Coronavirus Reads, Digest 24
India to allow patients with mild symptoms to isolate at home, the CDC expands official list of symptoms beyond fever, dry cough and breathing problems.
It’s Tuesday, April 28th.
The CDC (U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has expanded its official list of coronavirus symptoms adding “chills,” “muscle pain,” “headache,” “sore throat,” and “loss of taste or smell” to the existing list, which included fever, cough and breathing problems. The medical community is finding that a common symptom of otherwise asymptomatic carriers is a loss of taste or smell.
India news
India nears a confirmed 30,000 cases, and climbing towards 1,000 deaths.
Importantly, there has been a change in policy of handling Covid cases in the country. Patients that are diagnosed with mild symptoms will be allowed to isolate at home as long as they have a caregiver. Up until now, all Covid-19 positive patients in India were being kept in hospitals or isolation wards until they tested negative and fully recovered.
From the Indian Express’ Explained section, here are the government’s guidelines on home isolation in the event of developing mild coronavirus symptoms.
How and why is India’s Covid-19 death rate still relatively low? Soutik Biswas gets experts to weigh in, especially on the possible issue of undercounting, in the following report. Interestingly, 80% of India’s deaths in general happen at home, and at large there has been an undercounting issue of deaths due to pneumonia and respiratory issues (heart attacks are more likely to be reported at hospitals). Experts say it’s something to track and note how this aspect plays out with the pandemic.
India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates, BBC
Abortion has been deemed an essential service and allowed in India’s lockdown. However, access on the ground is limited due to transport problems, a need for a curfew pass, lack of facilities open. Roli Srivastava reports in Reuters on how this is an urgent problem, especially in light of the high rates of sexual assault of women in the country.
Abortion in a lockdown: India says 'yes' but women wonder how, Reuters
India’s current lockdown is supposed to end this Sunday, May 3rd. What happens after that? The government is considering a staggered exit, with restrictions being eased in areas with no cases. But as this NYTimes story points out, the strict lockdown has raised alarm. Now, people are too scared to leave their homes even if restrictions get relaxed.
Unified in Coronavirus Lockdown, India Splinters Over Reopening, Kai Schultz and Sameer Yasir, The New York Times
U.S. and International
The U.S. continues to consider ways to reopen, while the WHO warns against lifting restrictions too early. One of the problems the U.S. faces in reopening broadly is a continued lack of tests, and confusing testing strategy. European countries are looking at those who test negative or who show antibodies for the disease to come back into the workforce.
A NYC Emergency Room doctor, who treated many coronavirus patients, has died by suicide. She had no history of mental illness, her family says, and had described seeing how many patients were dying before even being taken out of the ambulance.
The UK medical community is noticing that children are becoming critically ill by an illness potentially linked to the coronavirus, with cardiac and abdominal pain symptoms. Up until now, it was believed that while children are carriers of the novel coronavirus, they were not getting too severely affected.
Coronavirus could be tied to a rare but serious illness in children, UK doctors say, CNN.
In The Guardian, Samanth Subramaniam reports on the world’s newest most coveted commodity: face masks. He describes the supply chain process, and the global bidding war to procure masks for each country or state.
The Race for a Treatment
A clinical trial at Oxford University for a coronavirus vaccine is proving to be effective in rhesus monkeys. It remains to be seen if it will provide immunity in humans. In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead, David D. Kirkpatrick
Interestingly, as India is one of the largest manufacturers of vaccines in the world, many Indian pharmaceutical companies have partnerships with American and European institutions developing vaccines, including the University of Oxford. These Indian companies have the capacity to produce hundreds of million doses of the vaccine, which will likely be needed by the end of 2020 once these clinical trials yield results. More details in this BBC report.
How India will play a major role in a virus vaccine, Soutik Biswas, BBC
Male mortality from the coronavirus has been shown to be much worse than women’s. Scientists are wondering what it is about women’s biological makeup that makes them able to fight the virus more effectively. Can Estrogen therapy help? A new trial is treating Covid-19 patients with estrogen and progesterone.
