I pledge

I pledge to wear the mask to prevent others from catching the infection if Ive caught it.

While Im at it, might as well get rid of all my hypocrisy in one go and pledge to reduce pollution by not driving my vehicle ever. Or even go by public transport coz that pollutes as well. And we know that air pollution kills 4.6 million other people every year. Hey, I’ll also save 1.35 million other deaths due to road accidents every year.

Hey, while I’m at it. Will stop ordering on Amazon, Swiggy and anything that is brought to my home in a vehicle that pollutes. Why, I pledge to not buy anything made in a factory – clothes, mobile phones, furniture. The factory pollutes. The freight from the factory to the retailer to my house pollutes. No consumerism, no pollution.

I might as well pledge away all my hypocrisy. Go vegetarian. The global meat industry is responsible for 40% of the global greenhouse emissions. And climate change kills 150,000 other people every year. While at it, I’m switching off the electricity in my house. Electricity production accounts for a third of greenhouse gas emissions. We can use candles. Switching off the refrigerator and the aircon would also reduce greenhouse gases, but since there’s no electricity anyway, that’s a moot point.

I pledge to grow rice, pulses and vegetables in my backyard and live off it. No point polluting the air getting all this stuff from farms, is there? And of course, once my current clothes tear, I’m going to cover my unmentionables with the leaves of the banana plant in my backyard. I don’t want to kill, you see.

And because I don’t want others to die, I’m going to stop paying taxes coz the taxes fund the army and the army is busy protecting the country. They could die protecting us, but I don’t want that! Let the foreigners invade. Let no one lose their life’s protecting us from floods and riots.

I pledge to stop spreading fear on social media on Covid 19. It doesn’t kill directly like the killers above, but it kills businesses, kills the livelihoods of self employed people such as Uber drivers, waiters in restaurants and so on. Which will ultimately kill people. So imagine how many lives I’ll save by not forwarding doomsday messages on social Media. Or even by not reading them!

Now that I’ve saved so many lives, let me save my own. I pledge not to eat fatty food even though it grows in my backyard. I don’t want a heart attack and no ambulance around to take me to a hospital. No vehicles to drive me remember. No sweets, no diabetes.

I pledge not to smoke or drink. I don’t want to be part of the 7 million statistic who die every year due to smoking, or 1 million who die due to second hand smoke. Or the 3 million people who die every year due to alcohol.

I feel good that Ive completely gotten rid of my hypocrisy!

But hey, if I don’t meet anyone or don’t get out of my house, I don’t need the mask anyway!

What’s the plan?

All of us have become experts in looking at graphs over the last few months. Looking at, not deciphering. Look at the graph below, the famous flattening the curve graph.

Doesn’t this mean that we will have fewer cases because of the lockdown?

Most people seem to think that flattening the curve means reducing the number of cases. Not true. The area under the red part equals the area under the blue part. Which means, the number of cases will be the same but spread over a longer period.

So effectively, instead of getting a 4 lakh cases in a month, you’ve spread it over three months.

What? What was the purpose of the lockdown then?

The lockdown gives the time for the government to build up the hospital infrastructure to cater for the spike. A lockdown cannot reduce the number of cases because once you open up, the virus has to start spreading.

So if your government is still locking down, I think it’s time to question the government on why they haven’t built the hospital infrastructure in three months, instead of continuing to live in fear.

Finally please take some time to do some research on the effectiveness of the lockdowns. In the three lockdowns between March 25th and June 8th, the number of cases continued to increase. There was no discernible spike at any point. Tamil Nadu has gone for a super lockdown but the number of cases continue to increase. Even a sixth grader can tell you that there’s no correlation. Unless of course it’s the sixth grade failures who run our government.

The number of cases are increasing.

The number of cases will continue to increase. So a person who wasn’t infected during the lockdown is likely to catch it now. The only difference is that there are more hospital beds, ventilators and PPEs to handle the number of cases.

The purpose was never to reduce the number of deaths. It was to delay it by a month or two to build up the hospital infrastructure.

When does the curve reduce?

The curve reduces when the virus runs out of people to infect.

This can happen only when the virus has infected that many people, and the people develop antibodies to fight the virus if it tries to infect them again.

So we’re a long way away from that? There are only 4 lakh infected people in India

There are only 4 lakh known infected people in India. ICMR did an antibody test in 80 districts in India and found that 0.73% of the population was infected at some point and developed antibodies. That’s close to 1 crore infected.

But the antibody test shows that most of these people – 96 lakh to be precise – didn’t even realize they were infected because the infection was so mild. Or they got infected before we gave it a name and attached a counter to it. Like me – I lost my sense of taste for a week in January.

At some point, that 1 crore will become 10 crores and maybe 20 crores, and that will see the point where the cases decline.

