Lockdown: faint light at the end of the tunnel?

Kolkata's first three coronavirus patients are apparently on the road to recovery.

South Korea has reported that it already has more people cured and sent home than still under treatment. Meanwhile, the USA, with by far the largest number of infections, has still not decided on a countrywide lockdown. Are they all very stupid compared to us? Or otherwise?

Given our country's gigantic population, and the considerably increased rate of testing of late, people at the highest decision making level should keep in mind how very, very slowly the infection- and death rate is going up: people are dying of coronavirus at the rate of two or three a day (remember, once more, that the normal death rate is 26,000 a day!), not in hundreds, leave alone tens of thousands, as so many doomsayers have been predicting with ghoulish glee over the last fortnight.

The media and opposition parties have rightly begun to point out that the man-made human tragedy caused by the countrywide lockdown could very quickly grow out of all proportion to the cost of the disease itself: see this article, for instance.

The highest civil servant in the central government has denied rumours today that there are any plans to extend the lockdown beyond April 14. We should be glad for small mercies, I suppose. I am also seeing reports that the government has already begun to ease up a bit on the countrywide transport of both essential and non-essential commodities. I wish they would act faster.

A thought: why not focus on the few specific areas where there have been infection flareups, and spare the rest of the country? As someone wrote somewhere very recently, why shut down Puducherry if there are a lot of infections somewhere in Uttar Pradesh?

Meanwhile, daytime temperatures in my town have risen to 36-37 degrees C. I never thought I'd welcome summer, but there is some hope that it might do away with the new virus as it deals with the ordinary flu...

Lockdown, and my daughter's blog

Well, I am far too insignificant a person for my likes and dislikes to affect how the world goes, or even this country, so now we are in a 'lockdown' mode more or less all over India. I have had to cancel classes for a prolonged period entirely against my will, and there is no way I can 'work from home' at a time when social distancing has acquired paramount importance. Today was my first day of enforced indolence, and I didn't like it much. Thank God my daughter is with me. She has the privilege of working from home, though, so maybe she's slightly better off...

In any case, she has written something on being gainfully occupied in the time of Covid-19 which I think all my readers should visit - for their benefit, not hers. If a few of them like it and write in to tell her so, I shall be glad.

P.S., March 25: I have been reading up on the opinions of the best experts, as well as listening to the warnings and counsel of top government leaders from around the world.  I shall cite some of them here. First off, please note that much of the panic is concocted and entirely avoidable: this is the first epidemic, if it is that, in the era of social media, overflowing with fake news of the stupidest, most uninformed and fear-mongering sort, and that is our biggest problem. Note, next, that the disease broke out in China at the end of 2019, and peaked in end-February; they have already brought it under control with a little more than 80,000 infections and 3,000 deaths. Also, though the disease is supposed to have spread worldwide, more than 80% of the deaths outside China have happened so far in only three countries: Italy, Spain and Iran. In India, just before the lockdown began - in a country so densely populated, so poor, so ill informed, so careless about health and hygiene, the number of infected had been a little short of 500, and the number of dead, 10. Remember to stay clean, avoid crowds and catching a cold if you can, and unless you are very young or very old, there is hardly ANY need to worry. Infection does not mean you have to fall ill, 80% of those who fall ill show only mild symptoms, and, I repeat, the fatality rate is very low, unless you are old and already ill with other diseases (read this article, especially the last lines). Lockdown is good to slow the spread and succour the desperately stretched healthcare services, but I shall stick my neck out and lay a wager on two things: the government will not be able to maintain the lockdown for very long without resorting to draconian measures which is bound to turn public opinion quickly and sharply against it (see the last lines of the linked article), and millions are NOT going to die. Please read this interview of one of the world's top 'virus hunters'.

