 Hello and welcome to Neuskrik. Today we will be looking at the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The total number of cases, the number of deaths, what are the steps governments across the world are taking and what is India doing? Most importantly, what do we have to do so as to reduce or contain the spread of the disease? We have with us Prabhupur Kaishta, over to you Prabhupi. Let's look at first at the global scenario. We are almost at the 4 million mark and out of this, the death toll is also pretty high. It's about 275,000 on deaths and of course we know out of this also. The United States has been the hardest hit along with Western Europe. Let's look at the global map on this count and you will see the countries today which are hardest hit are probably the countries which are well connected to each other, well connected internally, as well as have certain temperature characteristics which probably make the infection spread faster there. Of course, this does not mean it's not spreading in other countries. As we can see from India, we have seen earlier Iran and we also are starting to see spreads in various other countries, including Brazil. So we are entering a scenario where the pandemic is going to be with us for the near future or probably at least till we have a vaccine which can then stop the pandemic, otherwise it will be there with us in different forms. So we have to work out what is the global response to this. If we look at quickly and the figures that we can see in terms of the charts, then let's take a look at that. Let's have a quick look at the chart that we have in front of us and you will see that countries which earlier were infected, I'm leaving out China, South Korea out of this and talk of really European countries. You will see Italy was the first to really take off and it is now for the last 10 days or so, more or less looking to be just flattened the curve. The number of new infections are relative to the total number of infected and not very large and this is almost the same cause we can see for Spain, we can see for France, we can see for Germany as well. Now when it comes to United Kingdom, United Kingdom, the graph is still going up. You will see here that it is taken off a little earlier but it's still rising and if you see the death toll, the UK has the highest death toll of all the European countries. So UK is still under watch but there is some flattening of the curve there too. If you look at the United States, United States, because you remember there's a log curve so it doesn't show the differences that starkly but you will see if I put the cursor here you will see it's about 10-12 days back, they had 1 million and in another 8-9 days they have added almost 250,000 quarter of a million people. So therefore their infection rates are still there, some flattening from the initial rate that we saw probably at the moment the doubling time is around probably 14-15 days but nevertheless the control over the pandemic or the epidemic is still not there. If I come to India because that's what of course also interests us, we will see our rate of growth is still not flat, it's still going up. Clearly, Indian infection rates are not at the moment following the trajectory of the European countries we've taken off earlier but also Iran which has maintained now for quite some days a fairly flat trajectory or Malaysia who were earlier ahead of us but now it appears complete control over their epidemic, the numbers are rising very slowly and they have a borderless flat trajectory. India at the moment looking at the slope, this is a seven-day doubling rate, this is as you can see it's not very different from that so probably at the moment we have a little more than 8 days doubling which means every 8-8.5 days our numbers are going to double at the moment. Long-term predictions are very difficult at this moment and we'll talk about it a little later. So this is the scenario that we have in terms of the major countries when you come to India, let's have a look at that, what is the Indian scenario? When you look at the Indian scenario, we have almost reached number which is 60,000 okay, we are at the 60,000 number, we are looking at the last 24 hours new cases about our 3,300 odd cases. Now that is not a very good sign so it's not as bad as a day back when we had about 3,900 but the figures are still that it is still rising at a rate which is disturbing that means even after a lockdown we are not in complete control of what is happening and also if we look at the number of samples we have tested, we have totally tested about 1.5 million people but on the last day we have tested 85,000 odd people. Now if we look at the testing rates to the total number of people or the new infections, we are still seeing about 4 to 5 percent infections among the people we test that means out of about 20, 25 people we test one of them is infected so the rate of infection that we catch is also dependent on the number of people that we test. Look at the states which are we are really looking at then you will find that we have more or less seen a similar kind of spread as we had seen earlier what Maharashtra has always been the leading state you can see Maharashtra has been leading. Gujarat for the last 10-15 days has been the second largest spread we also have Delhi which of course is a city so we can understand that Delhi like Mumbai is going to show high figures. We have Chennai which shows also similarly high figures and therefore Tamil Nadu is also in the list but when you come to deaths it's interesting that we have a slightly different trajectory we don't see for example that Tamil Nadu has that many number of deaths but Maharashtra has deaths significant amount Gujarat, Rajasthan and Badr Pradesh all have relatively high deaths particularly when you compare them to the infections we now also have West Bengal which also has high deaths compared to the number of infections so that is a worrying sign it simply indicates that there are more infections that we are really observing and we are not testing enough particularly amongst people who we should be testing to see where the infections really are. If we come to the Indian states which are infected let's look at a quick figure over there Maharashtra is obviously leading the pack it was the earliest to take off in our chart apart from Kerala so this is almost touching now 19,000 it's 19,000 plus and you will see after that we have Gujarat which is the second highest and after that you have Tamil Nadu and Delhi almost neck to neck. What is interesting to observe or what is little problematic in terms of the numbers the Maharashtra's growth is not slowing the curve is not flattening we are seeing a growth rate of almost a little more than seven days of doubling Gujarat curve is almost about eight days doubling so is Tamil Nadu and that is our cause for concern that we have seen really growth rates which are not slowing down at the moment and because this is not slowing down and because the number of infections it has the total population of India therefore you see also India's growth rates hovering at the moment between eight to eight and a half days so that creates a long-term issue that having done the lockdown then what is it