Corona Daily 495: A virus by any other name…

Who names the viruses? - WHO names the viruses.

The current pathogen was initially called the “Wuhan Seafood market pneumonia virus”, not exactly a catchy name. On 11 Feb 2020, WHO stepped in to officially baptize it.

Covid-19 (Coronavirus disease-2019) is the name of the disease, not the virus. The virus is called SARS-CoV-2. (Like AIDS is a disease, but HIV a virus). Surprisingly, in the same breath, WHO said those who remember SARS may get frightened by its latest reincarnation. As a concession, it’s considered all right to refer to it as a virus causing Covid-19.

Before this, Swine flu had caused monumental confusion. Pigs were not a problem, it was contracted from birds. But worried by the name, Egyptian authorities culled more than 300,000 pigs, burying many alive. Since pigs disgust Jews, Israel proposed calling it ‘Mexican flu’, until the Mexican ambassador sternly objected.

Spanish flu, the greatest pandemic before the current one, didn’t start in Spain. After the First World War, Spain had the most liberal press and the courage to talk openly about the epidemic. As a result, Spain got the honour, though it could have originated in Britain, USA or China.  

In 1981, AIDS was called GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). This was both offensive as well as misleading. In Sept 1982, it was renamed AIDS.

In 2015, WHO issued virus-naming guidelines that disallow names of places or animals. No more Ebola (a river in Congo) or Middle East respiratory syndrome, or Mad Cow please. No matter how desperate Trump maybe to call it the ‘Chinese virus’.

Finally, calling it just Coronavirus is also imprecise. In all, this is the seventh Coronavirus. The first four are mild, flu-like. Fifth was SARS (2003), sixth MERS (2012) and now COVID-19, the seventh.

“Novel” is allowed as a prefix, recognizing this term will become obsolete, when a similar one appears in the future. SARS and MERS were also “novel” when they first appeared.

This is one area where the world could do without more novelties.

Ravi

Corona Daily 496: Dirty Money

Eating is necessary, shopping is a must to eat, and touching money usually necessary for shopping.

Banks in China and South Korea now use ultraviolet light to disinfect and sterilize banknotes, then seal them for 14 days before sending them back in circulation.

In places like Bombay, a banknote may be handled by hundreds or thousands before it reaches your hands. Banknotes and coins are ideal vehicles for Corona Virus.

Based on my research, and my own shopping experience, here is a guide to save ourselves from dirty money.

·       Contactless cards are of course the best, but not every country and not every shopper may have one. Smartphone transactions or cards with a pin are the next best option, but a street vendor may not be able to have access to one.

·       Before leaving the house for grocery shopping, arrange your money in denominations 10/20/50/100 and so on. Then wash your hands with soap. Try to give the exact amount where possible, to avoid getting any change.

·       If you know the seller well, and are a regular customer, ask him for his bank details, and transfer the money online. If he is not sophisticated, ask him to keep an account. Give him an advance for a week, or two weeks. That is a way to minimize transactions.

·       In countries like India, where coins are unimportant, refuse to take them. For example, if the seller wishes to give you a ten rupee coin, demand a ten rupee note instead.

Despite these precautions, it is safe to assume that the money you have handled is unsafe. The notes may have transmitted the virus to your hands. That by itself is not a problem.

The key is not to touch your face until the next hand wash. It’s curious how when we are told not to touch our face, we desperately want to rub our eyes, scratch our nose, adjust make-up, twirl our moustache, be polite and stifle a yawn with the hand. Covering the face with a mask or handkerchief may help. This is a lesser discussed benefit of a mask. Gloves don’t help, because if you touch your face with the gloved hand, the risk is the same.

Once shopping is over, wash hands and rub them with soap vigorously. For how long? In times of SARS, we were advised to finish the happy birthday song. For Corona, you should keep washing them until you complete singing your national anthem.

Ravi

Corona Daily 497: Small Numbers Big Numbers

Without context, some numbers appear to be very big.

As of 29 March 2020, nearly 32,000 people have died from Corona, making the monthly average around 16,000.

