Wednesday 29 April 2020

CORONA SUPREMACY




Corona is a noun in the English language (plural noun: coronae) which has different meanings in different fields.

In Astronomy, corona is the rarefied gaseous envelope of the sun and other stars. The sun's corona is normally visible only during a total solar eclipse, when it is seen as an irregularly shaped pearly glow surrounding the darkened disc of the moon.

In Physics, corona is the glow round a conductor at high potential but is also used to denote a small circle of light seen round the sun or moon, due to diffraction by water droplets.

In Anatomy, corona is a part of the body resembling or likened to a crown while in Botany, it is the cup-shaped or trumpet-shaped outgrowth at the centre of a daffodil or narcissus flower. Corona is a circular chandelier in a church. A part of a cornice having a broad vertical face is called corona in Architecture

The expression “Corona Virus” hit the ignorant like me as a jolt of lightening just when we were stepping into the third decade of the 21st century.

According to WHO; Corona viruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). Corona virus disease (COVID-19) is a new strain that was discovered in 2019 and has not been previously identified in humans. Corona viruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people.  Detailed investigations found that SARS-CoV was transmitted from civet cats to humans and MERS-CoV from dromedary camels to humans. Several known corona viruses are circulating in animals that have not yet infected humans.

As COVID-19 begins to shut down India and drives home the idea of a 3-feet social distance between humans; a new reality is emerging.

In the short-term; children and students may not go to school; there may be no movie shows; pubs and restaurants may have no patrons. Welcome to the new world order – where people have time at hand but nothing to do. Quick gains will accrue to the mobile-data providers and satellite-TV providers due to a spurt in media consumption but quick losses will be for petrol pumps and companies; shopping malls, and providers of discretionary health care. Elderly and parents with small children will be less visible outside their homes.

As the video clip from an IIT showed the students there celebrating no classes and no exams; students in technical education will take tests at home, using on line system or an off line assignment. No one will fail, at least in the short run.

Life for an ordinary worker in manufacturing, farm, construction or mining would however go on as usual.  There is no face-mask, no hand-rub sanitizer, no isolation or no quarantine for them. COVID-19 does not discriminate between the rich or the poor, literate or the ignorant, young or old, white or black, male or female, believer or the atheist.

Unfortunately however, COVID-19 virus seems to infect the children of globalisation more than others.

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*The motivation to use the expression came from the title of the novel “The Bourne Supremacy” written by Robert Ludlum in 1986. Jason Bourne is the main character and the protagonist in a series of novels and subsequent film adaptations created by novelist Robert Ludlum. He first appeared in the novel The Bourne Identity (1980), which was adapted for television in 1988. The novel was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 2002. The character originally featured in three novels by Ludlum, released between 1980 and 1990, followed by twelve novels written by Eric Van Lustbader since 2004. There is a video game as well.
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CORONA SUPREMACY was first published on 15 March 2020 on Face book and a lot of mayhem has since been created by corona virus.

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Thursday 23 April 2020

Guidelines and Protocols for Prioritising COVID-19 Patients




Imagine that day when India has reached a situation when every ventilator and every ICU bed in the country is taken and only two beds are available in the army hospital in the ICU for admitting Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. Unfortunately, only one ventilator is available. God forbid, at that moment, the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the Leader of Opposition catch COVID-19 and all three need an ICU bed and a ventilator. What would be the protocol for allocating these resources (2-beds and one ventilator) among the three claimants?

This completely fictional and hypothetical scenario has been presented above purely for communicating the point which is being made. No ill-will or malaise is intended towards anyone caricatured in this picture.

COVID-19 is affecting 210 countries and territories around the world. With confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world nearing two million and deaths from the disease already having surpassed a hundred thousand, a growing number of national and local medical authorities have begun issuing guidelines and protocols that call for hospitals to prioritise younger patients over those who are older.

The positive news about the cases of recovery heading towards half a million mark is getting lost on people because of the fear of death causing cognitive dissonance among people who filter out all positive news and let the feeling of fatality seep in.

There is no denying the fact that no medical and health care system in any country has the capacity of handling the sudden spike in numbers of patients which the likes of Italy and Spain have seen.  The scarcity of healthcare resources in India can be directly attributed to decades of mismanaged public healthcare system. While India is working overtime to ramp up the capacity, the growth of the current epidemic makes it likely that a point of imbalance between the clinical needs of patients with COVID-19 and the effective availability of intensive resources will be reached. Should it become impossible to provide all patients with intensive care services, it will be necessary to apply criteria for access to intensive treatment, which depends on the limited resources available.

COVID-19 does not discriminate among its victims in terms of their social or constitutional status. It did not spare even the British Prime Minister.

In Italy and Spain, the two countries most affected by COVID-19 in Europe, doctors in overwhelmed intensive care units have for weeks been making life or death decisions about who receives emergency treatment. The new protocols, however, amount to government directives that instruct medical personnel effectively to abandon elderly patients to their fate.

There are confidential protocols in Spain, now leaked, which effectively advises that elderly people afflicted by CONVID-19 should die at home. The document stated that dying at home was more humane as it avoids suffering: patients can die while surrounded by their families, something that is not possible in overcrowded hospitals. The protocol also advised medical personnel to avoid referring to the lack of hospital beds.