Side Effects of the Pandemic
As more people turn to wearing masks, the Deaf community is being affected as they’re unable to read people’s lips. Jessica Flores reports in USA Today on how the adverse effects of the pandemic on the community.
Coronavirus: Face masks pose communication hurdle for deaf community, USA Today
Amanda Mull writes in The Atlantic about how feeling out of sorts about your appearance (lack of hair cuts and styling, nails etc) in isolation isn’t just vanity. She notes: If so many people are so concerned with their appearance, then perhaps that concern goes far deeper than vanity. The care of a human body ties people to the physical, social world they’ve been abruptly forced to leave behind. Stuck inside, people are left with just their existing tools and skills, trying to maintain their sense of self, or at least their eyebrows. With people’s faces, so go their identities.
For people whose identity is heavily dependent on their life outside their home, not looking like the people they’ve long understood themselves to be can be a serious stressor on top of more concrete fears about health and safety.”
Isolation Is Changing How You Look, The Atlantic
Work-Life Changes
If we’re able to work, and not an “essential” worker, then we’re all working from home. But what happens when we ease out of isolation and return to an office routine? Well, for one, the open-space office design might be out, and cubicles and offices are likely to make a return. (I personally will be very happy about this!).
10 Ways COVID-19 Could Change Office Design
And in Vox, Rani Molla writes about how there will be careful consideration over every surface that could be rife for contamination and how to avoid it, from door handles to copy machines and communal kitchen areas.
And along with more barriers between office working spaces comes a reduction in coworking spaces, and an increase in acceptance of working from home.
How coronavirus could change your office space and remote work from home, Vox.
Coping with the Pandemic
100 word love stories from NYTimes’ Modern Love, an excerpt:
Daily Delights
Hot chocolate with an orange peel. A pink succulent in a ceramic pot. A late-night Target run for yellow Gatorade. Simon is a master of the small gesture. From my parents, I carried the assumption that only the grand gesture is proof of love. Since meeting Simon, I have come to value the minor favor, the daily smile, a murmured “Don’t go” in the morning, a lesson in making cappuccino, the last slice of pear. — Mariah Heinzerling
Tiny Love Stories: ‘In Her World, There’s No Pandemic Outside’
Dispatches on the Indian lockdown in 1843 magazine by three Indian writers, from the migrant crisis, to quarantine in the hills. A nation on pause: coronavirus in India | 1843
An excerpt from Anuradha Roy.
It is a strange irony being immured in the mountains, where freedom seems limitless. Our problems feel inconsequential compared to many, but they keep me awake through nights punctuated by the nightjar’s shrieks. How do I reach my mother in Kolkata? Will we see our friends again? We rejoiced in our reclusiveness, but isolation isn’t calming when enforced.
Nor when it is shredded by social media. Political arguments knife through my WhatsApp groups with a violence that days of flower photos and puppy videos cannot heal. I begin to wonder if decades of hate-politics in India have burned away kindness altogether. I switch off my phone and make pots. I tell myself to work – but my half-made draft feels irrelevant. One evening we see two fawns grazing by the car-free road before they fly down the slopes, our dogs in futile pursuit. For days we live off that moment of miraculous grace.
Hidden away in these mountains, it is possible to hope that we are too few, too far, too microscopic for the microbe. That it will somehow pass us by. It must: at last count there wasn’t a ventilator or intensive care unit to be seen as far as the Himalayan eagle flies. As in much of rural India, the public health system is rudimentary – one unkempt government hospital specialised enough for the odd broken bone. The military hospital treats only soldiers. When people are seriously ill they must travel to big cities.
Now that they cannot, what would happen if covid-19 spread here? A retired doctor-friend consoles me with a pensive smile: “Be happy. You’ll die in a beautiful place.”