Covid-19: What you need to know today
On Friday, news reports in the US said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was considering asking all Americans to wear masks, even if made only of cloth, when they went out. As the number of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases in the world marched past the 1-million mark, the extent to which the World Health Organization (WHO) messed up was once again brought sharply into focus. On April 1, experts from the US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said in a report to the White House that even breathing or talking could release tiny particles carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes Covid-19. This is very different from the earlier understanding that masks weren’t necessary. WHO said they weren’t. Many others concurred. There was even a comic strip explaining why everyone need not wear a mask which did the rounds on social media. Well, guess what? Everyone was wrong. On Friday, US President Donald Trump tweeted: “We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their masks. ‘P Act’ all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay.” 3M is one of the world’s biggest mask manufacturers and makes 400 million of them a year. It also exports them. Trump’s tweet came several hours after he said he was invoking the Defence Production Act to secure more masks and essential medical equipment from manufacturers. As this writer pointed out on March 22, “countries will start hoarding strategic resources at a national level. It could be oil; it could be lithium; or it could be medical equipment and drugs. Expect every country in the world to start building reserves of these, and also encouraging (and perhaps mandating) their companies to start manufacturing these – locally.”
The breathing and talking bit is new, but we are learning more about the enemy with every passing day. Now, there’s also research to bear out what anecdotal trends have suggested all along – that it kills more men than women. The research, published in late March, shows that infected men in China were three times as likely to die as infected women. The research is strangely reminiscent of a late 2000s graphic novel called Y: The Last Man, by Brian K Vaughan (the Y stands for the sex-determining chromosome).
If we are learning more about the virus, and also getting closer to the cure (it’s inevitable that we will find one), it’s because tens of thousands of researchers at government laboratories, private companies, and academic institutions are working on the frontiers of science. For instance, even as India is in the midst of a 21-day lockdown till April 14, there is a lot of research and development work going on behind the scenes – on everything from low-cost ventilators to repurposed drugs to vaccine candidates.
If the US is mulling masks, it is because the number of cases in the country were 259,750 on Friday evening (India time), of a total of 1.067 million cases worldwide. The country also accounted for a little over 6,600 of the around 56,700 deaths around the world.
India ended Friday with 3,066 cases and 86 deaths. Parts of Delhi and Mumbai have been classified as clusters, with the pandemic’s spread in Mumbai, one of the most densely populated cities in the planet, causing panic in India’s commercial capital. On Friday, there were 93 new cases in Delhi, 43 in Mumbai and a total of 546 around the country. Of this, in the last two days 647, can be attributed to the March gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi, which is threatening to undo some of the good done by the lockdown. Indeed, more countries are buying into the benefits of lockdowns, with Singapore on Friday announcing a month-long one, which its prime minister termed as a “decisive move” to “preempt escalating infections”.