I must also note, in passing, that one over-zealous chief minister (I won't even deign to speculate either on his IQ or his sense of humanity and decency) has threatened a 'shoot at sight order' in case people are found outdoors. The message, unless I have got it all wrong, is this: you are free to die of an accident or heart attack or snake bite, but we'd kill you if you risk dying of the coronavirus. With rulers like these, what hope for the ruled?

Meanwhile, I worry terribly about a) the fate of the vast majority of our poor working class who are in the unorganized sector, and have no social security or insurance or savings to fall back upon: how are they going to survive almost a month with no earnings? (read this article: one of them has told the reporter he is far more likely to die of hunger than of the virus); b) how are essential supplies going to be maintained for weeks with so many restrictions on mass movement of goods and people? and c) won't a vast number of people go mad with sitting at home doing nothing, even if they have enough to eat?

March 26: The worries are mounting rapidly. Do look up this article and this one in today's newspaper. Another concern is that given the cramped and unhealthy conditions in which a very large number of people live (think of metro slums), locking them all at home may not help too much to contain the infection.

I am truly glad that the central government has at least begun to move on the other great concern - how to prevent the vast number of poor from suffering too much - by announcing a large relief package. Knowing how leaky, clumsy and slow government delivery systems are, however, I strongly believe that the well-off public at large should come forward to help. I have started doing my bit; I hope a lot of my readers will do the same locally by contributing to relief funds and programmes being set in motion by NGOs and individual social activists. Every little helps: a thousand rupees donated by ten million individuals each (let's say everyone who owns a car and a decent house) would make a fund of Rs. 1,000 crore. That can feed a lot of people for a month or two.

March 28: It seems that the epicentre of the infection has now moved to the USA, while it is slowing down in Europe. And for some humour, look this up on my other blog.

March 29: It's barely a week into the countrywide lockdown, but I think anger is beginning to spread among a lot of people who do not enjoy the luxury of sitting at home for weeks and months on end without significant hurt to their stomachs or their pockets...

Coronavirus: are we hyperreacting?

I am writing this because several people have prodded me to. This is my take.

I have no idea why a very influential and supposedly responsible organization like the WHO has started bandying around words like epidemic and pandemic, despite the Director-General himself saying they should not be used carelessly. Well, let's look at a few very recent figures.

Since the scare began at the start of the year, a little more than 5,000 people have died, 3,200 of them in just one country, China. Out of 80,000+ who were infected there, nearly 67,000 have recovered already.

In the US, a little more than 3,000 infected people have been identified, and 60 have died (that's two per cent, by the way, and a little more digging will probably reveal most of them were old and weak and even ill already).

In India, positively identified infections has just risen beyond 100, and the number of deaths so far is 2 (oh, no, some will tell me: you are way off the mark; the actual number is 3).

Put this a little in perspective. Without a pandemic/epidemic of any sort, the number of normal deaths per day is 150,000 (two-thirds of age-related causes); 26,000 in India alone. That's almost 55 million a year (by the way, 150,000 people died in road accidents in India alone in 2018, and no sign of any alarms anywhere!).

As for epidemics and pandemics. When I was a child I was told of cholera and malaria epidemics which killed off whole villages in a matter of days, hundreds of thousands before the storm abated. The greatest pandemic we know of, the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19, also called the Spanish Flu, killed off 20 to 50 million worldwide; some experts claim nearly 100 million, or nearly 3% of the world population at that time!

By reacting as we are, putting whole nations in lockdown mode, we shall probably be doing economic harm to ourselves on a scale from which it will take many decades to recover. Talk of mass hysteria...

Also, everybody seems to have forgotten about similar scares which arose and subsided quickly without doing significant harm in the fairly recent past:mad cow disease, chicken flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zyka, H1N1, SARS and on and on. Even  AIDS didn't create a tiny fraction of this kind of consternation worldwide!

So my take is very well expressed by this letter-to-the-newspaper writer. It is good that we are taking precautions, so that the death toll may be limited to a few thousands, but I am not sure we are doing it the best way.