So what’s the way forward then?

A. Question the government on the lockdown. Did they build enough infrastructure to handle the cases?

B. The way forward is herd immunity. Making sure that most people are infected, and the fear vanishes. The other option is for someone to weld themselves shut till the vaccine is found. But remember, you still need to buy groceries and that’s potential for an infection too! Till then, sneeze into a tissue and wash your hands if you don’t want to get it.

Masks?

The CDC in the US has found that masks do not reduce the risk of catching the virus. Check the study here.

Around 80,000 medical professionals in the US have been infected. Do you think they didn’t wear masks?

So what’s the plan?

Judging by the absence of the great leader on TV, I assume the government has given up trying to contain the numbers. He probably thought that on March 24th, he could announce a lockdown and emerge a hero by May 31. Too bad, the virus has its own plans.

The government will show that its working, by issuing inane circulars. The “educated” and the rich will think that the government is doing its job. No one wants to know what’s happening outside their apartment complexes – That most of India, especially rural India, is not even wearing masks!

Again, what’s the plan?

March 24th – 500 cases, everyone welded themselves shut

May 4th – 50000 cases. Nothing has changed medically. People started coming out, ordered swiggy, got their part time maids in

June 8th – 250,000 cases. Nothing has changed medically. People have started going to restaurants. Resorts open.

See the trend? Skip all the milestones of 1 lakh, 2 lakh, 15 lakhs….

There’s a chance that you’ll catch it sitting at home. Read this.

Herd immunity means that we can quickly open up the state borders, international borders, open up the economy completely and not worry about a second or a third wave of infections.

And herd immunity may not mean 60% of the population needs to be infected. That’s a theoretical number. It just means that enough need to be infected to prevent the virus from spreading.

Open up. Gain herd immunity. There’s no other option.

And here’s my favorite line on masks. If masks work, why aren’t we opening up the entire economy in its original state? And if they don’t work, what’s all the fuss about wearing them anyway?

Recovery rate

In one of my previous posts, I had pegged the recovery rate for Covid 19 as close to 99% based on the serological study conducted by ICMR. Of course no one took me seriously.

So let’s look at the recovery rate based on the numbers we know – ie the numbers that you’re tracking on a daily basis in the newspapers and worldometer. Thanks to Prashanth Jnanendra for planting the seed for this post.

Based on current reports, the current recovery rate is over 50%. Pretty good as is, but as misleading as it can get.

Worldometer pegs the current recovery rate as 95%. Much better than 50%, but still not accurate as its based on any case which has had an outcome.

Imagine there are 1000 infected every day and 1 person dies every day. And it takes 14 days on average for someone to recover. So on Day 15, there would be 15,000 cases but only 999 recoveries from Day 1. So the recovery rate is 999 divided by 15,000, or 6.6%. On Day 21, there would be 21,000 cases but only the first 7 days would have recovered. So voila, the recovery rate is 33.3%!

Improvement because of better medical facilities? Impact of lockdown? Wrong. It’s just simple maths.

Back to Day 1. You need to check how many from Day 1 have recovered. You can’t add on the guys who are still recovering to calculate the recovery rate. So for day 1, the recovery rate is 99.9%.

We don’t have the data on recoveries by day. But if you look at it, I’m pretty sure it’ll come close to the ICMR number of 99%.

Back to this graph. If you look at the slope of the recoveries, it’s following the slope of the infections, except lagging behind by 2 to 3 weeks accounting for the recovery period. It’s like a one day cricket match. The oppositions run rate is following the first innings, but just lagging behind a few overs. And that’s good news.

What’s your R0?

Imagine you’re walking along the street. You see a group of people pointing up towards a building. You also look up to see what they’re looking at. Soon a big group forms and everyone is intently staring up at the point where everyone else is pointing to. And you realize there’s nothing there. It was a psychological experiment to show that if one person points upwards, chances are that a lot of people will follow.

Call it what you may. Herd mentality. Group think. But this has been used from time immemorial. Religion. Patriotism. The IPL. Linguistic fervor. And now, we’re seeing it in the Covid 19 paranoia.

Can we use the same thing to change the world?

You’re one of two types of people.

Exhibit A: The group that thinks that Covid 19 is not as dangerous as mainstream and social media make it out to be.

Exhibit B: The remaining who thinks that we need to wait for the vaccine before we can step out, or sitting on the fence not knowing whether to trust the doomsayers or the naysayers.

People in Exhibit A just need to talk to one or two people in Exhibit B. About:

• Be safe, be aware but yes, you can step out of your doorframe with an infinitesimally low probability that you’ll catch it
• Yes you can order Swiggy, you can go out and eat at restaurants and you can do the things you did before the lockdown.
• Get onto a diet of not reading any info about C19. Reading the number of cases every day in your city and country is not really helping you in any way except to make you more paranoid.

