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Covid-19: Are Indians letting their guard down against a possible third wave?

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 12:18:45 +0000

Globally, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have been around “200,174,883 confirmed cases of Covid-19, including 4,255,892 deaths,” that were reported to the WHO till August 5. As many as 658,630 cases have been administered. India has reported over 42,982 of those cases. Twenty four hours later, on Friday August 6, India reported around 44,643 new Covid-19 cases, taking the cumulative tally to 3,18,56,757. According to media reports this is the third straight day when over 40,000 new cases have been reported.

While the numbers are on the rise, even if the rise is ‘slow’ when compared to the onset of the devastating second wave, the Union government has not sounded any alarms as such yet. The health ministry’s focus, via its media statements, remains on the Recovery Rate being an encouraging 97.37% currently, it too has acknowledged that the daily cases have crossed the 40 thousand mark once again. India’s Daily Positivity Rate is 2.58%, and according to the ministry it has been less than 3% for the last 10 days. “Less than 50,000 Daily New Cases have been reported since thirty-nine consecutive days,” stated the ministry applauding the “sustained and collaborative efforts by the Centre and the States/UTs.” According to officials statements testing is also at a high and “cumulatively, India has conducted over 47.48 crore (47,48,93,363) tests so far.” The government’s Covid-19 tracker map however, shows that the worst is not yet over..

#COVID19 UPDATE

49.53 Cr. Vaccine Doses administered so far under Nationwide Vaccination Drive

3,10,15,844 total recoveries across the country

Recovery Rate currently at 97.36%

41,096 patients recovered during the last 24 hours

Read: https://t.co/Pjbmwi22n6 pic.twitter.com/lSjdTGLIIK

— PIB India (@PIB_India) August 6, 2021

States sound early warnings

Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik has minced no words and warned that the state will not hesitate to “impose complete lockdown if people fail to observe Covid guidelines”. Naveen Patnaik’s warning, the Telegraph reported, had coincided with Shree Jagannath Temple’s chief administrator announcing that the shrine will open again from August 16. The state’s CM has cautioned against “the possible third wave of the pandemic” stated the news reports. The CM reminded the people that some countries are already showing an upswing in Covid-19 cases and said that “At this point, there is an urgent need to adhere to Covid guidelines.” He added that even though the state has been “unlocking” and shops can now remain open from 6 A.M – 8 P.M this was not the time to let the guard down. According to the news report a “weekend shutdown” continues in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Puri, as they have reported a high caseload.

Meanwhile, the the chief administrator of the Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA), Dr Krishan Kumar told the media that while the temple will be open from August “only the people of Puri town will be allowed to have ‘darshan’ of the deities for the first five days. As there is a weekend shutdown on August 21 and August 22 (Saturday and Sunday) devotees from other parts of the state will be allowed entry into the shrine from August 23.” Devotees “will have to produce either their final Covid vaccination certificate or the RTPCR negative report, while visiting and will have to wait in a queue for their turn to enter the temple.

In Delhi too, the Health Minister Satyendar Jain has stated that the Delhi Government is “preparing for the worst-case scenario so that we can save precious lives.” He said that the state government has “learnt from the experience of the second wave of Covid-19 and is taking all necessary measures to combat any potential wave,” and over 37,000 beds dedicated for Covid-19 treatment are being created along with ramping up additional health infrastructure including supplies of oxygen, ventilator and ICU beds. He too has warned that people need to be vigilant and follow Covid-appropriate behaviour. “We have made public what our response would be. If the positivity rate now goes up to 5 per cent, then we will go for an immediate lockdown without delay,” said Jain. According to the minister, the Delhi Government is conducting 75,000 tests every day “and aggressive contact tracing is still on to ensure that the situation remains under control.”

Meanwhile, according to a report in Livemint the West Bengal government has also extended the existing Covid-19 restrictions in the state till August 15. The state government has “allowed government programmes at indoor facilities with 50 per cent seating capacity. Buses, taxis, auto rickshaws have been permitted to operate with 50 per cent capacity. Offices, both government and private, are also allowed to function with half the manpower. However, “not more than 50 people will be allowed at weddings and 20 people at funerals. All markets and bazaars will be functional from 7 AM and to 11 AM, while sweet shops will be allowed to function from 10 AM to 5 PM.”

In Tamil Nadu the coronavirus lockdown has been extended till August 9. According to news reports Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has appealed that people avoid stepping out unless necessary and has asked authorities and police to “strictly enforce guidelines”. He has also said collectors and commissioners can enforce lockdowns in specific areas if crowds gather. The Tamil Nadu government has already issued orders that it is now mandatory for people coming from Kerala from August 5 onwards to carry a negative RT-PCR report. The Karnataka government has also made carrying a negative RT-PCR certificate mandatory for those coming from Kerala and Maharashtra.

