đŸ’„Join UPSC 2027,2028 Mentorship (July Batch) + XFactor Notes & Microthemes PDF
Talk to Mentor

Civilsdaily

Login

Subject: Science and Technology

  • [pib] Laser Surface Micro-texturing

    International Advanced Centre for Powder Metallurgy & New Materials (ARCI) an autonomous R&D Centre of Dept. of Science and Technology has developed ultrafast laser surface texturing technology, which can improve the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engines.

    Laser surface micro-texturing

    • This technology offers precise control of the size, shape and density of micro-surface texture features. This has gained momentum as a way to control friction and wear.
    • In this technology, a pulsating laser beam creates micro-dimples or grooves on the surface of materials in a very controlled manner.
    • Such textures can trap wear debris when operating under dry sliding conditions and sometimes provide effects like enhancing oil supply (lubricant reservoir) which can lower friction coefficients and may enable reduced wear rate.
    • The texture surfaces were created on automotive internal combustion engine components, piston rings and cylinder liners using 100 fs pulse duration laser.
    • The micro dimples of 10-20 ÎŒm diameter and about 5-10 ÎŒm deep which have been created with laser beams had a regular pattern.

    Benefits of micro-texturing

    • The created textures were tested in an engine test rig under different speeds and temperatures of coolant and lubrication oil, and it was observed that there was a 16% reduction in the lube oil consumption with the use of texture on the piston rings.
    • The 10-hour lube oil consumption test shows that the blowby substantially reduced with textured rings.
    • Fabrication of a pattern of micro dimples or grooves on the surface of materials results in a change in surface topography which generates additional hydrodynamic pressure, thereby increasing the load-carrying capacity of the surfaces.
    • Hence these become useful for trapping wear debris when operating under dry sliding conditions and sometimes provide effects like enhancing oil supply (lubricant reservoir) which can lower friction coefficients and may enable reduced wear rate.

  • The Covid-19 crisis could bring the country up to digital speed

    Context

    The Covid-19 pandemic gives us a chance to re-evaluate the worth of two major initiatives of the government: demonetization and digitization.

    Importance of digitalisation in pandemic

    • The importance of digitization in a pandemic cannot be exaggerated when we are repeatedly told to maintain social distance and work from home in order to avoid infection.
    • Consider how nigh impossible it would be to avoid contact with retail cashiers and point-of-sale (PoS) terminals if we were to use credit cards and cash to pay for our daily necessities.
    • Today, most bill payments have moved online and barring older people, who may prefer to pay their electricity bills at physical counters, digitization is delivering in spades.
    • But digitization is not just about payments and financial transactions. Consider what all will happen as the current lockdown persists across the country.

    Application in the judiciary

    • Courts are beginning to use video-conferencing to conduct hearings. It is ironic that something that should have been done years ago to hasten hearings is now being done to prevent infections.
    • India’s judiciary has been resisting technology for as long as one can remember.
    • Witnesses do not have to drag themselves to court every day; they can video-record their statements in advance, and submit themselves to questioning through Skype or other such video-calling apps.
    • When the entire case is recorded, the possibility of judges conducting trials in an unfair way gets substantially reduced, for those at the receiving end of judicial injustice can seek retrials based on video recordings.
    • These recordings will also enable the higher judiciary to figure out who its good judges are, and who adopts dilatory tactics and frequent adjournments, delaying justice.
    • At some point, a judicial appointments commission will have video records of all judges shortlisted for promotions. They will thus know whom to recommend for elevation and whom to sideline. Corruption is also likely to come down.

    Application in the healthcare sector

    • In the current Covid-19 crisis, doctors and nurses are putting themselves at huge risk, and so are those handling millions of samples of throat swabs that need to be analysed for the virus
    • Applications: Remote patient examinations, analysis of symptoms with the help of databases and algorithms, and even the basic task of taking down a new patient’s medical history can all be done remotely through a digital app or interface.
    • The doctor will know even before he has met the patient what could be wrong, something she only has to confirm after interacting with the patient.
    • India is spending humongous amounts of money, and so are to-be doctors, to master medical knowledge that doubles every 75 days. In short, by the time your average MBBS doctor completes his or her degree, much of that knowledge could be outdated.
    • He or she has to use technology to update himself or herself, and also rely on databases and artificial intelligence to deliver healthcare without the risk of misdiagnosis.
    • India may be spending too much on training doctors at a cost of millions of rupees per head when a lot of that money could have been spent on technology to deliver competent and lower-cost healthcare.