And if each of those two people hop across to Exhibit A, they can start converting more and more people and restoring the world to normalcy. So similar to the virus spreading at a rate of R0 (the number of people infected by one person), we should look at spreading this message. And it’s not just by sharing this blog. You have to sit with them and convert them.

And if you’re in Exhibit B and reading this blog… Look for someone in Exhibit A to pull you over…

Social media was flooded with generic offers of help to friends after Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide. Why don’t you convert some of those offers to pull people out of their Covid 19 depression?

So what’s your R0?

What’s the purpose of a lockdown?

In one of my previous posts, I had equated the lockdown to a terrorist act. A rape. Genocide. I still maintain that, and the fact that anyone who talks about extending or reintroducing a lockdown would be in fact condoning rape. But this post talks about the theoretical rationale for a lockdown.

Does anyone know what this is? The “flatten the curve”. The orange part of the graph shows the growth in infections if there’s no lockdown. The blue part shows that we need to spread the infections over a few months so that the hospital system can handle it. And that’s why you supposedly need to lockdown.

So, a lockdown is meant to give the government time to build up hospital infrastructure so that the curve flattens. Nowhere does it say that the lockdown will bring the number of cases to 0. That’s outright stupid, and if it happens in a country like NZ with a third of the population of Bangalore, that’s just an outlier. The mighty WHO has also said that the lockdown is a temporary fix.

We endured the lockdown for 2 months. The government was supposed to have built the hospital infrastructure by now. We’re nearing three months and still bars, cinema halls and schools are closed. Open up, because the hospital infrastructure has been built. Or has it?

Still, the intellectuals are talking about reintroducing a strict lockdown. Wait didn’t Tamil Nadu introduce a 12 day super lockdown? Do they need 12 more days to apply finishing touches to the new hospital infrastructure? Or do they have no clue about the purpose of a lockdown?

By the way, rural India doesn’t seem to have received the memo on the paranoia. We went for a holiday to Mysore and 90% of the people are not wearing masks. Social distancing? What’s dat? Weddings of 500 guests. Bring it on! Higher end restaurants running at 100% capacity? Of course, especially on a weekday evening. And on the drive from Mysore to Coorg, that number increases to 99% without masks in the villages.

Before any of you jump, check the stats. Mysore has a grand total of 14 active cases. Fourteen. For a population of 1.2 million.

Instead of parroting that we need a lockdown, we need to sit and pause and ask ourselves and of course the government, what they achieved in terms of hospital infrastructure in three months. And what they hope to achieve in the next round in Tamil Nadu.

The purpose of a lockdown is to give the government time to build up the medical infrastructure. And then open up. Period. Question the blatant rape of our freedom by shutting our businesses and our social activities. Don’t blindly forward messages on lockdowns over WhatsApp.

1 crore cases in India : Why that’s excellent news

What was the news?

The Indian Council for Medical research yesterday published results of a sero survey showing that prevalence of Covid19 in India is 0.73%

The ICMR has also published a very critical number – The Infection Fatality Rate is 0.08%

Okay what is a sero survey?

The current testing for Covid 19 checks if a person is currently infected. Obviously to treat him and trace his contacts.

A sero survey looks for antibodies. The survey, if positive, shows that the person was infected by Covid 19 and has recovered. Once he or she recovers, there are Covid 19 antibodies in his system.

Okay, so what does this mean?

The survey shows that 0.73% of the population was infected with Covid 19 and has recovered.

Translating that to real numbers for the entire population of 1.35 billion in India, it means 1 crore people in India have been infected with Covid 19.

They were infected, their body’s immune system fought the disease and it produced antibodies. These people weren’t aware that they caught the disease, but the antibody test showed that they had it and they recovered.

What? Why on earth is that good news?

Three reasons.

One, it shows that for most people the disease is so mild that you won’t even know youve caught it and that youve recovered from it – like a simple sniffle or a cough! Well, this shows that the balance 97 lakh of the population (1 crore minus 3 lakh reported) weren’t even aware that they were infected. And they have recovered!

Two, and equally important, it shows that the disease is not as deadly as we initially thought. The death rate is 0.08%, which is much lower than what the media has been reporting of 3%. ICMR has also published this number in the report.

For all the doomsayers who said that the government is under reporting cases, it’s actually good news when the number of cases is higher than reported. Because your chance of dying even if youve caught the disease is much, much, much lower than we initially thought.

And three, the recovery rate is close to 99%!

Is this a fact? Or opinion?

As factual as it can be. The ICMR has published the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) as 0.08%. You can Google what IFR means. So nothing in this post is opinion.

It’s cold facts.

Are there any other countries that have similar findings?

