E-Paper
Covid 19: What you need to know today
In India, there have been instances of people jumping quarantines and not practising self-isolation. The government is now considering stamping the hands of all people arriving from overseas with indelible ink and fines for those who skip quarantines.
Is the safest place in the world to be right now, er, China?
On Thursday, reports said China for the first time reported no new local cases . To be sure, this could be an aberration and there could be new local cases on Friday.
In contrast, Italy has been badly hit this week, with deaths increasing by 475 in a day on Wednesday (the most anywhere in the world since the virus emerged) to almost 3,000. The death toll in the European nation seems set to cross that in China by the end of the week – which would make Italy the country that’s been most affected by this crisis.
Coronavirus outbreak Live Updates
Italy’s case is interesting because it is sort of Exhibit A in one of the two theories scientists around the world are debating and studying.
One is on the effect of heat (or temperatures) on Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. There’s already been some work on the latitudinal concentration of Covid-19 (in the northern hemisphere) and its correlation with temperatures but nothing conclusive has emerged so far.
The other is on the effect of the virus on different age groups. Indeed, India’s demography – 54% of the country’s 1.3 billion population is between the ages of 20 and 59 – has been held up as one of the things that could reduce fatalities in the country.
A paper published by the Chinese CCDC on February 17 claimed that the death rate was 14.8% among those over the age of 80, and 8% and 3.6% for those between the ages of 70 and 80 and between the ages of 60 and 70 respectively. There was only a 1.3% death rate among those between the ages of 50 and 60 and 0.4% among those in the 40-50 age-group. And it was 0.2% among those between the ages of 20 and 40. Sure, these numbers may have changed since, especially because there were fewer than 1,000 cases outside China at the time the study was published. Now there are around 150,000.
In Italy, over a third of the population is over the age of 55 and a fifth over the age of 65.
That would seem to suggest that there is a correlation between age and fatality rates from Covid-19.
But according to the US CDC (based on cases and outcomes between February 12 and March 16), 40% of patients sick enough to be hospitalised in the US (around 9,400 infections, over 100 deaths), are in the age group 20-54. Many in this group will recover, but they will get very sick, and before they are hospitalised, infect potentially vulnerable older people.
Click here for complete coverage on coronavirus outbreak
This is the logic behind quarantines, and self-isolation. Yet, in India, there have been instances of people jumping quarantines and not practising self-isolation. The government is now considering stamping the hands of all people arriving from overseas with indelible ink and fines for those who skip quarantines. The US CDC has already said Americans who break quarantine in that country can be jailed and fined.
On Thursday, the government also announced that India will pretty much close its borders starting March 22 for a week – by not allowing any international flights to land. It has also asked states to enforce WFH (by now it’s no longer an abbreviation) for private companies and halved the number of federal government employees who will attend office . And the Delhi government announced the shutting of all restaurants and restricted all gatherings to 20 people . In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of the necessity of self-isolation and social distancing, emphasised the gravity of the situation, and spoke of measures his government is taking to address what he termed a global crisis on the scale of the world wars.
The focus of the measures announced as well as the Prime Minister’s speech was clearly on containment although the government is set to allow 51 private laboratories to start offering tests before the end of the week and even though the testing protocol will remain the same (it is restricted to symptomatic people with a history of foreign travel to countries affected by Covid-19, direct or indirect contact with an infected person, or health care workers caring for infected people).
As of March 19, there were more than 230,000 cases around the world, and 173 (149 active) in India. There have been over 9,300 deaths, including four in India.
.