And yes, as I write this, I am perfectly well aware that the new virus could kill me, but equally that, statistically speaking, there are at least ten much more likely ways that I might die. And no, I am not going to drink cow's urine as a potent preventive, even to save my life.

If some of my readers think this is the voice of informed and sound common sense, please share it with as many people as you can, in the larger public interest. 

P.S., March 18: Here is an article by an infectious-disease trained epidemiologist which can help to calm your nerves, if you can read, understand, think and remember. 

Mamata's minions making millions: how amazing?

Mamata Banerjee’s electoral advisor Prashant Kishor (already notorious statewide as ‘PK’) is apparently dismayed to find out that while Didi deliberately lives an austere lifestyle, her footsoldiers, even far down the line (including municipal councillors) are living it up and flaunting it. He fears that this could boomerang on the party at the hustings next time round, because the opposition – read everyone from the BJP to the CPI(M) – could make a noisy issue out of it.

Who in this country pretends to be surprised at this late date? Read my three-part essay on corruption. Personally, I would lay much of the blame for the persistence of the disease on the mass media: they hold the spotlight steadily and harshly on those at the very top, to wit prime ministers and chief ministers, so that they have to keep forever to the straight and narrow or go the way of Lalu Prasad and Jayalalitha (in fact, when I am in a cynical mood, I often say that I would much rather leave the top jobs to others: too much trouble, too little scope of wholesale loot!), and pay scant attention to how the minions are feathering their own nests with impunity. The saying in political circles, indeed, is that if you can become and stay a councillor for two successive terms, your children can live in gravy all their lives without doing a day’s honest work.

In fact, it has been at least three generations since most young people who have known they cannot make a good enough living in any ‘respectable’ profession and don’t have the stomach for a life of wholesale and large-scale crime, take to politics as a duck takes to water. They have no ideology and no ideals and no goals beyond enriching themselves quickly and effortlessly through the bribes, cutbacks and speed money that come with assumption of office. They always know which side of the bread is buttered, they quit fading parties like rats deserting a sinking ship,  they always salute the rising sun, and they keep changing badges over and over again. The real tragedy of our political life is that this type has become too numerous to satisfy all of them, and too impatient and fickle, so the top leaders, who have to utilize their money and muscle and loyalty to grab power and hold on to it are always living on a powder keg with a slow fuse attached; the ancient saying ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ has acquired a much more sinister immediacy in these ‘democratic’ days than in the days when real kings ruled! I remember India’s political history clearly since the early 70s, I pity the leaders of Congress, CPI(M), Trinamool, BJP and the rest equally, and I marvel at the composure and (short-lived? suicidal?-) self-confidence of top leaders who have to rely on this kind of human material to govern this land or even parts of it.

I have said and not once before that the roots of the malaise lie in four social factors:

1.      Far too many people have become convinced that a flashy and expensive lifestyle alone gets you widespread social approval, despite all our high-falutin’ talk about the nobility of 'plain living and high thinking',

2.      Far too many people, who started off poor or hard up, can see politics as they have understood it as their only passport to quick money and ‘fame’ (notoriety, to their minds, does almost quite as well: no harm in occasionally spending a few months in jail if that ensures the five-star lifestyle for the rest of the year),

3.      There is too little systemic surveillance, condemnation and punishment of that kind of living.

4.      Every opposition party goes all out to hoist the one in power on this ‘corruption’ petard, knowing full well all the time that those whom they are luring into their own camps from the ruling dispensation are being drawn only by the tacit promise of carrying on making the ill-gotten gains they have got habituated to making for a few more years. 

So those who pretend to beat their breasts over the rottenness of the system are either naïve and ignorant, or very cynical but want to look good in their own circles (just the same as claiming loudly that only others, ‘bad people’, watch porn!), or just have too many idle hours to kill every day in useless chatter. The comfortably salaried, holier than thou, middle-aged  middle class is the most culpable.

There: I have just ensured that like John Stuart Mill, I am never going to win an election myself!