Of course. The CDC in the USA, equivalent to the ICMR in India, has published the IFR there as 0.26%. They are more conservative in their approach and estimate only 35% as asymptomatic. Stanford University has also done a sero study showing 1.5% of the population is infected.

So the risk of dying from Covid 19 is 0.08%?

Nope, that’s the Infection Fatality Rate. That means that out of 10000 people who are infected with Covid 19, 8 will die. And most of them who have co-morbidities.

The risk of dying from Covid 19 as of June 10 in India is even lower – 0.0006%.

But that’s still a risk isn’t it? Anything more than 0 means it’s a risk?

Anything has a risk. But we weigh that risk against the potential benefits. For example, there’s a risk of 0.011% of dying in a road accident in India. Almost 15 times higher than the risk of dying of Covid 19. But we say that that risk is tiny compared to the benefits of road travel. We accept the risk of flying against the minute possibility of the aircraft crashing.

And we relish the taste of fried food, against the small possibility of dying of a heart attack. Which is 150 times higher than dying of Covid 19 in India for ages between 30 and 69.

The risk of dying of Covid 19 in India is 0.0006%. We weigh that against sitting cooped up at home and decide that we have to move out.

There will never be 0 risk of dying. Ever.

Why aren’t there celebrations then?

Because we are flooded by a strong current of negative news by the media. It’s in their DNA to publish bad news to grab eyeballs for advertising revenue. We’re also flooded by negative news on social media. The government is worried that they’ll lose votes because the lockdown failed, so they’re busy scaring us.

We have to buck the trend and celebrate the reality. Every one of us who reads this and believes this needs to spread the word and the belief. It also means that we should start moving towards normalcy. No, not the “New” normal but the old one. Be safe, no one wants to catch the infection. But let’s get back to restarting our normal life.

Catch that coffee with friends. Take your kids out for that meal out on a Sunday. Shop for the latest fashions. The economy needs us to restart the virtuous cycle. The waiters, the Uber drivers, the salesmen in malls – Everyone needs us to get going again.

Share this post if you believe that we need to get back to normal.

Short takes on C19

Imagine there’s a stampede. People are running helter skelter. After the dust settles, you see the extent of the damage. That’s happening now. We’ve unlocked (although a lot of people are not aware of it). There’s a good amount of traffic on the road. But businesses are bleeding. Airlines are realizing that it’s better to ground the fleet than fly it at 50% and low yields. Restaurants are seeing one or two customers a day. A shop that sells savouries and stuff is reporting that business is half the usual. A car dealer i spoke to said business is 25% of usual. A bakery near our place is running at 30% revenues. Uber and Ola are hardly seen on the roads. And fear continues to spread on WhatsApp and mainstream media. The Hindu, which used this headline in March – “Death toll spikes to 3″ is using this headline in June to describe a drop by 2000 cases a day – “Marginal decrease in cases reported”. The Times of India, on June 8th, had a blaring headline: “Bangaloreans apprehensive about stepping out”. Well done.

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Deep philosophy alert. If our child is scared, would we scare him further? Why are we then spreading fear on WhatsApp, and reading it? We’re so particular about wearing a mask to a) protect ourselves from infection and b) prevent others from catching an infection from us. Why are we then so casual about not filtering toxic information that we read on WhatsApp, and why are we so trigger happy to forward that toxic information to everyone. You may argue that it’s harmless and it’s up to the reader to decide. Well, let’s ask that restaurant owner who opened up on Monday whether he thinks it’s harmless or not.

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Probability or risk assessment is something very few people think of during these times. They don’t hop into an Uber thinking their probability of dying of C19 will increase if they do that. Of course it will, but from 0.00058% to 0.00059%. They don’t go to a restaurant to protect themselves from dying. But the BigBasket guy who delivers their vegetables could have had a cuppa at one of the restaurants with twenty of his Swiggy, Uber and Zomato buddies sneezing on his face when he’s sipping his coffee.

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Below is a table which shows the risk of dying of various causes in India. We get completely petrified if someone famous dies of C19. Hell we get petrified if a political figure tests positive. But we don’t bat an eyelid while boarding a plane, knowing that there have been a lot of famous personalities who have been killed in plane crashes. Or car crashes.

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There is only one way you can completely protect yourself from dying of C19. Grow cotton to stitch your clothes and grow vegetabled, fruits and grains for your food. And don’t meet anyone. Oh, but then you’ll probably die of boredom. Or the roof falling on your head. Best to buy a basketball to keep you company, but from a salesman at Decathlon who has already been tested negative.

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At last count, 381 daily wage migrants died on the Shramik Special trains on their way home. And 500 died walking back. But, who’s counting these “cases”?

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At last count, 15 people were beaten up and killed by the police during the lockdown. To prevent them from dying of C19.