 Hello and let's talk about the COVID-19 situation in India. The number of cases recorded yesterday was a shocking over 69,000. This number of cases is far more than any other country and the same happened the day before too. It has been almost 5 months since the lockdown was imposed and over 2 months since the lockdown began to be lifted, but the number of cases has been growing rampantly and uncontrollably, even as the government has pretty much stopped addressing it. We'll talk about this a bit but let's take a look at the numbers. The total number of cases crossed 28 lakh or 2.8 million with a new case in the preceding 24 hours before 8am today standing at 69,652. The number of new deaths stood at 977, while the total number of deaths stands at 53,866. The number of active cases is 6.86 lakh. The total number of samples tested stands at 3 crore 26 lakhs 61,252. There has been a lot of discussion about the recent seroprevalence studies in major cities which calculates the prevalence of antibodies in the population. The second such study in Delhi has shown that 29.1% of the population in the city is antibodies. What does this imply? We talked in the news click on the implications of the rise in cases and these studies. Prabir, thank you for joining us. So to begin with, of course, the numbers are as alarming as usual because yesterday's numbers were over 69,000 which makes India the highest in terms of new cases and that to 21,000 new cases more than the country next in line which is present. So could you talk a bit about what these uncontrolled numbers indicate? Is it spreading to new areas or is what are the trends? One thing is clear about India. The trend has been consistently the same. We have been adding a certain percentage of figures every week. And if you go by that, our rate of growth has been consistent at the level that our doubling rate will be between 20 to 25 days. And if you go back past 90 days to 120 days, you will find the doubling rate of 20 to 25 days has held constant over this period. So we have absolutely no control over the epidemic. It has not exploded in the sense that it has not doubled every five days or every 10 days, which is what it was doing initially. But nevertheless, this means that the rate of growth, if it is consistent, that means another 25 days, we will be double what we are in terms of numbers, which means we will be not only number two, we will be going near what the US figures are. US, if you see the doubling rate is now something between 45 to 50 days. Though it is also varying, sometimes it goes up and sometimes it comes down. So it's not the US in that sense showing a consistent rate of growth. So India is in a bad state in this sense. And we also see the number of deaths are also quite significantly high in the sense that death rate is also constant, and sometimes we are number one, sometimes you are number two, sometimes you are number three, but we are really moving in the first three in terms of number of new deaths that we are talking about, not total deaths. Our total figures are low and we'll come to that in a minute. So those are the basic broad criteria that you can see. And also let's be very clear, we are talking about identified cases. How many cases we are identifying? Roughly about 8 to 10% of the test proof positive. Now the WHO has given guidelines which says it should be less than 5%. So this is not a low figure either. So even in that sense, we are not catching all the people who are infected. And the set of prevalence studies seem to show that. So we'll come back to that as well in a minute. So looking at now the death rate, which is what the government of India is now talking about, it's given up the argument that it can control the pandemic. It's given out how much help the lockdown provided. Now that we are in a lockdown lifting mode, that's what at least the jingle on our telephone says. So and we can see it physically that the lockdown has not been disappeared. But we have also seen large numbers of people congregating together. The mask use is not so significant. So all the ingredients of increasing figures are there. The only saving rates in schools and colleges have not been opened. The cinema halls have not been opened, but the places of worship are also open. And even the gyms we are talking about opening and hotels we are talking about opening. The restaurants are still closed. So some respite on those counts, but we have to see how the governments move on that. The argument seems to be, let's live with the epidemic and let's revive the economy. They don't seem to understand that the economy will not revive as long as the epidemic continues. So control over the epidemic is important to again lift the economic ship, so to say. But that's not going to happen as long the infections continue at the rate that we are seeing them. People are scared. A lot of people will not move out and buy things, they'll abandon what I will say as consumptions which they can avoid. That's what they will continue to do. And that's a trend we see worldwide. Coming back to the death rate, a simple issue is the Indian demography is much younger. Okay. If you take, for instance, the Italian demography. Italy had a median age of something like 43, 44. We have an median age of 26, 27. Now what does it mean? It means from zero to 50 years, the number of deaths that occur is actually much lower than what occurs after 50 or basically after 60, 70 and 80. As you go up the age groups, you find mainly because of the immune system is not so effective our natural immune system doesn't work so well or for older people, then you tend to see more serious infections. It's not the infections are more, more serious infections which seem to indicate the immune system is not able to fight it so well. And that's why the older people tend to fall more seriously ill. And if they fall seriously ill, then a lot of the problems that we see, which are what are called the cytokine storms, the immune system attacking the lung, etc. leads to much more serious cases and people, then a lot of them die. So it's a death rate of the older population which shows up in the case fatality ratio as it is called. And if you take the case fatality ratio, correct it by the age demography. Take the Italian figures for example, correct it by the age