Coronavirus Reads, Digest 16
Delhi increases containment zones, the United States' death toll is now higher than Italy's.
It’s Sunday, April 12th.
India has crossed 8400 cases, as states prepare to extend the lockdown. Delhi is classifying more areas as containment zones (there are 33 now, according to The Indian Express), and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal has said they plan to color-code the areas based on the severity of the local outbreaks. Drive-through testing facilities are beginning to be set up in the Delhi NCR region, with the first in west Delhi’s Punjabi Bagh and now a second in Gurugram.
Indian doctors share their accounts on how they’re treating COVID-19 patients: No Cure Or Vaccine, Doctors Rely On Each Other, & Guidelines, India Spend.
Further chaos in Madhya Pradesh’s governance of the pandemic: survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, who suffer from various ailments, including increased rates of cancer and birth defects, have been left without any access to health care after the hospital treating them was converted exclusively into a COVID-19 facility. One intensive care patient has died so far due to the suspension of medical care. Vidya Krishnan reports in The Caravan.
India has barred not only foreigners, but its citizens abroad from returning during the pandemic, leaving many students stuck in Europe. Stephanie Findlay reports on how they are faring.
Loneliness and despair prey on India’s stranded students, Financial Times.
The US death toll is now higher than Italy’s. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been discharged from the hospital and is now recovering at his country residence.
Most New York coronavirus cases came from Europe, scientists say from the genetic makeup of the SARS-CoV-2 virus prevalent in the city.
A massive NYTimes investigation shows how President Trump ignored all the warnings and advice from senior staff and scientists on the pandemic. The Times has the receipts: revealing memos, emails, and other documents.
S Mitra Kalita of CNN has written a moving and candid piece about her family’s current experience in quarantine in the NYC region and how they are managing in a multi-generational set up, taking care of her aging father and teenage daughters.
Writer extraordinaire Zadie Smith writes in The New Yorker about America’s identity and ego being challenged in the pandemic.
An excerpt, where she discusses the American desire to return to the past:
“We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had “unequal health outcomes.” But, in America, all of these involved some culpability on the part of the dead. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong skin color. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong Zip Code, wrong beliefs, wrong city. Wrong position of hands when asked to exit the vehicle. Wrong health insurance—or none. Wrong attitude to the police officer. What we were completely missing, however, was the concept of death itself, death absolute. The kind of death that comes to us all, irrespective of position. Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems...
…Even global mass extinction—in the form of environmental collapse—was not going to reach America, or would reach it only ultimately, at the very last minute. Relatively secure, in its high-walled haven, America would feast on whatever was left of its resources, still great by comparison with the suffering out there, beyond its borders.”
The American Exception in the Coronavirus Crisis, Zadie Smith