Kerala continues to report a high caseload and the Health minister Veena George has asked citizens to be “extra cautious and vigilant against transmission of the infection to prevent a third wave from occurring”. Recently the Health Minister Veena George told the state Assembly that the number of Covid patients in the state will increase further. According to a report in Mathrubhumi, the minister while responding to an adjournment motion notice filed by the opposition seeking a discussion on the “unscientific nature of the Covid protocol”, said said that the number of patients will be “double or more than what is reported now”. The minister told the Assembly that if the “third wave occurs even before the vaccination process is completed then the situation could turn worse,” stated the news report.

The Himachal Pradesh government has also made a negative RT-PCR report mandatory for all tourists entering the state. The negative Covid report should not be “more than 72 hours old”. The hill state has seen a huge inflow of tourist traffic. Scores of media reports showed traffic holdups and jams on highways, choked parking lots, and hotels at full occupancy. In some areas it was reported that people were forced to spend the night in their vehicles as they couldn’t find a vacant hotel room.

Over a month ago, the Union Government deputed multi-disciplinary teams to visit Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Manipur in view of the increased number of Covid-19 cases being reported by these States. In July, districts having more than 10 per cent positivity were identified as “districts of concern” reported India Today. Arunachal Pradesh had 19 such districts, Manipur had eight, Meghalaya had seven, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura had four each and Assam had two.

However according to a report in the Economic times the “the ongoing surge in cases in certain regions such as Kerala and northeast India is part of the second wave started by the Delta variant”. It quoted Anurag Aggarwal, director of CSIR-Institute Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology as saying, “There is no third wave yet. We are still in the late phase of the second wave,” he added that the second wave reached later in the northeast and has spread more slowly in Kerala. Another expert cited in the report was K Srinath Reddy, president of Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), who said the rate of hospitalisation significant indicators of a possible third wave were “number (of cases), deaths and hospitalisation. The best indicator is hospitalisation because the other two indicators are vulnerable to undercounting and also because the numbers needing hospitalisation indicate the stress on the health system.”

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Covid-19: What is in a name? A lot it seems!

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 09:01:11 +0000

Image Courtesy:fda.gov

Now emerging variants of Covid-19, the worst pandemic to hit the world in recent times, will soon be named after letters of the Greek alphabet. This announcement from the World Health Organization (WHO) comes in the wake of ‘stigma’ being attached to the coronavirus variants when they are named after the countries they reportedly were identified in first/ variants.

The WHO stated that it has “been monitoring and assessing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 since January 2020”. And after it established “emergence of variants that posed an increased risk to global public health” it categorised them as “Variants of Interest (VOIs) and Variants of Concern (VOCs),” to prioritise global monitoring and research. It then gave them new titles using the Greek alphabets, instead of alphanumeric codes or countries of origin.

As reported in the Verge, the “naming diseases after geographical locations has a long history that includes the Ebola virus (named after the Congolese river) and the Spanish Flu”. Most recently it was the former president of America Donald Trump who had called Covid-19 the “Chinese Virus”. International media, including the Verge, reported how this was one of the factors that led to rancid attacks and hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the US. The WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove had been quoted as saying, “No country should be stigmatised for detecting and reporting variants.” As per Verge Covid-19 was officially named that in February 2020, and before that was referred to as “Wuhan pneumonia” or “Wuhan flu.”

On May 11 the World Health Organisation had said the Coronavirus variant first identified in India in 2020 “was being classified as a variant of global concern.” According to the World Health organisation (WHO), this was based on preliminary studies that showed that it spreads more easily. Named B.1.617,it was reported to be “the fourth variant to be designated as being of global concern” and the other variants of global concern were first detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil. On May 12, the government issued a statement slamming media reports that used the term “Indian Variant”. The information technology (IT) ministry asked all social media companies to “take down” content that refers to “Indian variant”.

However, now that WHO has assigned new labels for Variants of Interest or Variants of Concern, even though they shall not replace existing scientific names it is hoped that they will lessen references that are “stigmatizing and discriminatory.” The WHO has even asked “national authorities, media outlets and others to adopt these new labels.”

Biden reviving hunt for COVID-19 origins?

