India coronavirus dispatch: Poor spending heightens vulnerability to crisis

Mizoram enforces Lockdown 7.0, Hyderabad suspends Covid testing, and stroke, depression, anxi-ety in Covid patients - a roundup of news on how India is dealing with the pandemic

Expert speak
 

India spent one per cent of GDP on public health for 15 Years. Result is vulnerability to crises: With the Covid-19, India’s public health sector has been pushed to firefight an unprecedented health crisis. But it is unrealistic to expect an already overburdened sector to do the heavy lifting without the required government support. The allocation for health in the Rs 20 trillion ($260 billion) stimulus package announced by the central government on May 12, 2020, is grossly insufficient and amounts to 0.008 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Read this interview with Poonam Muttreja, executive director, Population Foundation of India, a Delhi-based NGO that works for gender-sensitive population, health and development strategies and policies.

Can online learning replace the school classroom? To ensure that students do not miss out on their studies, schools moved classes online, forcing students to attend lectures via their gadgets. However, this has also sparked a debate on whether the increased amount of screen time helps students learn or if it impedes their progress. In a discussion moderated by Puja Pednekar, Kiran Bhatty, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and Reeta Sonawat, Executive Director at the Early Childhood Association look at the pros and cons of online learning. Read more here.

Opinion
 

That food grain stocks lie in public godowns while people are going hungry is a scandal: With Covid-19 cases increasing and the economy continuing to be in a downturn, some corrective measures need to be put in place to ensure that there are no exclusions and that this basic support of subsidised food grains reaches everybody preventing large-scale hunger and starvation. Despite gaps, the PDS is one of the most effective instruments to reach people in the current situation. Read more here.

In post-Covid-19 world, growth of business must not be at expense of societal well-being: Business associations, and those who lead them, should use this crisis to determine how they must reform their associations to not merely lobby for the ease of doing business, and how they will regulate the conduct of their members. Or else, business will have to be regulated more firmly by the government for increasing citizens’ ease of living. Read more here.

Managing Covid-19 

Covid-19 patients no longer have to visit a care centre for medical assistance: The Centre has withdrawn the order that made it mandatory for those testing positive for the coronavirus to visit a Covid-care centre for a clinical assessment, Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said on Thursday. With 3,390 fresh instances, the number of coronavirus cases stood at 73,780 in Delhi on Thursday, including 26,586 active ones. Sixty-four fatalities were reported, taking the death toll due to the disease to 2,429 in the city. Read more here.

As Mizoram enforces Lockdown 7.0, its ethic of community service ensures no one is hungry: Mizoram’s Covid-19 numbers are among the least ominous in the country. Yet, on June 22, it announced what it calls “Lockdown 7.0”: a state-wide shutdown with few exemptions till the end of the month. Restrictions in the state continued to be significantly higher than in most other parts of the country. There were strict controls on the numbers of vehicles that could be out on the street and shops that could open. Read more here.

Hyderabad suspends Covid testing as sample backlog ‘runs into thousands’: Telangana capital Hyderabad has decided to suspend Covid-19 testing until the backlog of tests is cleared.  Hyderabad already has the lowest testing rate among big Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai, and a positivity rate of 30.6 per cent, which means approximately 31 out of every 100 people tested are diagnosed with Covid-19. The average positivity rate for India between 10 and 23 June was about 8 per cent. Read more here.

Sudden closure of Karnataka garment factory stitching H&M clothes leaves workers stranded: On June 6, the factory unit in Mandya, with around 1,300 workers, was shut down. An announcement was made through a notice stuck on a wall inside the factory telling its workers that they no longer had their jobs and that they would be paid half of their wages. The notice said that the reason for laying off the workers was due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the manufacturing activity of the exporter. Read more here.

India’s medical students and Covid-19 – a Catch 22 situation: As India’s monumental lockdown has failed to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country, it is faced with a chilling prospect: an epidemiological peak that will reach way beyond our healthcare capacity. But even as facilities are being set up to augment the number of beds and ventilators, an important limiting factor in the equation is the number of healthcare workers. That is, what good are ventilators when you don’t have healers to operate them? Read more here.

Understanding Covid-19
 

Lancet study finds stroke, depression, anxiety in both young and old Covid-19 patients: It is now fairly well-established that the novel coronavirus affects multiple organs in the body. A study, involving 153 patients treated in UK hospitals, published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal Thursday, has now found a range of neurological and psychiatric complications that may be linked to the disease. All the patients included in the study were severely affected by the disease, so the researchers said it is not possible to draw conclusions from this study about the total proportion of Covid-19 patients likely to be affected. Read more here.

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