Covid-19: What you need to know today

At 10am today (Tuesday, April 14), Prime Minister Narendra Modi will announce if and how India will exit the three-week lockdown, which came into effect on March 25 and is scheduled to end at midnight. For three weeks, life and work across India have been upended. There is no doubt that the lockdown has prevented the march of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to some extent; people have spent time in self-isolation, and all establishments and offices other than those providing essential services have been closed (with people working from home or not at all), breaking possible chains of infection. But the economy has taken a hit and may take months to recover; millions have been rendered jobless (mostly in the unorganised sector); agricultural and industrial supply chains are broken. The government has to find a way of balancing two situations that, on the face of it, look like they cannot be balanced. The Prime Minister’s comments during a meeting with chief ministers on Saturday and reports on the thinking within the government suggest that the lockdown could be partially lifted – by geographies and businesses, and, even within these, in parts. India’s dilemma isn’t unique. Other countries that have declared a lockdown to fight the spread of the disease are debating how and when to end it (even as they mull the health costs of not enforcing one, and the economic costs of enforcing one). Even Italy and Spain, two countries ravaged by the pandemic (20,465 and 17,489 dead till Monday) have announced steps to restart some business activity. The key to this, everyone agrees, is antibody testing. Widespread and rapid antibody testing can help identify those who have been exposed to the virus and are, therefore, immune to it. These people can then safely return to work – without the risk of infecting others, or themselves getting infected. For almost two weeks now, officials in the health ministry and the Indian Council of Medical Research have spoken of these rapid tests, which they plan to use to test for infections in clusters and so-called containment zones. These tests, it was held out by these people, would also improve India’s abysmal testing statistic (137 per million). The kits had been ordered (from China) and were on their way, the officials said. All good; except for one problem. The kits have already missed two deadlines. The officials are now hoping they will meet a third (April 15) (see page 1). Separately, Indian states have also been trying to order these kits, but without much success. A minister in Tamil Nadu said last week that kits his state ordered were diverted to the US. There’s clearly a shortage of these kits, and because countries have figured out that these are the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way of deciding who gets to return to work, that shortage could intensify. Meanwhile, the state-owned HLL Lifecare, which last week said that it would begin production of similar rapid testing kits on Monday (April 13), will now do so only later this week because it has just received clearances to do so. When Israel fell short of the RT-PCR kits needed to test for Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, it deployed its spy agency Mossad to source kits. In March, the agency delivered, sourcing half-a-million kits (in two batches) from undisclosed countries. India has to realise that sourcing the rapid kits could mean the difference between a functioning economy (or, at the least, a partially functioning one) and an economy in lockdown.