that we now need to do still and this brings us to the question that if we look at for instance Telangana and these are Telangana figures or you look at Kerala then you see the curve is quite flat after having gone up quite rapidly initially for Telangana then you can see that they're flattening the curve and Kerala from the beginning except for a few days they have really flattened their curve after that so it means it's possible to take control of the curve in the sense we can flatten the curve we can reduce the infections but what is missing is that the second element which is not long done alone but what else do we have to do now before I go into that it's also interesting to look at the for instance what is what do we see in terms of the cities and you will see there let's talk about where are the infections say Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh coming from and we will see clearly that the infections are concentrated in the case of Maharashtra almost entirely concentrated in Mumbai and suburbs in the case of Gujarat it's almost entirely concentrated in Ahmedabad there are other cases but the huge numbers of this are really from Ahmedabad and in Madhya Pradesh it's almost entirely from Indore which is not a very large city going by Indian standards or even Madhya Pradesh standards but Indore and Ujjain have a significant number of people who are sick which would simply indicate these are clusters which have taken off and we need to do something about what is the where this concentration of infections are there we need to work out something now I like to come into this issue here that if we look at what is rudely crudely called the reproductive rate that means how many people do in one person in fact we are looking at one person in fact infecting something like 1.25 to 1.3 now that may appear much better than the initial infection rates which are about three that's what the calculations seem to show but again there is a there are two mistakes here one mistake is of course when you talk of an earlier reproductive rate of three you're looking of the infections you're detecting that means if you're not testing enough when you start testing you have a sudden takeoff of numbers which is not really new infections but new infections plus the ones you're discovering now were infected so your rates seem to be higher but if you look at now and if we compare on an apple to apple basis I will say that yes the lockdown has been effective in slowing down the rate of infection that is clear and I don't think we should dispute that that's why we have from the beginning said yes we need to do a lockdown but that's not going to be enough because if it's 1.25271.3 kind of figures then we are going to see every 8 every 8 to 10 days we'll see a doubling of the numbers now that is simply not going to be good enough which means in other say 10 days we will double what we are seeing 1.20,000 another 10 days we'll see 2.40,000 so obviously there's a creeping pandemic and as we lift the lockdown we're going to see much more infections so what is it the strategy that we have to have obviously lockdown is not going to or cannot continue in the same form we've already seen that a lockdown plus the kind of policies this government has had particularly with respect to migrant labor or the sections which depend on daily wages on their livelihood on their livelihood we have seen what the impact has been we have the horrific pictures of migrant workers being run over because no facility for taking them home is there all looking after the needs in the city is there we have seen in Lucknow a couple trying to reach home on bicycle being hit and killed so we have now enough examples of this we have also seen the industrial capital calling for 60 hour week we have Narayan Murthy our IT guru who set up Infosys calling for 60 hour week particularly around Mehdi you know ironically we have governments state governments particularly the visible end governments saying we should have no labor protection laws for the next two years hold it in advance nothing but the capitalists but the workers should be not protected in this period and we have had the visor gas leak to show what happens when you remove all protections to the workers and you remove all the other laws which are supposed to be for the safety of the people around factories so this is this is already there the consequences of a lockdown and the consequences of an opening which seems to think that the workers and the people don't count only the capitalists class counts but what is disturbing about this is a second set of steps that we need to take which is really increase of this we have been saying from the beginning we need to increase our testing much more than what we are testing right now we need to test at least five to ten times more than what we are testing which otherwise we are in no condition to halt the community spread testing identifying people who are sick and then quarantining they're quarantining them independently of the general population not put them back in their homes because they're going to infect the family but we have also stigmatized covid after the tabligi jamal incident and as a consequence people are even scared to say that they are infected so unless we can make all of this work the next phase of our containment of the disease is going to fail because it's not enough to contain the disease we have to know also mitigation measures and mitigation is test identify quarantine hospital these are the things that we have to do and protecting the hospital population we have seen the spread of covid-19 in the hospital itself so these are the steps we need to take but at the moment the doctrine seems to be more focused on messaging and saying that we are in control don't worry we have got it down otherwise it would have been 20 lakhs 25 lakhs kind of shall we say modeling fiction which is being presented not based on anything which is really concrete but some figments of modeling imagination of the people yes of course lockdown was important we have no absolute no disagreement on that but lockdown was never going to be enough and it's very clear now that if this continues that we are going to see also covid-19 continue particularly as the lockdown is relaxed the impact of this is going to grow so the second set of measures is what is missing at the moment and this is exactly the problem we have in India as well as the United States which seems to be going to the same cycle of course US has other problems like white supremacists claiming that this is really something against the freedom of movement liberty and so on so they are opposing it also from that point of view and for them it might also be an argument that well it's killing the minorities more so do we really care it's after all the african-american the hispanic population were dying in larger numbers but leading that out it's very clear that as we relax if we don't take the other measures we talked about we are not going to be in control and the current figures simply and the chart that we have shown you simply point out the same thing thank you for being so much you're talking to us that's all we have time for today keep watching 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