demography that India has and I've done this calculation, you will find that the 9% rate of death in Italy corresponds to 2% rate of death in India. Only because we have much younger set of people. So if you do that exercise, you will find that India claiming credit for having a lower death fatality rate, case fatality ratio is simply a fact of our demography. It has nothing to do with either the government or the disease itself slowing down in terms of its fatality, both of which is not true. The disease has exactly the same fatality profile. It's only that the Indian demography like a lot of other South Asian countries or African countries because of their much lower the age, median age, therefore they have better outcomes in terms of the total population and the death they are off. So the low figures in a lot of countries are simply because of the age, the median age of the population. We come to the last issue which is the set of prevalence studies being done. It does indicate that yes, the set of prevalence studies show that a lot more people were infected but did not progress to disease or to perceptible symptoms of the disease that may have had low symptoms, which they simply ignored, but certainly number of people who are infected is much higher than what we see in terms of the cases. So let's also recognize when we talk about the death, we are talking about the case fatality ratio and that's true for all countries and cases itself are a bit of an artifact of the testing that you do. So coming to the set of prevalence studies, it seemed to indicate that in urban areas like Delhi, Bombay, Pune for example, which also had an early outbreak of the disease of the epidemic that in these places in some areas it shows for instance in Dharavi the set of prevalence shows about 57% of the people had infections, but the number of people who had disease were much, much less, but in areas in Delhi for instance, not in Delhi, but the largest numbers have come from, there again the set of prevalence seems to be about 40%. But if we take the average, then the set of prevalence relatively has been 25 to 30% in major urban centers, but again this doesn't mean much. It might mean that in a particular area of Delhi, the number of people who are infected who have antibodies is only 3 or 4% while in another area it's 50%. Now you average the two, you get something like 27%. It doesn't mean 27% of the people got infected, it's just as an artifact of you are adding two numbers and dividing by the population. So these figures have to be taken with a pinch of salt, meaning that that does not indicate that you are safer because the 25% of Delhi's population have, by several prevalence studies seem to have been infected, it just might mean that the people who interact with are not in the 25% and therefore you are equally liable to fall sick. So I think set of prevalence gives you a certain understanding over a time period, how the epidemic is moving in certain areas, but it doesn't let you take decisions regarding what you as an individual have to do or the society in an urban area, what do you have to do? It just says, okay, this area, there are still a lot of infections, let us focus there, but not that area, there's not much infection, set of prevalence shows that infection is really burnt out of that area, let's move our focus somewhere else. So it lets you take public health decisions, it does not really solve the problem we are doing, how to bring our total numbers down. It gives you a better strategy, but a better strategy has to be accompanied by steps as public health system has to do. Unfortunately, our public health system has been almost a policing system and once the policing has gone, the public system in most places, the public health system seems to be reverting to a kind of laissez-faire, that each one do hopefully things will be better for the future. I don't think that we are really moving on the steps that we still need to take, extent testing, much more extensive testing needs to be done, identify people and quickly either self-quarantine or quarantine them and also strengthen the hospital system to be able to take care of the serious cases and for that we need to also see how do you put a pipeline of medicine, dexamethasone of course is the primary issue, but even remdesivir which might have some effect in the first or second stage, it should be available at a much lower price and much more widely than it is now and I think government is just closing its eyes, hoping the drug companies or big capital will solve the problems for itself or laissez-faire, let the people do what they want, hopefully things in the long run will straighten out. Thank you so much for waiting for talking to us. Our next segment is part of an interview with Charles Zhu, the Chiaw Collective on the US tech war in China. He explains the context to the US measures that have been targeting China's technological prowess and especially the company Huawei. So to begin with, could you just talk about what you see as what the aims of the United States are as far as this tech assault is concerned? Yeah, absolutely. I think that what is referred to as the tech war on China or from a more sort of Western oriented perspective, a tech war between the US and China with the sort of implicit assumption there that we're talking about a rivalry between equals in some rough sense. It really needs to be understood in a somewhat longer term historical context that begins with the reform and opening process within China itself. China's sort of controlled reintegration into the global capitalist infrastructure at a moment when the entire global system was transitioning quite dramatically into its current neoliberal form. And it needs to be understood sort of from the perspectives and from the strategic imperatives of both the United States and China. The expectation of the United States was essentially that, you know, here we are being given almost on a platter thanks to, you know, the sign of Soviet split thanks to, you know, the sort of newfound openness of the, you know, the Communist Party leadership to control forms of foreign direct investment and diplomatic rapprochement. We're being given on a platter almost all of these essentially sort of free gifts of China's developmental model in the earlier decades