    Conclusion

    If we just stop to think where we would have been in this pandemic but for digital technology, we would recognize the importance of going digital. It should make us think of how to convert the Covid-19 disruption into an agenda that brings us up to technological speed in various spheres of human activity.

  • The race to find a cure for COVID-19

    Context

    The world is dealing with an unprecedented and unimaginably serious crisis. Therefore, the speed of vaccine development is crucial.

    Speeding up the vaccine development

    • Availability of rationale and information: The race for developing an anti-COVID-19 vaccine has begun. Reasonable scientific rationale and the information needed for vaccine development are available to all stakeholders in academia and industry.
    • Vaccine platforms: A large number of candidate vaccines based on different vaccine platforms, including delivering the virus genetic materials (RNA, DNA) or using synthetic biology to produce key viral proteins, have already been developed.
    • Phase-I safety trials of an experimental vaccine, jointly developed by scientists at the National Institute of Health and at Moderna, a biotechnology company, has already been administered to healthy volunteers for its safety and immunogenicity.
    • The speed with which the experimental vaccine has entered safety trials is unprecedented.
    • Another vaccine jointly developed by China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and CanSino Biologics has reportedly been cleared for early-stage clinical trials.
    • Development in India: The Serum Institute of India has also recently announced its readiness to start safety trials following animal experiments.
    • According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, more than 20 vaccine candidates are in advanced stages of development and will be ready for Phase-I safety trials.
    • However, it is also clear that it will not be possible to roll-out any efficacious vaccine for at least another year.

    Questions that need to be answered

    • While these developments are encouraging, several questions will need to be answered for this vaccine development to move further.
    • Triggering immune response safely: Although it is quite evident that humans mount a strong immune response and clear the viral load, the nature of the immune response and how to trigger it safely through vaccination will be key questions to address.
    • Duration of the acquired immunity: How long the acquired immunity in humans will last is another important question to be asked before experimental vaccines move forward.
    • We will need to know this because if the immunity is transient, then humans will be susceptible to reinfections.
    • Ensuring no disease enhancement: Before moving to Phase-II trials in a large number of healthy volunteers, we also have to ensure that the immune response induced by vaccination does not lead to any disease enhancement.

    Repurposing the already available drugs

    • Therapeutic interventions, not only for curing severe cases of the disease but also for protecting all front-line healthcare workers, are urgently needed.
    • Using already approved drugs: Since developing new drugs is a complex and lengthy process, scientists and pharmaceutical companies have rushed to investigate and use drugs that have already been approved by regulatory authorities.
    • Using available molecular and structural biology information on the virus, a group of scientists have analysed all interactions of the viral proteins with human proteins that are crucial for the virus to enter human cells and use the host cell machinery to rapidly reproduce itself.
    • Of the nearly 70 short-listed molecules that may interrupt these key interactions, 24 happen to be already approved drugs which can now be tested in laboratory animal models as well as humans.
    • However, the re-purposing of several drugs, alone or in combinations to treat COVID-19 patients, have already been reported.
    • More confusion than hope: There are many success stories of curing patients of COVID-19 doing the rounds in different parts of the world, but these have managed to create more confusion than hope.
    • Without any appropriate controls, careful dosing and safety concerns, such small experiments can only do more harm than good.

    Controlled randomised trials

    • Given the urgency of finding a cure, it is absolutely necessary to find out unequivocally what works well and what does not. For that conducting carefully controlled randomised trials is the only way to go.
    • In a welcome move, the WHO has announced clinical trials called the ‘Solidarity Project’.
    • Under this project four drugs or drug, combinations will be tested in many countries around the world.
    • These candidates include the anti-Ebola drug, Remdesivir, Chloroquine, anti-HIV drugs, and the Ritonavir/Lopinavir combination, with or without Interferon-beta.
    • The European counterpart of the trial, Discovery, will conduct these trials in countries including France, Spain, Germany and the U.K.
    • The pharma company Roche has also decided to initiate large, randomised Phase-III trials of its arthritis drug Actemra for its safety and efficacy in adult patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
    • It is complex and tedious to conduct randomised, large multi-centric trials.
    • Quickly getting all the stakeholders together is laudable and underscores the notion that everyone needs to fight the deadly virus together. Hopefully, these trials will lead to tangible drug therapies against COVID-19.