True this virus is a wanton globe traveler, capable of infecting an American beggar as well as a British prince. The deaths it causes are unnecessary and traumatic. Its prowess scares because none of us wants ourselves or our families to fall victims. Also the big unknown is the scale of the eventual collateral economic destruction and deaths. Having said that, the panic that the daily updates of figures creates is unwarranted. In this year of postponed Olympics, some people watch the Worldometer link as if it were the medals tally table.

***** 

The current world population is 7.8 billion, including 5.8 billion above 15 years.

In 2019, more than 5 MILLION PEOPLE died EVERY MONTH. That figure included:

* 1.7 million dying from cardiovascular diseases (heart attacks, strokes),

* 900,000 from cancer

* 600,000 from respiratory diseases and infections (flu, pneumonia)

* 117,000 from road accidents.

Remember these are monthly figures. (The worldwide lockdown in fact has saved hundreds of thousands from dying on the road. No plane crashes either).

As per the deadliest estimates, Corona virus is capable of killing a 100 million people. (50% adult population infected worldwide, with 3.4% deaths).

With the current mortality rate of 16,000 a month, the global lockdown is a major victory so far. Even if the monthly rate climbs to 100,000 deaths, as it may, it will take the virus 84 years to kill a 100 million people. Viruses don’t last that long.

Lockdown, social distancing, slowing the monthly deaths, and flattening the curve as they call it, will allow the world to produce enough ventilators and a competent vaccine. In that sense, the current numbers are encouraging rather than the other way round.

Ravi

Corona Daily 498: Self-defeating prophecy

There are two kinds of prophecies: self-fulfilling and self-defeating.

A teenager studying for a competitive exam gets increasingly nervous. Only 2% get through, does he have a chance? It’s a vast syllabus, has he really covered it all? Despite studying diligently, on the eve of the exam he is convinced he knows very little. In the exam hall, he starts sweating. Panics after looking at the first question he knows nothing about. Forgets his formulae. And really manages to flunk the exam.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The student’s excessive fear of failure really leads to his failing. Similar phenomena are observed in ulcer patients. Those who keep worrying about their stomach ulcers usually make them worse.

There is another boy, perhaps less bright than the first boy, studying for the same exam. He says 2% are better than 0%. As long as the passing percentage is more than zero, he must have a chance to get through. He is fearless, confident; in the exam hall he begins with what he knows best, and successfully passes the exam.

This is a self-defeating prophecy. We often see this in sport. Players with better nerves can outperform players more talented or skillful.

In the current situation, we must emulate the second boy. When people rebel against the worst predictions, and are confident they will not come true, they manage to defeat the predictions.

First and foremost, individually and collectively, we need to firmly believe this ordeal is going to end eventually. Only that confidence will bring the world back to normal one day.

Ravi

Corona Daily: 499: Buying an Extra Banana

Hunger is not a prerogative of the poor any longer.

The hospital canteen in a major Bombay hospital is seriously understaffed. The canteen focuses on catering to the patients. Doctors and nurses, some unable to leave the hospital, have sporadic access to food. Fortunately, volunteers in the neighbourhood now organize home food for them twice a day.

When we venture out for groceries, it’s a good idea to buy a little more than what we need for ourselves. An extra banana or apple, an extra sandwich, a pack of chips or a bottle of water. People in uniform working on the streets may have money in the pocket, but getting food or drink is not easy. A hot meal or drink is an unthinkable luxury.

On your way back from grocery shopping, if you see a policeman, a street cleaner, a security guard outside an ATM, offer him that extra fruit or sandwich or the drink. Your money has meaning if it starts fighting hunger. You don’t need to be a doctor any more to save lives.

This is not an act of charity. It is simply a token of our gratitude.

Ravi

Corona Daily: 500: Faces and voices

We see hundreds of faces every day. If you use public transport, work in a huge office, you may easily see a thousand faces, and hear hundreds of different voices every day. This is an important human interaction, its value often underestimated.

Now locked up in the house, we may end up seeing 1 or 2 faces, hearing 1 or 2 voices.  The same faces and the same voices day after day. That adds to the sense of being a prisoner.  

To fight this vacuum, start making voice and video calls. Texting is impersonal, voices and images are personal. Don’t text chat, call a person. Better still use whatsApp, Skype, zoom, Facetime for visual contact. Speak daily with your parents on video. Don’t feel shy, or think you are intruding. Faces and voices of strangers on the public transport were intruding in our lives, and we didn’t complain.

