headlines that matter
Gujarat is officially a shitshow
Low testing: The state has 14,000 Covid-19 cases, 888 are dead. And yet it is only conducting between 4,800 and 5,500 tests a day. Worse, there are dangerous delays in testing patients: 66% of those who test positive have died within two days. The big reason: even patients who are critically ill—i.e. on ventilators—have to wait for approval for tests at a private lab. See scary infographic charting the inverse relationship between the state’s Covid count and number of tests.
The High Court case: The state government received a tongue-lashing from judges looking into the dismal state of affairs at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad. They called the hospital “as good as a dungeon, maybe even worse than a dungeon”—pointing to the acute shortage of PPE, ventilators and isolation wards. Point to note: 351 of the 570 deaths recorded in Gujarat as of May 20 occurred in this one hospital. Indian Express has more details on the dire state of Civil Hospital.
Fake ventilators: Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani rolled out his buddy Parakramsinh Jadeja’s cheap “ventilator” with great fanfare—touting Dhaman-1 as a “great achievement” that would “add a feather” in the PM’s ‘Make in India’ campaign. Awesome, except the damn things are actually Artificial manual breathing machines, or Ambu bags. Also: they require way too much oxygen and are near-useless, as hospitals in Ahmedabad are finding out. Now, the CM insists that he never claimed that the contraption was a ventilator. Ahmedabad Mirror has more details on this sordid story of crony capitalism.
An update of the latest Covid gyaan
Bad news about a second peak: The World Health Organisation has warned that countries where coronavirus infections are declining could face an “immediate second peak” if they come out of a lockdown too soon. A senior official said: “[We are] right in the middle of the first wave, globally… We're still very much in a phase where the disease is actually on the way up."
Good/bad news about minks: Dutch workers at mink farms may be the first known case of direct animal-human transmission—i.e. the first instances of where infected animals spread the disease directly to humans. Point to note: we still don’t know exactly how the virus jumped from animals to humans in China. The WHO says it is “collecting and reviewing more data [about the Dutch cases] to understand if animals and pets can spread the disease." The minks and anti-fur activists said: serves you effing right!
Good news about the vaccine: Monkeys were injected with a prototype vaccine—i.e. Infected with the virus. Then 35 days later, doctors sprayed a dose of the virus under their noses. The monkeys showed signs of having developed immunity. Why is this good news? If the monkeys had not produced antibodies immediately, “the implication would be that the entire vaccine effort would fail… That would have been really, really bad news for 7 billion people.”
Good news about mutations: A new study shows that not one of the 31 mutations of the virus have proved more deadly than the other. In fact, some of these changes to its DNA have been actively harmful to the virus and its ability to spread.
Bad news about masks: According to Japanese experts, children under two should not wear masks because it increases the risk of choking.
Google has a delete problem
Google deleted over five million negative TikTok reviews from its Playstore after the app's rating fell from 4.5 to 1.2 stars overnight. The reason: Tik Tok star Faizal Siddiqui posted an offensive spoof of an acid attack—sparking outrage and an anti-Tik Tok backlash. Also fuelling the rage and one-star reviews: a growing anti-China sentiment in India, according to Economic Times.
Also hitting delete: Google-owned YouTube which has been erasing Chinese phrases that are critical of the Chinese Communist Party. The two phrases—“共匪” (“communist bandit”) and “五毛” (“50-cent party”)—were automatically deleted within 15 seconds of posting. YouTube’s response: “This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are investigating.”
Richard Branson’s not having a good year
First came his airline woes. Now his space company Virgin Orbit’s first attempt to launch a rocket from the wing of a Boeing 747 has failed miserably. Yes, you read that correctly. His company plans to use old Jumbo jets to launch satellites into space—making it way cheaper. Branson plans to try again in a few weeks. (BBC)
Signs of the end of lockdown
Metro trains are getting ready to start their engines in Delhi within the next two days. JNU is insisting that students in hostels take the next train home. And Akshay Kumar is shooting a movie—ok, a public service ad campaign offering post-lockdown guidelines. And far, far away, Wall Street has reopened the New York Stock Exchange trading floor—but with facemasks and plexiglass partitions.
Indian economy: Doom & gloom edition
- One in four Indians of working age is unemployed. And the unemployment rate is higher in cities (27%) than rural India. What this means: less than 25% of the urban working population is employed.
- In related news: Economic growth between January and March was the slowest in eight years. Predictions in the Reuters poll of economists for the GDP growth rate in the first quarter of this financial year range all the way from a respectable 4.5% to an alarming -1.5%. Also, why people don’t like economists.
- Adding to the doom and gloom: Uber India has laid off 600 employees, which is a quarter of its workforce in the country.