[Oh, and it would be remiss of me if I didn't mention that I am very pleased that the post titled 'Addendum to the population bomb post' has stayed so long on the most-read list, and the post on Father Wavreil has come back, and the one titled 'Missing you, my heart' too: though the memory of the girl - besides my own daughter - who caused me to write it only makes me want to puke these days: how could I have been stupid enough, at fifty, to be besotted with someone so completely ordinary, common and nondescript? I often think that most women can live with a modicum of safety and decency only because the average man is so docile and tolerant and gullible.]

Another milestone

I just noticed tonight that I have had two-thirds of a million page views, and I wanted to take formal note of that. 

So anyway, it’s been a pretty long time now, and already I can only remember with difficulty the days when the internet did not exist, and weblogs (to give them their long forgotten original name) did not exist, and I was not writing in my blog. I was just about to step into middle age when I started, and I shall be a ‘senior citizen’ in four years! Those very few who have been reading this blog continuously from the start, can they point out, in terms of specifics, how I have changed over the years, as I must have?

As I said, I read up a lot of good books this last time I spent a week’s vacation at my daughter’s place. One of them the classic Hutom Pyanchaar Noksha by Kaliprasanna Singha (around whose character Sunil Gangopadhyay built his magnum opus Shei Shomoy, Those Times): what a master satirist he was! I can only compare him with Jonathan Swift, and in Bangla, with Rajshekhar Basu, aka Parashuram. In recent times, Chandril Bhattacharjya was going that way, but alas, he seems to have lost his touch too early, and become too hackneyed, besides being too much style and too little (original-) substance. I also read Shashi Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu (constantly recollecting Russell’s Why I am not a Christian the while), and though it is very well informed and brilliantly written, I couldn’t help wondering how, in a much longer and much more involved life (in the sense of being in high places, at least) than mine, it could not have occurred to him to criticize much that is crude and bad and indefensible about Hindus, too: he has lightly touched upon the evils of casteism and superstition and fatalism, but hardly bothered to mention how our popular culture, with all its noise and corruption and discourtesy in public life and kowtowing shamelessly to the powerful and cruel indifference to the welfare of our flora and fauna, our near-universal prudery in matters sexual, our conflation of education with acquiring skills to make a living by, etc. etc. sit so uncomfortably with our pretensions to being the inheritors of the loftiest, most liberal, most spiritual body of philosophical speculations in the world. 

The Met. Department has hit the nail on the head once more. The nor’wester storm-showers have arrived one month ahead of schedule. It goes without saying I am enjoying them hugely. It is good that the cold has stopped biting, but the longer summer is delayed and the more the dust in the air is washed away, the happier I am.

I chanced upon this article on CNBC recently. It’s written for American youth, but since our youth, at least the urban, ‘educated’ section of it, is desperately aping them, I guess many of them could profit by it if they took its message to heart. I have lived by that outlook on life myself, and it has helped me hugely to live a decent and uncomplicated life.

And here’s a link to a news item about our PM lamenting about how pitifully few rich people declare their real taxable incomes. Most powerful man in the country, and he apparently can do nothing about bringing them to book: doesn’t even seem to know who they are! Can we safely assume, at least, then, that all the hoo-ha about how he will bring all the trillions of dollars in black money back home from stashes abroad, as well as all the noisy promises made back in end-2016 following the demonetization shock therapy (‘just give me a few months’!) was a farrago of nonsense, meant only to garner the votes of umpteen foolish and besotted millions? Mind you, this is not about one Narendra Modi: virtually all our leaders have proved to be men of straw where such issues were concerned. As far as I can remember the last man in power to make any more than a half-hearted attempt to book our treasure of black money was V. P. Singh when he was union finance minister, in the mid-1980s, but all the children who write their learned opinions about such matters on social media these days won’t even know what happened to him without googling it…

Just to let you know that as I head towards the million-page views mark, my mind is just as observant and active as ever. Bye for now.