of the People's Republic, right? A highly sort of educated workforce, extensive infrastructure. And, you know, of course, the size of the potential market, both for labor and, you know, as time went on and China's income, you know, itself grew, a consumer market as well for Western bits. And, you know, the sort of idea from the US perspective was, OK, we're going to strike this grand bargain, right? Where China would open itself up to U.S. and, more generally, Western foreign investment, granted, you know, in some ways on China's terms and by the end of its inclusion into global capitalism, into, you know, these sort of extended global value chains that, you know, were becoming more and more integral to world capitalism, that these would create the conditions essentially for China to take its place among the ranks of other sort of, you know, peripheral or semi-peripheral nations that, you know, had a well-defined place as manufacturing hubs, right? As sites where, you know, cheap labor could be found and where, you know, U.S.-based multinational corporations would have a reliable, you know, source of hyper-exploitable labor and resources, right? And the expectation was that essentially, you know, you would have the rise of a compredor bourgeois class in China, which would then, you know, have the capacity to essentially capture the state, right? Whether under the, you know, aegis of continued Communist Party rule or not, the idea was that the Chinese state would then become pliable, you know, itself to the demands of U.S. capitalism, right, that it would willingly take this sort of semi-peripheral place and that it would essentially offer up in large measure its own sort of sovereignty, its own prerogative to determine the course of Chinese development in a way that was amenable to U.S. interests, right? From the Chinese side, you know, you had a very much a longer term developmental plan put in place that offered for several decades an apparent convergence of interests with what the U.S. was pursuing, namely, you know, to sort of strategically open up to foreign direct investment on the conditions that, you know, foreign multinational investors would abide by Chinese law that they would exceed to the requirements of technology transfer to Chinese firms, that they would allow the creation of Communist Party cells within their own branches in China, right? And in general, that this opening would be a controlled process that would serve the interests of China's own developmental project, which was essentially to, you know, incorporate sort of all of these advantages of, you know, and fruits of foreign capitalist investment for its own sovereign ends. And, you know, they recognized as well that with the shifting configuration of global capitalism, it would require, in some ways, playing by the rules of the global system established by the United States, right, for its own advantage, up to a point, simply in order to acquire the technology then, you know, needed to sort of bootstrap China's own domestic, you know, technological base in order to build its productive forces and, you know, in order to arrive at a position of strength, of relative strength compared to where it was previously in the global pecking order, wherein it could actually assert, you know, the kind of sovereignty that would then be needed in order to pursue an independent developmental path. And what we're seeing now is essentially the results of that sort of very pragmatic and, as it turns out, transient bargain breaking apart because of the inherent contradiction between those two expectations. Because, contrary to what the United States at least hoped for, we have not had, you know, the establishment of a Comford or Bourgeois class in China that, you know, essentially is aligned in its material and its political interests with US imperialism and has effective control of the Chinese state and party apparatus. And it must be mentioned as well that, you know, the longer terms of ideal situation for the United States has always been outright regime change in China, you know. You know, for a while, you know, at least for the sake of appearances, you know, it accepted the sort of political leadership of the Communist Party, you know, while its policy making appeared to be compatible with US economic interests, but it was never entirely comfortable that situation. But now we are seeing essentially, you know, China's longer term plan paying off. And in particular, you know, a renewed orientation, particularly through, you know, the Made in China 2025 initiative through, you know, the rise of Huawei, as you mentioned, to the status of, you know, a multinational corporation of global extent, right, the world's number one producer of telecoms infrastructure, and as of last month, I believe, also the number one smartphone supplier. And certainly the global leader in development of 5G infrastructure, right, far outstripping any US-based competitors, which, you know, in terms of these sort of critical technologies, as the US describes them, you know, is genuinely posing a threat at least to the US monopoly on the sort of higher value end of the value chain. Because, you know, the way that global imperialism operates today for the most part is through this international division of labor, where, you know, countries of the global south, China included are, you know, assigned essentially the role of manufacturing hubs, right, where sort of the lowest value added elements of the production process are, you know, sort of localized. While, you know, western countries like the United States in particular continue to monopolize sort of the higher value added elements of that, whether at the start of the process with R&D or at the end with marketing and sales. And therein lies, you know, precisely the linchpin of the US advantage and the position that it wants to maintain. So, you know, you see there a direct conflict between, you know, US expectations and reality that is now leading to, you know, this apparent tech war that at least in terms of what you see in western media gives off the appearance of actual parity, where it's still not there. That's all your time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with major news developments from the country. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.