As theories, including conspiracy based ones, continue over whether Coronavirus was created in and leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in 2019, the truth is yet to be unearthed. According to multiple media reports, US President Joe Biden has ordered that the origins be traced. According to a report in Reuters, “U.S. intelligence agencies are pursuing rival theories potentially including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.” The US president’s written statement reportedly said that Biden had asked his team in March to detail whether the novel coronavirus “emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

According to the news report this has “lent credence to a theory that the virus may have emerged from a Chinese research laboratory instead of in nature.” As reported by WION, “Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo had kept up an unrelenting tirade against China, including accusations that: the virus was man-made; had escaped from the Wuhan lab in the course of secret experiments; and, experiments involving the virus were for military purposes, or what is known as “gain of function”.”

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Fighting Hidden Hunger: ‘Our Mission Is 90% Of Crops Must Be Biofortified’

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 06:52:58 +0000

Bangkok: Two billion people, or nearly one in four individuals, suffer from ‘hidden hunger’ or vitamin and nutrient deficiencies, resulting in mental impairment, poor health, low productivity and even death, according to the World Health Organization.

Children are especially vulnerable to micronutrient deficiencies. Lack of zinc in childhood leads to poor growth and stunting, vitamin A deficiency can cause night blindness and poor immunity, while iron deficiency leads to poor mental and physical development.

Nutritional supplements are one solution, but these are expensive. It would cost ‘US$5.9 billion (Rs 41,764 lakh crore) a year to deliver 14 essential nutrition interventions at full coverage across India’, says this 2016 study in the Maternal Child & Nutrition journal. Compliance is another challenge. Despite a National Nutritional Anaemia Prophylaxis Programme addressing anaemia through supplementation over the past 50 years, more than half of India’s children under five (58.6%) and women (53.1%) were anaemic in 2016, according to the ministry of health and family welfare’s National Family Health Survey, 2015-16.

Why can’t people get required nutrients from food itself, asked American economist Howarth ‘Howdy’ Bouis in the 1990s. Bouis came up with the idea of breeding seed varieties naturally high in micronutrients with high-yielding seed varieties, a concept later termed ‘biofortification’.

Bouis founded the agricultural research non-profit HarvestPlus at the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington D.C. in 2003, which developed high-yielding seed varieties of staple crops including maize, rice, millets and wheat biofortified with vitamin A, zinc and iron.
In face of initial skepticism from public health experts and scientists, Bouis worked tirelessly over decades to develop and then popularise biofortification as a solution for hidden hunger–raising funds, working with breeders to develop seed varieties, conducting research to prove efficacy and convincing governments to invest in the technology.

Each $1 invested in biofortification gives a country a return of $17, showed a 2017 review of HarvestPlus evidence from 2003 through 2016, co-authored by Bouis. Today, biofortified foods are being used by over 30 million farmers across the world, especially in Africa and Asia.

The Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR), run by the ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare, has also developed over a dozen biofortified varieties of cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables and fruit, said this 2017 bulletin.

ICAR also established minimum levels of iron and zinc to be bred into varieties of pearl millet (bajra, kambu), making India the first country to have such standards for millet varieties. Biofortified pearl millet, introduced into the diet of Indian adolescents, led to reduced iron deficiency and improved learning skills and mental ability, IndiaSpend reported in September 2018.

Bouis was awarded the World Food Prize in 2016 for his work in reducing hidden hunger.

“You have to persevere and keep repeating yourself,” Bouis told IndiaSpend in an interview at the ‘Accelerating the End of Hunger and Malnutrition’ conference in Bangkok, Thailand in November, 2018, jointly organised by IFPRI and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Edited excerpts.

What gave you the idea to develop biofortified crops?

I was attending nutrition meetings where nutritionists were saying supplements and fortified foods were needed to address vitamin A deficiency. They said taking one vitamin A capsule daily for six months would reduce child mortality by 23%. A vitamin A capsule costs a dollar. To provide 500 million tablets each year over a decade would cost $5 trillion. But people were already getting vitamin A through food, so I thought why not breed these vitamins into crops so that diet will provide enough nutrition?

I then spoke to scientists and asked if it was possible to develop both high nutrient and high yield crops. But they said no, it would be a trade-off between high yields and high nutrients.

Then I met another group of scientists who said there needn’t be such a trade-off, that it was good for plants to contain more minerals because it would be good for the plants’ own nutrition. So it [developing both high nutrition, high yield varieties] wasn’t a trade-off but was actually complementary.

If we had done that in the 1960s, we would not have all these [micronutrient] deficiencies. Back then knowledge of these deficiencies was poor.

Do you see biofortification as a support to supplementation efforts, such as India’s iron and folic acid tablet distribution programme to address anaemia? Or can biofortification replace supplementation?

It really depends on the situation. About 40% of the daily requirement of iron is being added through biofortification. If 60% of iron requirement is met through diet, then [biofortification] can take this to 100%. But if only 20% of iron requirement is met through diet, [biofortification] will take this up to 60%, in which case supplements will still be needed.

