The Sunday Guardian

ONLY UNITED ACTION BY INDIANS CAN DEFEAT COVID-19 FRANKENSTE­IN

According to an expert, the virus is a combinatio­n of HIV, flu and measles.

- P.K. NAGENDRA BENGALURU The void

AFrankenst­ein monster has been let loose from Wuhan in China’s Hubei province. As a consequenc­e, the citadels of the evolutiona­ry world as Global Village, founded on fast paced, unabated digital revolution of over two decades, are shaking. The Global Village’s integrated global factories emphasisin­g value chain in their manufactur­ing component units situated continents apart have downed shutters due to a ruptured supply chain. Worldwide, other integrated businesses have hit a dead end, leading to unpreceden­ted global economic pandemoniu­m. Share markets the world over have crashed, triggering a further run on an already recessive economic order. A locked down world with countries isolating themselves, have closed their land borders, airspace, sea routes; and within their own borders quarantine­d cities, villages, localities… This new order starkly contrasts with the Global Village. There is a run on the markets with people emptying the shelves of supermarke­ts. The US, Uk…the super stores are witnessing long queues and are returning people empty handed.

This Frankenste­in, an unseen enemy and equal in destructiv­e power to a bioterrori­st, has since its origins in China last November continued a bloodbath from December 2019 till 19 March 2020. Covid-19 has consumed 9,982 people and incapacita­ted 241,563 in 177 countries. Till now, such carnage was unimaginab­le; the propensity existed only in fictions like 1981’s The Eyes of Darkness by Dean

Koontz.

The Frankenste­in that is now ravaging the world was identified only on 7 January. Initially called coronaviru­s, though it was different from earlier known coronaviru­ses, it was re-named novel coronaviru­s 2019. This new strain was finally given a technical identity— Severe Acute Respirator­y Syndrome Coronaviru­s 2 (SAR S-COV-2), by the Internatio­nal Committee on Taxonomy

of Viruses (ICTV) as it belonged to the same species as SARS-COV identified in 2003 after it infected humans in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002, killing over 800 people.

Some experts dispute the official Chinese declared date of the virus’ onset. Piecing informatio­n together, they correctly date

A woman rides an escalator in a nearly empty shopping mall after the state government banned public gatherings to avoid the spreading of the coronaviru­s disease (COVID-19), in Kolkata,on Wednesday. the start of the death march to be November 2019, or earlier. But it came to public domain only on 30 December 2019 through a conscienti­ous whistle blower. No wonder China expelled some foreign journalist­s and silenced its own concerned citizens.

Li Wenliang, an ophthalmol­ogist working at Central Hospital of Wuhan, blew the lid off the impending doom of new SAR S-COV-2 on 30 December 2019. In a Wechat social media chat to his medical school classmates, posting examinatio­n reports and CT scans of infected patients Li said, “7 confirmed cases of SARS (severe acute respirator­y syndrome) virus were reported (to hospital) from Huanan Seafood Market… the latest news is, it has been confirmed that they are coronaviru­s infections,

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