    Conclusion

    It is most heartening to see scientists in academia and industrial partners coming together to fight a monumental public health crisis. The battle between pathogens and humans will continue but let us hope that we win the present one sooner than later.

  • Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

     

    Researchers from a Canadian space observatory have been recording the periodic radio waves hitting Earth from a neighbouring galaxy from past few years. These radio waves are called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

    Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

    • FRBs are super intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves produced by unidentified sources in the space.
    • Their discovery in 2007 by American astronomer Duncan Lorimer led to the term ‘Lorimer Bursts’.
    • Since then, just a few dozen similar events have been observed in data collected by radio telescopes around the world, building evidence that points to a variety of potential causes.
    • Only a handful of emissions have been traced to specific areas of the sky, indicating sources in other galaxies.
    • The flash of radio waves is incredibly bright if distant, comparable to the power released by hundreds of millions of suns in just a few milliseconds.
    • This intensity suggests powerful objects like black holes and neutron stars could be involved.
    • The events were once considered to be largely transient – they seemed to happen once, without obvious signs of a repeat emission. However, a number of such bursts have been identified since then.

    Why are they significant?

    • First noticed in 2018 by the Canadian observatory the waves have created ripples across the globe for one reason — they arrive in a pattern.
    • This gave birth to theories that they could be from an alien civilization.
    • Initially, it was believed that the collision of black holes or neutron stars triggers them.
    • But the discovery of repeating FRBs debunked the theory of colliding objects.

  • What is Hantavirus?

    China has reported the death of a person from Yunnan Province who tested positive for the Hantavirus.

    What is Hantavirus?

    • The Hantaviruses are a family of viruses spread mainly by rodents. It is contracted by humans from infected rodents.
    • Cases of the Hantavirus in humans occur mostly in rural areas where forests, fields and farms offer suitable habitat for infected rodents.
    • A person can get infected if he/she comes in contact with a rodent that carries the virus.
    • In the US and Canada, for instance, the Hantavirus carried by the deer mouse is responsible for the majority cases of the Hantavirus infection.
    • Like this, there are various other kinds of Hantaviruses that find hosts in rodents, like the white-footed mouse and the cotton rat among others that may lead to infections in humans if transmitted.

    Its origin

    • The Hantavirus is not novel and its first case dates back to 1993, according to the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
    • In the Americas, the family of viruses is known as ‘New World hantaviruses’.

    Symptoms

    • A person infected with the virus may show symptoms within the first to eighth week after they have been exposed to fresh urine, faeces or the saliva of infected rodents.
    • Symptoms may include fever, fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, chills and abdominal problems.
    • Four to ten after being infected, late symptoms of HPS may start to appear, which include coughing and shortness of breath.

    Mortality risk

    • It is the cause of Hantavirus pulmonary disease (HPS), a severe respiratory disease. The HPS can be fatal and has a mortality rate of 38 per cent.
    • It remains unclear whether human-to-human transmission of the virus is possible.
    • There have been no reports of human-to-human transmission of Hantavirus in the US.

  • [pib] National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

    The Union Ministry of Science & Technology has informed about the progress of the National Supercomputing Mission.

    National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

    • NSM is a proposed plan by GoI to create a cluster of seventy supercomputers connecting various academic and research institutions across India.
    • In April 2015 the government approved the NSM with a total outlay of Rs.4500 crore for a period of 7 years.
    • The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.
    • Currently there are four supercomputers from India in Top 500 list of supercomputers in the world.

    Aims and objectives

    • The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to Hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (PF) in academic and research institutions of National importance across the country by 2022.
    • This network of Supercomputers envisaging a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and was later revised to a total of 45 PF (45000 TFs), a jump of 6 times more compute power within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems.

    IWhat is a Supercomputer?

    • A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer.
    • The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
    • Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS (petaFLOPS).
    • Since November 2017, all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.

    Why do we need supercomputers?