In Italy, a document prepared by a crisis management unit in the northern city of Turin also proposed that COVID-19 patients aged 80 or older or that in poor health should be denied access to intensive care if there are not enough hospital beds.

What is the best way to serve humanity? Aspects such as who has the greatest chance of surviving an admission to intensive care will come into play. It is up to the doctors to see who has the best chance of survival.

One must ask if the high rate of mortality among the elderly is a feature of COVID-19 or an outcome of discriminatory medical care provided to them. The large numbers of dead, especially among the elderly, appears to be the price that Indians would be paying just like the European countries.

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Sunday 19 April 2020

Mentevirus: Deadlier Than Coronavirus




Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. At this time, there are no specific vaccines or treatments for COVID-19. However, there are many ongoing clinical trials evaluating potential treatments.

What if we hear that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we are being told that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of evolution of culture, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we are then told that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others – human and non-human – as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy.

Please do not dismiss this line of thinking as another conspiracy theory. This approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.

What is being missed out in the World’s War against CONVID-19 is that another infectious psychological disease caused by a mind virus is simultaneously infecting the world much more aggressively and is a companion of the newly discovered coronavirus. Let us for the time being label this mind-virus as MENTEVIRUS.

There are at least three distinctly identifiable variants of MENTEVIRUS infecting people at this time – MENTEVIRUS-COMMERCIO, MENTEVIRUS-INDIVIDUO, and MENTEVIRUS-POLITICO. It is unlikely but imminently possible that an individual is infected with more than one variant of MENTEVIRUS simultaneously. [Nomenclature drawn from the Italian language in memory of so many lives that Italy lost fighting War against CONVID-19]


MENTEVIRUS-COMMERCIO
This virus affects rich business people. The common symptoms are worries and anxieties like:

  • How long before I downsize or stop?
  • How long before my cash reserves and additional credits run out?
  • By the time we return to “normal” many businesses will just not exist while others will be struggling.


MENTEVIRUS-INDIVIDUO
This virus affects individuals, mostly those who are neither rich businessmen nor politicians. The common symptoms are worries and anxieties like:

  • How would I earn if I am locked at home?
  • How long would my cash reserves and savings last?
  • By the time we return to “normal” many people would have lost jobs and a meaningful economic slowdown is expected.


MENTEVIRUS-POLITICO
This virus affects rich business people. The common symptoms are worries and anxieties like:

  • How much time I have before I am no longer able to defend the number of deaths?
  • What if the rates of mortality and gravity of effect on health are actually extreme? What if one of the assumptions - that the virus is contagious and spreads exponentially is erroneous?
  • By the time we return to “normal” the political leadership all over the world will be hard pressed to invest heavily in incentivising re-growth.

Catching a cold when you already have the flu - sounds like a nightmare scenario. Can someone catch two MENTEVIRUSES simultaneously? YES, though this may not happen very often. We need to be studying these MENTEVIRUSES together like they making an ecosystem. If we understand how mind-viruses interact and how certain infections caused by mind-viruses may favour or inhibit each other, then maybe we can develop better ways to target viruses.

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Thursday 9 April 2020

Has TRAI failed the Consumer?




An active competition and rivalry in business is, undoubtedly, conducive to the public welfare, but neither the regulators nor the customers should ignore the fact that competition may be carried to such an extent as to accomplish the financial ruin of those engaged therein and thus result in a derangement of the business, an inconvenience to the consumers, and in public harm.
A price cutter is usually a financially strong player, who makes up his losses of profits on cut-prices either by the number of his sales or by extra profits on other sales to the consumer under the decoy of the cut-price upon one or a few items. The regular player cannot meet such competition and is driven out of business. That which is, properly speaking, "competition" in business, is thereby strangled and the only competition which is promoted is that of the particular branded article against itself.
Fixing and maintaining of a fair price above cost is a commercial necessity; and any other course must end in bankruptcy. When that price is so unreasonably lowered as to drive others out of the business, with a view of stifling competition, not only is that wronged competitor individually injured, but the public is prejudiced by the stifling of competition. Thereafter the market leader begins to extract the costs of buying market share and snuffing out competition from the purchasing public by unreasonably raising the price.
It is a mere truism to say that Jio is responsible for bringing call costs way down in the mobile telecom market. 21-years after the launch of mobile telephone in India, entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited into the mobile telephony market as a late-entrant in 2016, and then racking-up a price-based competition has not been in overall interest of the consumer. The consumer received some price advantage through predatory pricing by jio, but concurrently suffered falling service-quality around call-drops and service disruptions. Jio promised free unlimited calls and texts, as well as affordable data at the time of its launch in September 2016 and became India’s biggest telecom company with over 355 million subscribers at the end of September 2019.  Jio did not earn but bought market share.
On October 9, Reliance Jio announced that it would start charging users 6 paise per minute for outgoing calls to other operators. This is clearly against the operator’s promise of free unlimited calls and texts and Jio hadn’t said that the deal was subject to business dynamics.
One of the main objectives of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is to provide a fair and transparent policy environment which promotes a level playing field and facilitates fair competition. The strangling of competitors by price-cutting is not "competition" but TRAI doesn’t seem to know it.
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