Technology has now privileged us to reduce social distancing. And it is mostly free. Use it to see many different faces. Talk to different voices. That will make everyone happier.

Ravi

Fish, Trump, and Modi

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Booker of Bookers. I have tried to read this greatest book several times. After umpteen attempts, the furthest I got was page no. 35. I tried many of his other books, with similar results. Since I was unwilling to consider myself as intellectually inadequate, I called Rushdie a pseudo-intellectual. Like certain avant-garde artists, he relishes in creating literature that will be praised because it is not understood. In a lighter vein, I had suggested Satanic Verses should have been banned for poor writing, not for any other reason.

When I began my anti-Rushdie tirade at a book club which I had just joined, the female readers pounced on me like vultures (metaphorically speaking). One lady had read Midnight’s Children more than twenty times, and had enjoyed it more and more during successive readings. One girl called him the greatest existing writer. An MBA executive recited entire passages from memory.

To be fair, there were other readers there, both male and female, who disliked his writing and agreed with me. We clearly had two camps. One passionately hating Rushdie and the other loving him.

Fish eaters and fish haters

Fish is as polarizing as Rushdie. I hate fish; I can’t sit in a room where somebody is eating fish. By a freak DNA distortion, my brother loves fish. I don’t understand how he can love fish; neither does he understand how I can hate it. The world is full of fish lovers and fish haters. But I have never heard of a riot happening between them.

Nobody calls the fish haters leftists or liberals, fish lovers don’t unfriend them on FB walls; neither party forwards floods of WhatsApp messages giving links to articles endorsing or condemning fish-eating. I don’t think Cambridge Analytica knows I hate fish, neither have they tried to convert me to fish-eating. Fish lovers and fish haters don’t start doubting the intelligence of each other, or stop talking to one another. Why are Trump, Brexit and Modi different from fish?

The only field

Fish is not the only polarizing subject where two sides coexist peacefully. In the book club mentioned above, sixteen years after my joining it, Rushdie haters and Rushdie lovers continue to be good friends. In literature, art, music, science and most other fields, healthy debates happen, differences in opinions persist but they rarely result in violence or wars.

In 2017, following Trump’s election, hate crimes in the USA grew by a record 17%. Brexit so polarized the UK that a week before the referendum, Jo Cox, a young MP, was murdered in broad daylight. In India, after the introduction of a discriminatory law, 53 people were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots in Delhi. In this week’s diary, I will attempt to explain why Trump, Johnson and Modi create a different kind of polarization from Rushdie or fish.

The food chain

Ecological scientists have classified the food chain into four key levels.

Level 1: (Producers): Plants. Plants make their own food and are therefore called the producers. Naturally, plants are the most non-violent species.

Level 2: (Primary consumers): Herbivores or plant-eaters. For example, rabbits who survive exclusively on plants. The world is full of vegetarian animals like rabbits.

Level 3: (Secondary consumers): Carnivores that eat herbivores. Rabbits eat plants, and foxes eat rabbits. So foxes belong to this level.

Level 4: (Tertiary consumers): Carnivores that eat carnivores. Wolves, bears, even eagles and owls eat foxes. They are the tertiary consumers.

You will notice that species like foxes can be predators as well as prey. Like a worker getting harassed by his boss, later beating his wife on returning home.

Species such as tigers or lions are called the apex predators. At the top of the food chain, they are nobody’s prey.

Trump, Brexit and Modi

The modern politicians understand the food chain well. In order to become predators, they need to identify their prey.

Johnson, Farage and other Brexiters identified European migrants as prey. The British, particularly the English, are inherently superior to the continental Europeans, but these outsiders were taking away their jobs. EU fishermen were catching fish in British waters. A danger existed that Brussels would represent a super-state and enslave Britain.

In India, the Modi-Shah combination belied hopes their party will focus on governance. Hindu predators have long identified Muslims as the prime prey. Destroying a 16^th century mosque to build a temple, whatever the rationale, was an animal act. Introducing laws and actions to harass or imprison Muslims suggests Modi-Shah trying to find a well-defined object in the food chain that can be subjugated.