    • Developed and almost-developed countries have begun ensuring high investments in supercomputers to boost their economies and tackle new social problems.
    • These high-performance computers can simulate the real world, by processing massive amounts of data, making cars and planes safer, and more fuel-efficient and environment-friendly.
    • They also aid in the extraction of new sources of oil and gas, development of alternative energy sources, and advancement in medical sciences.
    • Supercomputers have also helped weather forecasters to accurately predict severe storms, enable better mitigation planning and warning systems.
    • They are also used by financial services, manufacturing and internet companies and infrastructure systems like water-supply networks, energy grids, and transportation.
    • Future applications of artificial intelligence (AI) also depend on supercomputing.
    • Due to the potential of this technology, countries like the US, China, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia have created national-level supercomputing strategies and are investing substantially in these programmes.

    When did India initiate its efforts to build supercomputers?

    • India’s supercomputer programme initiated in the late 1980s, when the United States ceased the export of a Cray Supercomputer due to technology embargos.
    • This resulted in India setting up C-DAC in 1988, which in 1991, unveiled the prototype of PARAM 800, benchmarked at 5 Gflops. This supercomputer was the second-fastest in the world at that time.
    • Since June 2018, the USA’s Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world, taking away this position from China.
    • As of January 2018, Pratyush and Mihir are the fastest supercomputers in India with a maximum speed of Peta Flops.

    What are the phases of the National Supercomputing Mission?

    Phase I:

    • In the first phase of the NSM, parts of the supercomputers are imported and assembled in India.
    • A total of 6 supercomputers are to be installed in this phase.
    • The first supercomputer that was assembled indigenously is called Param Shivay. It was installed in IIT (BHU) located in Varanasi.
    • Similar systems, Param Shakti (IIT Kharagpur) and Param Brahma (IISER, Pune) were also later installed within the country.
    • The rest will be installed at IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (JNIAS).

    Phase II:

    • The supercomputers that are installed so far are about 60% indigenous.
    • The 11 systems that are going to be installed in the next phase will have processors designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and will have a cumulative capacity of 10 petaflops.
    • These new systems are to be constructed more cost-effectively than the previous ones.
    • One of the 11 proposed supercomputers will be installed
    • at C-DAC exclusively for small and medium enterprises so that they can train employees as well as work on supercomputers at a very low cost.

    Phase III:

    • The third phase aims to build fully indigenous supercomputers.
    • The government had also approved a project to develop a cryogenic cooling system that rapidly dispels the heat generated by a computing chip. This will be jointly built together by IIT-Bombay and C-DAC.

    What are the advantages of the National Supercomputing Mission?

    • The National Supercomputing Mission can ensure accessibility to supercomputers at an affordable rate to the scientific community and medium and small enterprises.
    • It can exponentially enhance the quality and quantity of R&D and higher education in the areas of science and technology.
    • It can solve the current and future challenges that are plaguing the country.
    • Currently, the world’s top supercomputers are mostly under the control of advanced nations like the US, Japan, China and the European Union. This Mission has the potential to bring India into this select league of such nations.
    • These supercomputers can be used in the areas of climate modelling, weather predictions, computational biology, atomic energy simulations, defence, disaster simulation, astrophysics etc.
    • These computers have played a crucial role in scientific and technological advancements in numerous fields.
    • Unlike other computers, these high-performance machines can crunch the most complex of data at a speed, which is millions of times faster than a desktop PC.
    • This mission, aiming to provide supercomputing facilities to about 60-70 institutions across the nation and thousands of active researchers, academicians, is moving fast towards creating a computer infrastructure within the country.
    • This mission can also enhance the country’s capacity to develop the next generation of supercomputer experts.

    How do other countries make use of supercomputers?

    China:

    • Jiangsu Province has a supercomputer called “Sunway TaihuLight”.
    • This supercomputer performs a wide range of tasks, including climate science, weather forecasting and earth-system modelling to help ships avoid rough seas, improve farmers’ yields and ensure the safety of offshore drilling.
    • TaihuLight has already led to an increase in profits and a reduction in expenses that justify its cost ($270 million).

    United States:

    • In the US, supercomputers are radically transforming the healthcare system.
    • The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has used supercomputers to create a far more detailed model of the Hepatitis-C virus, a major cause of the liver disease that costs $9 billion in healthcare costs in the US alone.
    • Using supercomputers, the researchers have now developed a model that comprehensively simulates heart down to the cellular level and can lead to a substantial reduction in heart diseases.

