Covid-19 infections are rising fast in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan Hospitals are already struggling to cope ......... The freeing of 1.7bn people—more than a fifth of humanity—from varied restrictions will bring relief to the region’s battered economies. Alas, it promises no relief from the pandemic itself. ......... With some 350,000 confirmed cases and fewer than 9,000 deaths so far, the region’s toll looks relatively modest. Yet those numbers disguise both widespread undercounting and a rate of growth that was frightening even before the lifting of restrictions. At the current pace, the numbers are doubling every two weeks, suggesting that by the end of July, when some models predict the outbreak will peak, the official number infected may reach 5m and the death toll could approach 150,000. ............. Low levels of testing mean that the real numbers could be far worse. One foreign health official in Pakistan reckons the death toll is between two and three times the government’s count. ......... Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, may already have as many as 750,000 cases, even though the official national tally is less than 60,000. .......... Three medical interns at another hospital in the centre of Mumbai recently released a video claiming that they had been left for hours in sole charge of 35 seriously ill covid-19 patients, with no doctors, nursing or cleaning staff to help. ........... In Delhi, the capital, some 600 health workers have tested positive for covid-19—including 329 at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, the country’s grandest government hospital. ........... Overall, India has a ratio of doctors and nurses to population that is half China’s and a quarter of Europe’s. And the virus has now spread from better-served cities to poor rural states such as Jharkhand, where there is one doctor for every 6,000 people. ........... In normal times, the region’s rich can largely insulate themselves from the implications of decades of puny public spending on health. “If they so much as sneeze they flee to Thailand, Singapore or India,” says a doctor at a private hospital in Dhaka. Now, she says, it is “almost impossible” to gain admission to Bangladesh’s elite hospitals, whether for covid-19 or other illnesses. ............ Delhi has relaxed a ban on traditional funeral pyres made of wood, instituted to reduce pollution, because there are too few gas-fired ovens to meet the spurt in demand. ....... Perhaps the most egregious errors were made by India’s government. Despite imposing the most stringent and heavily policed restrictions in the region, the government failed to foresee that its measures might prompt a mass exodus from cities of tens of millions of migrant workers made suddenly destitute. ............ In Bihar, a state whose 110m people are among India’s poorest, more than two-thirds of covid cases identified so far have been among returning migrant workers.
In the bureaucracies of Bangladesh and Pakistan, the Raj lives on Recruits are taught Victorian table manners ......... One too many slices of carrot on the fork: another two points lost. When Sarim was training to become a civil servant in Pakistan, he was graded on his table manners. Everyone in his class was so cautious during the test that they would barely eat, he chuckles. ........... During six months living and studying at the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre (bpatc), future civil servants must eat with knives and forks, says Mehbub, a successful graduate. A watchful instructor is quick to chastise anyone who reverts to eating directly from the right hand, as is customary for most South Asians. .......... Another section explains in depth the art of “managing bread and rolls”. ......... The bpatc’s injunctions not to dip bread in sauce and to stand whenever a woman comes or goes from the table would seem impossibly stuffy to most contemporary Britons. ......... When posted abroad, the Indian official often found himself overdressed compared with Americans and Europeans. “My Pakistani friends were even more so,” he laughs. ......... The formal etiquette helps the bureaucracy set itself apart, in her view. In hierarchical places like South Asia, bureaucrats are the top of the pile ..... Rigid decorum adds to their sense of importance. ...... Mehbub thinks it will take “another hundred years” for Bangladesh’s civil service to lose its Britishness and become purely Bengali.
Blood types may play role in which COVID patients get sickest Scientists who compared the genes of thousands of patients in Europe found that those who had Type A blood were more likely to have severe disease while those with Type O were less likely. ........ Many researchers have been hunting for clues as to why some people infected with the coronavirus get very ill and others, less so. Being older or male seems to increase risk, and scientists have been looking at genes as another possible "host factor" that influences disease severity. .......... People with Type O are better able to recognize certain proteins as foreign, and that may extend to proteins on virus surfaces ....... During the SARS outbreak, which was caused by a genetic cousin of the coronavirus causing the current pandemic, "it was noted that people with O blood type were less likely to get severe disease" ......... Blood type also has been tied to susceptibility to some other infectious diseases, including cholera, recurrent urinary tract infections from E. coli, and a bug called H. pylori that can cause ulcers and stomach cancer
'S. Africa may use dexamethasone for COVID-19 patients' Experts say steroid can be considered for use on critically ill patients, President Ramaphosa tells citizens ........ “The Department of Health and the Ministerial Advisory Committee has recommended that dexamethasone can be considered for use on patients on ventilators and on oxygen supply,” the president said. Researchers at the UK’s University of Oxford have found that dexamethasone reduced deaths by about one-third in patients on ventilators and one-fifth in patients who require oxygen. .............. the virus’ transmission slows down if people start wearing medical or cloth masks and cover their mouths and noses in public places.
Coronavirus cases are spiking across the country and experts say Florida has the makings of the next epicenter "The potential for the virus to take off there is very, very nerve-racking and could have catastrophic consequences" because of the state's aging population and the prevalence of nursing homes and retirement communities ...... "more complacency" in Southern and Southwestern states not initially hit hard by the virus has led to "full-blown outbreaks." ........... Despite the rising number of cases, the White House has downplayed the risks, with President Donald Trump saying Wednesday in an interview with Gray TV that the virus is "dying out." ....... With the White House narrative at odds with the data, health experts including Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci have been absent from many public updates. Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN it's because "they tell the truth." ......... "And the truth is that the pandemic is still very, very active in the United States and that we're not getting back to normal and there are difficult things that the public has to do" .......... Fauci warned about an "anti-science bias" contributing to case spikes in the country. .......... States reporting spikes in new cases will have to re-implement "significant levels of social distancing" to contain the spread ....... Los Angeles County, which accounts for almost half of California's cases, reported Wednesday another single-day high of new cases. But officials attributed the county's increase to a lag in test reports. ....... Earlier this week, nine Texas mayors, including those in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, urged Gov. Greg Abbott to give them the authority to require masks be worn in public "where physical distancing cannot be practiced." .......... an estimated 230,000 to 450,000 cases of the virus were prevented in states that required mask use between April 8 and May 15. ....... Oklahoma, one of the states reporting a record-setting number of new cases, is scheduled later this week to host a campaign rally for Trump.