Donald Trump is the apex predator. An American, rich, white male with nuclear weapons at his fingertips is undoubtedly at the top of the food chain. He has identified several species as prey. Muslims, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Chinese and immigrants in general.

Supremacists and herd mentality

Social psychology explains a concept called Group polarization. It says collective thinking and decisions of a group are more extreme than its individual members. A single person hating immigrants or Muslims, when joined by another thousand, can become vicious as a group member; is genuinely angry and hateful, is willing to drive them away or in extreme cases imprison or kill them. Since we are discussing animals in this article, this phenomenon is aptly termed: the herd mentality. Social media facilitates forming of such herds.

The winning formula discovered by modern politicians is to become a predator, and then appeal to voters willing to join the predator gang by forming herds. The two top prey species are immigrants and Muslims. Both are easy targets.

Trump started by calling Obama a Muslim. During the election campaign he advocated issuing ID cards for Muslims. After becoming a president, he imposed a visa ban on several Muslim countries. On the other front, he wants to build a wall to stop Mexicans illegally entering the USA. The laws for new legal immigrants are suffocating; many high caliber immigrants are subjected to a lottery.

Trump’s anti-immigrant stance is particularly amusing, because he and his white supremacists’ base are all immigrants themselves. The earlier immigrants’ attacking potential immigrants is similar to the hypocritical nuclear club: We (USA, China, Russia, UK and France), the members, will produce as many nuclear weapons as we wish, will exercise a veto power over every critical global decision, but no other nation should dream of producing a single nuclear warhead. 

Boris Johnson compared Muslim women wearing burkas to letter boxes. He said the EU nationals who made Britain their home have treated the UK like “their own”country for too long. (Conveniently omitting that British citizens have settled in EU countries as well).

Narendra Modi is more suave than Trump or Johnson. He delegates inflammatory speeches to his Home Minister. On Modi’s watch, beef-eating has become a grave sin and crime, love jihad has entered the vocabulary, a saffron monk is appointed as the chief minister of India’s biggest state, Allahabad has been renamed as Prayagraj. Bangladeshi immigrants are called termites by the home minister, and a recent law advocates discrimination based on religion.

These days we often hear the term “Supremacists”. It’s nothing but declaring yourself as a predator, identifying your prey, and screaming to the world that you are superior to your prey. Whether they are the White Supremacists in the USA or Hindu Supremacists in India, they display a behavioral pattern. They usually belong to privileged classes, are economically well-off, white or Brahmin males, pigeonholing immigrants or Muslims and hating the entire class. They usually bully or dominate their subordinates, wives or house maids. They readily believe in false statistics, in history devoid of facts, and specialize in whataboutism. (When I opposed India’s anti-Muslim legislation, one reader defended it by asking me: what about the female genital mutilation practiced by Muslims in Africa?)

Immigrants

Most immigrants, the Mexicans in the USA, the Poles in the UK, and the Bangladeshis in India do jobs the locals are unwilling to do. The lowest paid; the dirtiest jobs are often the only ones available to them. They face racism, humiliation, harassment, uncertainty and still diligently carry out their work. Their contribution to the economy is significant. In the next five years Britain will face a true crisis because of the shortage of plumbers, carpenters, gutter cleaners, barbers, waiters, bartenders and all low-paid jobs. Bombay’s Hindu supremacists, when they book an Uber, usually find that the driver’s name is Mohammed.

Instead of being grateful to the immigrants, the predator politicians declare them as prey; the voting herds applaud those politicians. All that Trump, Johnson and Modi have to do is to invoke the animal spirit. A winning formula is created: the animal instinct elevates the politician and his followers in the food chain, and the hunting game begins.

Evolution

Each of us has an animal sitting inside us. Civilization is about moving from that animal stage and becoming human. For 70+ years, we have lived without a World War. That is a stupendous human achievement. In every election, the voter needs to ask a simple question. Is the candidate a predator? An excellent clue: Does he talk about immigrants and Muslims? If he does, he wants us to become predators and join him in this hunting game.

Predators play a violent game. That is why Trump, Johnson and Modi are so different from Rushdie or fish.

Ravi