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Covid-19: What you need to know today
Coronavirus in India: With 6,701 infections (and 231 dead) on Thursday, India, this writer would like to think, has been ahead of the curve when it comes to defining containment zones — just as it has been behind the curve on testing proactively.
On Wednesday and Thursday, more states adopted the containment zones approach, enforcing hard lockdowns selectively — the size of the zone ranges from a single apartment block to an entire city — highlighting the strategy that India will use over the next few weeks to fight the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) .
The HT newsroom has written extensively on such zones, and what the approach involves — door-to-door screening, aggressive testing, and enforced containment and social distancing. Given that Covid-19 tends to manifest itself in clusters (even on a larger scale as evident from what’s happening in New York City), and that India will never be able to test as aggressively as, say, Germany or South Korea, this is a sound approach. It identifies and sequesters the hot spots — and then tests anyone with even the mildest symptoms.
With 6,701 infections (and 231 dead) on Thursday, India, this writer would like to think, has been ahead of the curve when it comes to defining containment zones — just as it has been behind the curve on testing proactively. It was also ahead of the curve on enforcing a lockdown at a time when the number of cases in India were still low. Indeed, a study by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, says India was quicker than almost every other country in imposing a lockdown on March 25.
Did the lockdown work? Did it flatten the curve? Or is the virus raging undiscovered through India? The last seems unlikely. If that were the case, there would have been be a spike in unexplained fatalities across the country — the kind of thing that is almost impossible to hide in a country with as high a number of mobile phones as India (nothing seems to happen without at least a few people capturing it on their phones).
That could mean one of two things: the curve is flattening; or the strain of the Sars-CoV-2 virus infecting people in India has mutated into a milder version (which means it may be infecting lots of people without really affecting their health significantly). After all, only around 50 of the 3,375 active cases in India on April 6 were on ventilator support. Still, all these are questions and theories that require more scientific study.
As is the question of whether the Sars-CoV-2 virus is affected by temperature and humidity. Not enough to cause a sharp reduction in infections, the US National Academy of Sciences said in a report that summarised existing research, although it said more research was warranted.
The number of infections, fatalities, and cured recoveries (581 according to the latest data) in India have now reached a level where researchers in the country can start doing primary research to answer such questions and, indeed, others — such as the immune response in India; the strain of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in later infections; and the treatment that seems to be the most effective. Social distancing can help prevent the spread of the infection, but ultimately, only research can find a cure for it.
Meanwhile, health care workers at the frontlines continue to fight it with all they have. Theirs are the stories that need to be told and celebrated, of real heroes going above and beyond the call of duty (but still behaving as if it’s just business as usual). At Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital, for instance, doctors, nurses, technicians, even security staff have been doing 14-day shifts, and then 14-day furloughs at a hotel or a hostel (without going home so as to not infect anyone) since March 16 (see page 1). When it really matters, India’s health care workers have stepped up to be counted.