A key difference [between biofortification and supplementation] is cost. You need to invest once in breeding [to get biofortified crops]. Subsequently, you don’t have any cost. With biofortification, the cost would be the same year after year. But supplements are very expensive.

Are nutrients like iron better absorbed through food?

A lot of things determine how much iron gets absorbed by the body. The main factor is an individual’s nutrition levels. If very deficient in iron, they would absorb a lot more iron compared to an individual with adequate iron levels.

How much do you work with the Indian government and how open are they to biofortification?

We focused on trying to get three governments–China, India and Brazil–to invest in biofortification independent of HarvestPlus, and we have managed to do that now. All three governments now independently fund research on biofortified crops. It didn’t happen right away, it took many interactions, but now the Indian government has its own independently-funded biofortified research on crops. So they are enthusiastic about the potential.

Can only one nutrient per crop be fortified at a time? In future, could more than one nutrient be fortified per crop?

We didn’t want to do two nutrients at a time because it is a complicated process and it takes up to 10 years of breeding to fortify seeds with one nutrient. We had to do it one nutrient at a time.

A good example is maize. We chose vitamin A to begin with and fortified maize in 10 years. Now we have 10 years to add zinc. Latin America eats a lot of maize, but while Vitamin A deficiency is not a big problem there, zinc deficiency is. So we are developing maize varieties for Latin America that are high in zinc. What we accomplished with vitamin A biofortification for maize in Africa, we are starting to develop for Latin America.

How many farmers are growing biofortified crops?

There are 170,000 wheat farmers growing biofortified crops in India. It is a drop in an ocean [India has 127 million cultivators], but you have to start somewhere. The mission is that 20 years from now, most wheat varieties currently being grown are biofortified and capture 75% of the market.

Are biofortified crops high in minerals yield after yield, or do farmers have to purchase biofortified seeds after every harvest?

[Biofortified seeds] are not hybrids, so can be planted from previous crops each year. This, however, can’t be done for too many years. They should be purchased every three years, as is the case with regular varieties.

In Africa, you have chosen maize for biofortification because that’s their staple crop, while in India it is rice and wheat. As diets change, will we change which foods are biofortified?

It is not so much the food staple which changes with changing dietary habits, it is other things added to the diet, if you look at what poor and rich people eat. In South India, poor and rich people alike eat rice, but they could add other things [like fruits, nuts or meat].

There is an Indian company Nirmal Seeds which is a biofortification success story. The pearl millet market differs from rice and wheat because of two things–it is not part of the food subsidy programme [Karnataka included millets in its public distribution system in 2012] and most of it is grown from hybrid seeds sold by private seed companies.

Nirmal had a particular variety which was biofortified with iron and also had a 10% higher yield. They told all of their 100,000 customers to buy this variety as it had a higher yield, and placed a logo on it showing it was high in iron. Within one or two years, 100,000 farmers were growing a high yield variety of biofortified pearl millet.

What can the Indian government do to accelerate biofortification?

Our discussions with Indian government started in 2004-05. At that time, there wasn’t much enthusiasm among scientists but we kept going year after year.

India now has a new policy that all varieties of millet have to meet a certain level of nutrition before being released in India. In many countries, you can’t release a seed variety unless it is first tested by the government for disease resistance, drought resistance and iron density above a certain level. So even a high-yielding variety with low iron levels can’t be released. India is the first country to have such standards for millets.

We want them to give highest priority to biofortification. Government needs to give an incentive [to farmers] in public interest, and they can attract the market by including biofortified produce in the food subsidy programme.

Are you satisfied with the progress that biofortification has made?

No, not at all. The mission is to capture 90% of crops grown in a country. There are now 10 million farmers using biofortified crops across the world and we want this to be 200 million farmers by 2030.

But releasing biofortified varieties in the market takes time. It takes 10 years to breed a high nutrient seed variety and 20 years to get it into the market. You have to create a pipeline of varieties year after year till it becomes the norm.

The modern seed varieties developed in the 1970s made a huge difference to yield, so farmers switched to them. But if any new seed [including biofortified varieties] offers just a 3% higher yield, it may not lead to a farmer switching. So it takes time.

It is a matter of sticking it out. You have to do that for a long time. I began raising funds in 1993 and HarvestPlus began operations in 2003. It took 10 years to get a little bit of funding for the first 10 years, but it was only enough to do experiments, not for breeding programmes. There were no private programmes. Now of course you have the hybrids in the private sector. So we work with the private seed companies. You have to have some money to get centres to try new ideas. Now we are at the point when they want to do it and donors are interested [in biofortification].

(Yadavar is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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