India coronavirus dispatch: Does your health insurance cover Covid-19?

Here is a round-up of articles in Indian news publications on how the country is dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. From one testing lab for 30 million people, to the meaning of community transmission, and how fast coronavirus can spread via hospital surfaces — read these and more in today’s India dispatch.

Interview

Hyderabad’s CCMB develops Covid test that can ‘handle up to 50,000 times more samples’: We spend very little money on research, science and technology, but we need to realise solutions to problems lie in science. Read this interview with Rakesh Mishra, director of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), who explains how the solution to the crisis will come from a lab. The government and big industrial houses have perhaps realised this amid the spread of Covid-19 — a positive side-effect of the disease. Read more

Long Reads

How scientists around the world are already fighting the next pandemic: If a two-year-old child living in poverty in India or Bangladesh gets sick with a common bacterial infection, there is more than a 50 per cent chance that an antibiotic treatment will fail. Somehow the child has acquired an antibiotic resistant infection – even to drugs to which they may never have been exposed. How? Unfortunately, this child also lives in a place with limited clean water and less waste management leading to frequent contact with faecal matter. Read more here

30 million people, one coronavirus testing lab — a crisis in eastern UP: Jaunpur does not have a Covid-19 testing lab of its own. Barring Varanasi and Gorakhpur, none of the 17 districts in Purvanchal have a lab that can do the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. All they have are TruNat machines used for testing diseases like tuberculosis, which can now be used for Covid-19 testing. Read more here

Opinion

Covid-19 crisis brings opportunity to expand the autonomy of public universities: As universities scramble to put together their online infrastructure with insufficient preparation, learning from home has involved a complete rejig of the spatio-temporal dimension. “Distance education”, traditionally the less preferred sibling of the 'regular' system, has moved mainstream in its tech avatar. The “new normal” will see several more unanticipated inversions. Read more here

Managing Covid-19

Does your health insurance cover Covid-19 costs? A health insurance policy generally covers all hospitalisation expenses incurred by the person insured for all ailments, except any critical ones that are not part of the policy. However, after an Irdai circular, even those who have a general health insurance policy (taken up individually, or offered by employer), will be able to claim insurance for Covid-19 treatment as well. Read more here

What is community transmission, the Covid-19 phase which Delhi health minister spoke of? Community transmission or spread is said to be taking place when the source of the contagion is not known — that is, when one is unable to trace an infection back to a carrier who has travelled in an affected area, or through contact with a person who has the disease. A state of community spread implies that the virus is now circulating in the community, and can infect people with no history — either of travel to or contact with affected people and areas. At this stage, it is theoretically possible for everyone to catch the infection. Read more here

India must regulate its wildlife, wild meat markets: To understand what happens if wildlife, wild meat markets are not regulated and illegal trade in wildlife is not curbed, one needs only to look at the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. About two-thirds of the first 41 patients admitted to hospitals with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 infection had been exposed to the Huanan seafood market, “an important hub in the lucrative trade in wildlife — both legal and illegal”. Scientists believe that this poorly regulated, unsanitary market has all the conditions that are conducive for virus transmission from animals to humans. Read more here

Understanding Covid-19

How fast can coronavirus spread via hospital surfaces? A new study has aimed to simulate how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, may spread across surfaces in a hospital. For safety, the researchers did not use the SARS-CoV-2 virus but artificially replicated a section of DNA from a plant-infecting virus, which cannot infect humans, then added it to a millilitre of water at a similar concentration to SARS-CoV-2 copies found in infected patients’ respiratory samples. The result: the virus DNA left on a hospital bed rail was found in nearly half of all sites sampled across a ward within 10 hours and persisted for at least five days. Read more here

The best practices for home quarantine of Covid-19 patients: Home recovery does not mean just remaining confined within your home and waiting for the quarantine period to get over. Some good practices followed during home quarantine can expedite the recovery process, while protecting other people in the family. Even simple things like the right diet, eight hours of sleep, adequate hydration, and maintaining a positive attitude can help in the recovery process. Read more here

What are the steps of vaccine development and what do they mean? News headlines are full of trial results concerning Covid-19 interventions. It’s easy to get excited when reading about a new drug or vaccine. But early successes do not guarantee a treatment will work. Covid-19, like Alzheimer’s, is a complex disease, and clinical trials to test treatments are particularly challenging, with highly variable outcomes. The process for drug and treatment approval is long, but it is designed to guarantee that what a physician gives you will do help, not hurt, you. Read more here

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