Coronavirus Reads, Digest 32
Cyclone Amphan hits eastern India, while a new report says the U.S. locked down too late.
It’s Thursday, May 21st.
India news
72 people have been killed by Cyclone Amphan in the eastern states of West Bengal and Odisha. Prime Minister Modi will be visiting both states tomorrow and do an aerial survey.
Here’s a look at the trail of devastation in worst hit West Bengal in photos from the Indian Express.
This obviously comes while also battling the pandemic, and the state infrastructure was pressed into the addition of setting up cyclone shelters that could quarantine Covid-19 patients. However, successful massive evacuations have kept the death toll relatively low. There is however, significant damage to property and infrastructure especially in West Bengal and Kolkata.
Maharashtra continues to be the worst hit by the coronavirus, it has now crossed 40,000 cases.
Delhi has amended its quarantine policy for healthcare workers, after they complete their rotation in the Covid unit, they will no longer be in quarantine for 14 days, but instead go back to treating patients after 5 days. This has raised concerns over the continued risk of infected healthcare workers, as the latency period of the coronavirus can be up to 14 days. As many as 500 healthcare workers are already infected with the virus in Delhi, which has over 10,000 confirmed cases.
Delhi: 500 cases in a day, no more 14-day quarantine after coronavirus duty for healthcare workers, by Astha Saxena, The Indian Express
The newsroom of the Indian television channel, Zee News, has had a significant Covid-19 outbreak, with as many as 66 confirmed cases, raising questions over whether the newsroom had done as much as possible to reduce its employees’ risk.
Zee’s Editor-in-chief, Sudhir Chaudhary bragged on Twitter that his infected employees weren’t “sitting at home” and were instead coming to work. He later claimed that his words were being “misconstrued” and that the office was contained after the first person tested positive.
However, this report in Newslaundry quotes several senior staff members as saying that Chaudhury had asked for 100% attendance in the office after May 1st (when the government had issued guidelines on only maintaining 33% of the staff in the office). Several employees also said that even after one person tested positive for the coronavirus, he said he didn’t want to hear “any complaints about fever or cough.”
How Zee News became a Covid-19 hotspot, by Atul Chaurasia
U.S.
New research shows that U.S. social distancing restrictions came in too late, and that even if they had started a week earlier, it could have prevented 36,000 deaths.
Meanwhile, new concerns over a conflict of interest in the Trump administration has emerged, as the official overseeing the U.S. initiatives for a vaccine also has numerous financial ties to some pharmaceutical companies,
CNN reports CDC officials as saying their scientific guidance and approach has been “muzzled” by the White House, resulting in a “worsening of the crisis.”
So what happens even if we have an effective vaccine? In this Op-Ed, a historian offers lessons from what happened with the polio vaccine -- expect manufacturing and distribution problems, and continued political scuffles over it.
Opinion | What to Expect When a Coronavirus Vaccine Finally Arrives, NYTimes Opinion
Coping with the Pandemic
How do we survive long-term social distancing without getting completely isolated? Christina Cauterucci suggests something she’s doing-- creating a pod of people who will only socialize with each other, “a quarantine bubble.”
Why I decided to join a quarantine bubble, and you should too.
Leslie Jamison writes in NYTimes Magazine, about how she’s coped in quarantine, especially with sobriety.
When the World Went Away, We Made a New One. An excerpt:
A decade later, quarantine was nothing if not searing and undeniable — the broken-record quality of our daily lives insisting on the same rooms, the same people, the same routines. Recovery meetings happened on Zoom now, like so much of the rest of my life, and at a distance couldn’t offer the same bodily surrender. Still, while certain kinds of visceral intimacy were lost, in other ways the meetings felt more intimate than ever. Every square on the screen was a portal into someone’s home, revealing other sober alcoholics leaning against their headboards or curled up under blankets, Bluetooth buds carrying the rest of our voices, cat whiskers swishing suddenly in front of computer cameras. In our thumbnail boxes, we chanted the serenity prayer in an out-of-sync patchwork that was somehow more moving for its raggedness, for the ways it failed to disguise the incompleteness of our medium, the ways it didn’t replace what we’d lost: that room full of body heat and layer cake, plastic forks passed palm to palm. It was a chorus of disembodied voices trying our best, straining or fumbling or sometimes surging toward gratitude; acknowledging all the loss and terror around us without trying to redeem it.
...Every morning I read the same passage in the Big Book, It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness, and thought of other people’s quarantines — people with partners, who curled up with a body each night, or people who’d fled the city, or people who’d fled the city with their partners — and tried to surrender that resentment too. I tried to neutralize it with gratitude. Not gratitude in the dutiful, box-checking, white-knuckled sense of acknowledging everything I had — my health, my daughter, my job — but in a more immediate sense: for the sunlight on my daughter’s overgrown curls, for the specific weight of her head on my shoulder; for my students reading from the pandemic diaries I’d asked them to keep, as we all gathered in our Zoom boxes to listen; for my high school friends on Zoom, how blunt and broken I could be in their company. I was grateful for the taste of peanut butter, the first time it returned — the first time any taste returned. The faint nutty sweetness was like a stranger standing at the end of a long corridor, barely visible but there — more than six feet away, but better than no one at all.