India Coronavirus Dispatch: How the country got to a million Covid-19 cases

Improvement in economy may slow down in second quarter, 70% new cases in Kerala due to local spread, and how effective a vaccine needs to be-a roundup news on how India is dealing with the pandemic

Managing Covid-19 

India just hit a million Covid-19 cases but here's what should really be worrying us: The Covid-19 pandemic has required us all to get comfortable with an array of numbers as well as a glut of statistical methods. But of the three numbers used by governments and the media to convey the extent of the virus’s spread – the total number of cases, the number of active cases and the number of new cases daily – it is the first number that grabs most headlines. Read more here. 

70 per cent of new Kerala cases due to local spread:  Kerala crossed the 10,000 cases milestone in the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic with a cumulative case burden of 10,275 on Thursday. The State reported 722 fresh cases, 501, or almost 70 per cent of them are from local transmission. Ac-tive cases stood at 5,372 and recoveries at 4,864. A big chunk of new cases were from the commu-nity clusters along the coastal belt and 34 cases with no epidemiological link were reported. Read more here. 

Security forces returning from leave bring Covid surge in Nagaland, rest of NE echoes pattern: As the flow of migrant returnees decreased in Nagaland, the state found itself facing another challenge this month — a surge in Covid-19 cases among paramilitary personnel returning from leave. So far, according to state government data, at least 187 personnel of the Assam Rifles, Cen-tral Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Border Security Force (BSF) have tested positive in Kohima and Dimapur. Read more here. 
 

How India got to one million Covid-19 cases in 6 charts: India has become the third country in the world to cross the mark of 1 million Covid-19 cases on July 17, 2020. As the country continues to lift restrictions, it has not succeeded in flattening the curve as the number of new cases reported daily continues to rise. The country reported a record single-day increase of 34,956 cases, bringing the tally up to 1,003,832 confirmed cases. At the current doubling time of 21 days, the tally could rise to 2 million by early August. Of the worst affected states, case growth has slowed only in Delhi. Read more here.

As cities worldwide go back into lockdown, they must learn from past experience: The WHO reported more than 230,000 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday – the world’s largest daily in-crease during the pandemic. The surge has forced governments across the world to order new lock-downs. This includes Melbourne, which is back in a six-week lockdown. Cities including Beijing and Leicester had lifted Covid-19 restrictions, only to re-enforce them when new outbreaks oc-curred. So how have other cities gone about their second lockdown, and have the measures been effective in tackling the Covid-19 resurgence? Read more here.
 

Opinion 
 

Improvement in economy might slow down or even stagnate in the second quarter: India has had little option but to open up the economy. That has led to some improvement in economic activi-ty towards the latter part of the April-June quarter — but this is unlikely to sustain. In the July-September quarter, we expect the pace of improvement to slow down or even stagnate and fall in some cases. Read more here.
 

The lockdown revealed the extent of poverty and misery faced by migrant workers: The pan-demic has further worsened India’s hunger and malnutrition woes, more so for the millions of in-formal workers, on their way back home or struggling to meet two ends in their urban and rural homes. Their embedded informality over labour, land and housing tenure has uprooted and shaken them with loss of income, occupation and habitat, multiplying their already entrenched nutrition vulnerability. Read more here.

Understanding Covid-19
 

Severe lung damage, blood clots: Covid-19 signatures that linger: As the number of novel coronavirus infections in India surges in the fifth month of the outbreak – going past the 1 million mark on July 16 – doctors have been increasingly reporting several relatively new conditions associated with Covid-19.Among these conditions are lung damage, known as lung fibrosis, and blood clots in the pulmonary artery – Pulmonary Thrombo Embolism or PTE – which are seen in persons who have recovered from very severe cases of the disease. Read more here.

How effective does a vaccine need to be to stop the pandemic? With fewer people protected, a vaccine would have to have an efficacy of at least 80 percent to be able to stop the pandemic by itself, meaning social distancing could be completely relaxed. This can provide a target to aim for when developing Covid-19 vaccines. This doesn’t mean that a vaccine with a lower efficacy would not be useful. It would mean that social distancing and mask-wearing likely would have to continue until the pandemic runs its course or a vaccine that is actually “good enough” arrives.  Read more here.
 

Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine is safe and works, early interim results show: Moderna Inc’s experimental vaccine for Covid-19 showed it was safe and provoked immune responses in all 45 healthy volunteers in an ongoing early-stage study, US researchers reported on Tuesday. Volunteers who got two doses of the vaccine had high levels of virus-killing antibodies that exceeded the aver-age levels seen in people who had recovered from Covid-19, the team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Read more here.

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