Coronavirus Reads, Digest 23
India relaxes some restrictions in areas with no cases, the FDA warns against HCQ.
It’s Saturday, April 25th.
India news
India’s cases soon to reach 25,000 as the government tightens restrictions on containment zones but relaxes restrictions in areas with no cases, allowing retail stores selling items to open at 50% staff capacity. However, restaurants, salons, and service oriented stores will still be closed. Online deliveries continue to only be allowed for essential items (groceries and select household items). Public gatherings have been banned in the state of Uttar Pradesh until June 30th.
Back to the coronavirus crisis in Mumbai, a death audit report carried out by the city’s BMC shows that in Mumbai, the average time between reported onset of symptoms and death is 6.4 days, and 2.4 days between admission to the hospital and death. (Confirming that patients are being admitted into hospitals too late). Preliminary studies show the interval between onset of symptoms to death was 17-18 days based on data from China and other countries. The audit committee has made 11 recommendations, including opening up testing criteria for people with underlying health conditions, and allowing them to be tested once they develop the slightest of symptoms, and making ambulances more widely available.
The Financial Times reports on the challenge of containing the outbreak in Mumbai’s Dharavi, home to 1 million people. India’s biggest slum tests Modi’s coronavirus response, by Benjamin Parkin and Andrea Rodrigues
Covid positive members of the Tablighi Jamaat, part of the Delhi Nizamuddin outbreak, after a period of quarantine and recovery, are donating their blood plasma and antibodies to help treat critical patients. This, after a sustained campaign of Islamophobia and misinformation about the community. Despite Islamophobia and Arrests, Recovered Patients Who Attended Tablighi Jamaat Will Donate Plasma to Treat Coronavirus Patients, by Satviki Sanjay, Vice.
In the Hindustan Times, Neelanjan Sircar, Jishnu Das and Partha Mukhopadhyay suggest a new testing strategy for India that will help identify high risk clusters and contain the spread, by testing many more asymptomatic people. New data shows that as many as 60% of those infected in Wuhan, China were asymptomatic.
But a row over testing costs continues; despite the Supreme Court initially saying that COVID-19 testing should be made free it later modified its order, saying it will be free for the “poor.” Private hospitals and clinics are being allowed to charge 4500 rupees per test. For those who test positive, they will need to be tested at least 3 times (if not more) before they are discharged to ensure they’ve recovered. Their immediate family could also be tested. That means testing alone could cost more than 50,000 rupees for a family of 4, making it prohibitively expensive for large tracts of the middle class.
This, at a time when as noted above, states and cities are pushing for more people to be tested, and tested earlier in order to contain the spread and reduce the mortality rate.
Vidya Krishnan reports in the Caravan on the history of the testing row, how the private sector pricing was arrived at, and how the tests in India are the most expensive in South Asia.
U.S. and International
The FDA has now warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine and another anti-malaria drug, chloroquine, due to their severe side effects that have already caused deaths: FDA cautions against wide use of hydroxychloroquine, drug Trump touted
Meanwhile, 30 New Yorkers have dangerously ingested household disinfectants after a bizarre press conference presided over by President Trump where he suggested scientists look into the efficacy of injecting disinfectants into humans to fight the virus.
To be clear, disinfectants, bleach, and household cleaners will kill you if you consume them. They are only to be used as cleaning products on surfaces, to clean.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says that 21% of those tested in New York City have coronavirus antibodies. This news, combined with new data analysis that shows silent outbreaks were present in American cities much earlier than previously known, reveals how the virus is much more infectious than estimated. For example, March 1st was New York City’s first confirmed COVID-19 case. Experts now believe there may have been as many as 10,000 infections in the city already by then. This also puts the percentage of asymptomatic carriers of the virus at a much higher percentage.
Hidden Outbreaks Spread Through U.S. Cities Far Earlier Than Americans Knew, Estimates Say, by James Glanz and Benedict Carey.
The novel coronavirus has been known to affect major organs in addition to the lungs, and now doctors are noticing a disproportionate number of people in their 30s and 40s having debilitating strokes and also testing positive for Covid-19. Young people with coronavirus are dying from strokes, by Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post
Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk’s next novel is set during the plague pandemic at the turn of the 19th century. Based on his research of pandemics over the past few centuries, he writes in the NYTimes:
“Like evil itself, plague was always portrayed as something that had come from outside. It had struck elsewhere before, and not enough had been done to contain it. In his account of the spread of plague in Athens, Thucydides began by noting that the outbreak had started far away, in Ethiopia and Egypt. The disease is foreign, it comes from outside, it is brought in with malicious intent. Rumors about the supposed identity of its original carriers are always the most pervasive and popular.”
Opinion | What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us, by Orhan Pamuk
Side Effects of the Pandemic
As heterosexual couples struggle with a widely reported unequal distribution of household and childcare (falling disproportionately on women), while continuing to work, Caroline Kitchener reports in The Washington Post that women academics are submitting fewer papers, while men are submitting 50% more than they usually would.
With the Zoom platform being flooded for video conferencing, Facebook and Google are struggling to catch up, attempting to make changes to their video features on Whatsapp, FB Messenger and Google Meet. Sheera Frankel and Mike Isaac report that Zoom has been the most downloaded app in Apple’s app store for more than a month: Zoom's Biggest Rivals Are Coming for It, The New York Times
Coping with the Pandemic
The Auschwitz Museum in Poland has a virtual tour available. It allows you an interactive experience of 360 degree panoramic stills from the site. http://panorama.auschwitz.org/
How photojournalists for the L.A. Times are gearing up to protect themselves while reporting in the field.
Production has been halted in Hollywood, but Variety reports that studio execs are desperate to get it started again. Along with unions, they’re trying to come up with plans to find a socially-distanced way of hitting the sets.
Post-Pandemic Hollywood: How Will Companies Restart Production?, by Brent Lang, Justin Kroll. Variety.
There is no more brunch.
This is a stunning piece of writing, by the owner of an upscale independent New York City restaurant closing during the pandemic, and examining the deep inequities of society, business, the economy that have been laid bare open during this moment of crisis. An excerpt from My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? By Gabrielle Hamilton
The conversation about how restaurants will continue to operate, given the rising costs of running them has been ramping up for years now; the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time. The past five or six years have been alarming. For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured. These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable. But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.
...It gets so confusing. Restaurant operators had already become oddly cagey, and quick to display a false front with each other. You asked, “How’s business?” and the answer always was, “Yeah, great, best quarter we’ve ever had.” But then the coronavirus hits, and these same restaurant owners rush into the public square yelling: “Fire! Fire!” They now reveal that they had also been operating under razor-thin margins. It instantly turns 180 degrees: Even famous, successful chefs, owners of empires, those with supremely wealthy investors upon whom you imagine they could call for capital should they need it, now openly describe in technical detail, with explicit data, how dire a position they are in. The sad testimony gushes out, confirming everything that used to be so convincingly denied.
...The work itself — cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it — still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever. Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth. But maybe it’s the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors...And God, the brunch, the brunch. The phone hauled out for every single pancake and every single Bloody Mary to be photographed and Instagrammed. That guy who strolls in and won’t remove his sunglasses as he holds up two fingers at my hostess without saying a word: He wants a table for two. The purebred lap dogs now passed off as service animals to calm the anxieties that might arise from eating eggs Benedict on a Sunday afternoon. I want the girl who called the first day of our mandated shut down to call back, in however many months when restaurants are allowed to reopen, so I can tell her with delight and sincerity: No. We are not open for brunch. There is no more brunch.