    These are some of the very few cases of how supercomputers have enhanced breakthroughs in various fields.

    How do supercomputers help fight coronavirus?

    • Earlier, the US had established COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium that will bring together industry, academic institutions, and federal laboratories to try to identify or create candidate compounds that might prevent or treat coronavirus infection.
    • One of the members of the consortium, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, aimed to look into compounds that are already available in the market that might combat COVID-19.
    • For this purpose, the world’s fastest supercomputer “Summit” was used.
    • Like other viruses, the novel coronavirus uses a spike protein to inject cells.
    • Using Summit with an algorithm to investigate which drugs could bind to the protein and prevent the virus from doing its duty, the researchers have a list of 77 drugs that show promise.
    • Starting with 8,000 compounds, Summit has shortened the time of the experiment exponentially, ruling out the vast majority of possible medications before settling on 77 drugs, which are ranked based on how effective they are likely to be at halting the virus in the human body.

    Way forward

    • It is evident that supercomputers would become a vital part of our lives as it can provide solutions to the current and future problems and India, one of the most populous nations in the world, must ensure that it also has access to this technology for the welfare of its people.
    • Supercomputers, as they operate at such incredible speeds, will encounter numerous barriers like network and interconnectivity hardware that previous generations of designers did not have to deal with.
    • The cooling system is also one of the major design constraints.
    • Hence, India must give a high emphasis on innovation to tackle these challenges.
    • India must also give high emphasis to the application rather than the technology itself.
    • Supercomputing research also requires fundamental research of the next stages of computing like quantum computing that are still in the theoretical stage.
    • Bureaucratic red-tapism must be circumvented and scientists and researchers must be allowed to take bold and radical steps without fear of reprisal.
    • The government must also invest in necessary physical and digital infrastructure.
    • It must also address the challenges of:
    • Limited funding and delayed release of funds
    • The increasing need for imports for necessary hardware components to build supercomputers

    Conclusion:

    • Supercomputers are strategically important for India as it can help the country to become a knowledge-driven economy.
    • This technology also can support cutting edge research that can benefit the economy, society, businesses, environment, etc.
    • Thus, enhancing investments, improving flexibility for research and providing other necessary infrastructures must be ensured for it to grow.
    • Without this technology, India risks being surpassed on the global stage by other nations and will consequently miss the huge benefits that come from having this strategically important technology at the disposal of the country’s best and brightest minds

     

     

  • Picking up the quantum technology baton

    Context

    With the Budget announcement providing direction for the development in quantum technology, the stakeholders need to roll-out the national mission quickly.

    Pushing India into second quantum revolution

    • Budgetary allocation for NM-QTA: In the Budget 2020 speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a welcome announcement for Indian science — over the next five years she proposed spending â‚č8,000 crores (~ $1.2 billion) on a National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications.
    • This promises to catapult India into the midst of the second quantum revolution, a major scientific effort that is being pursued by the United States, Europe, China and others.

    Timeline of the development of Quantum Mechanics

    • Science to describe nature on atomic-scale: Quantum mechanics was developed in the early 20th century to describe nature in the small — at the scale of atoms and elementary particles.
    • Foundation for understanding: For over a century it has provided the foundations of our understanding of the physical world, including the interaction of light and matter.
      • It also led to ubiquitous inventions such as lasers and semiconductor transistors.
      • Despite a century of research, the quantum world still remains mysterious and far removed from our experiences based on everyday life.
    • Second revolution: A second revolution is currently underway with the goal of putting our growing understanding of these mysteries to use by actually controlling nature and harnessing the benefits of the weird and wondrous properties of quantum mechanics.
    • Challenge of experimental realisation: One of the most striking of these is the tremendous computing power of quantum computers, whose actual experimental realisation is one of the great challenges of our times.
    • Quantum supremacy: The announcement by Google, in October 2019, where they claimed to have demonstrated the so-called “quantum supremacy”, is one of the first steps towards this goal.

