallies), and recreational activities.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON NOV 30, 2020 04:50 AM IST
On Saturday, the country registered 41,799 cases, according to the HT dashboard. It conducted almost 1.24 million tests. To date, India has conducted almost 150 million tests. That’s around 115,000 tests per million of population.
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON NOV 27, 2020 05:38 AM IST
The coronavirus disease has resulted in huge public interest in a process that is usually restricted to the research departments of pharma companies, laboratories and research institutions, and peer-reviewed academic journals with readership in the thousands (or tens of thousands).
Covid-19: What you need to know today
By R Sukumar | Hindustan Times, New Delhi
UPDATED ON NOV 26, 2020 01:18 AM IST
There are clear signs of a second wave — there have been, for some time — but the week starting November 30 will decide how rapidly this gathers momentum.