    Applications and challenges

    • Applications: Besides computing, exploring the quantum world promises other dramatic applications including the creation of novel materials, enhanced metrology, secure communication, to name just a few.
      • Some of these are already around the corner.
      • Application in communication: China recently demonstrated secure quantum communication links between terrestrial stations and satellites.
      • Applications in cryptography: Computer scientists are working towards deploying schemes for post-quantum cryptography — clever schemes by which existing computers can keep communication secure even against quantum computers of the future.
      • Exploring fundamental questions: Beyond these applications, some of the deepest foundational questions in physics and computer science are being driven by quantum information science. This includes subjects such as quantum gravity and black holes.
    • The need for collaboration: Pursuing these challenges will require unprecedented collaboration between physicists (both experimentalists and theorists), computer scientists, material scientists and engineers.
    • Challenges on the experimental front: On the experimental front, the challenge lies in harnessing the weird and wonderful properties of quantum superposition and entanglement in a highly controlled manner by building a system composed of carefully designed building blocks called quantum bits or qubits.
      • These qubits tend to be very fragile and lose their “quantumness” if not controlled properly, and a careful choice of materials, design and engineering is required to get them to work.
    • Challenges on the theoretical front: On the theoretical front lies the challenge of creating the algorithms and applications for quantum computers.
      • These projects will also place new demands on classical control hardware as well as software platforms.

    Where India stands

    • India late in starting work on technology: Globally, research in this area is about two decades old, but in India, serious experimental work has been underway for only about five years, and in a handful of locations.
    • What are the constraints on Indian progress in this field? So far we have been plagued by a lack of sufficient resources, high-quality manpower, timeliness and flexibility.
      • Resource and quality manpower problem: The new announcement in the Budget would greatly help fix the resource problem but high-quality manpower is in global demand.
      • In a fast-moving field like this, timeliness is everything — delayed funding by even one year is an enormous hit.
    • A previous programme called Quantum Enabled Science and Technology has just been fully rolled out, more than two years after the call for proposals.
    • Laudable announcement: One has to laud the government’s announcement of this new mission on a massive scale and on a par with similar programmes announced recently by the United States and Europe.

    Limits and way forward

    • But there are some limits that come from how the government must do business with public funds.
    • Role of the private sector: Here, private funding, both via industry and philanthropy, can play an outsized role even with much smaller amounts.
    • For example, unrestricted funds that can be used to attract and retain high-quality manpower and to build international networks — all at short notice — can and will make an enormous difference to the success of this enterprise.
    • Private participation is the effective way: This is the most effective way (as China and Singapore discovered) to catch up scientifically with the international community, while quickly creating a vibrant intellectual environment to help attract top researchers.
    • Connection with industry: Further, connections with the Indian industry from the start would also help quantum technologies become commercialised successfully, allowing the Indian industry to benefit from the quantum revolution.
    • We must encourage industrial houses and strategic philanthropists to take an interest and reach out to Indian institutions with an existing presence in this emerging field.
    • For example, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), home to India’s first superconducting quantum computing lab, would be delighted to engage.

  • Stages in a COVID-19 Pandemic

    Over the past few weeks, India has been dreading the possibility that the novel coronavirus outbreak will move to the stage of community transmission.

    What are the stages of a pandemic?

    Stage I

    • In the first stage of a disease epidemic that eventually takes the form of a pandemic sweeping the globe, cases are imported into a country in which the infection did not originate.
    • An infection whose spread is contained within the boundaries of one or a few countries is obviously not a pandemic.

    Stage II

    • The second stage is when the virus starts being transmitted locally.
    • Local transmission means that the source of the infection is from within a particular area and the trajectory the virus has taken from one person to the next is clearly established.

    Stage III

    • The third stage is that of community transmission. It is usually localised.
    • According to the WHO community transmission is evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases, or by increasing positive tests through sentinel samples.
    • In layman terms, it means that the virus is now circulating in the community, and can infect people with no history either of travel to affected areas or of contact with an infected person.
    • If and when community transmission happens, there might arise the need for a full lockdown because in that situation it is theoretically possible for every person, regardless of where they are from and who they have been in contact with, to spread the disease.

    Stage IV

    • There is also a fourth stage in every pandemic. It is when the disease, COVID-19 in this case, becomes endemic in some countries.
    • The Indian government’s containment plan takes this possibility into account.
    • Among diseases that are currently endemic in India — meaning they occur round the year across the country — are malaria and dengue.

    How does categorising an outbreak in this manner help?

    • The stages of a pandemic are uniform the world over.
    • This is so because, in today’s interconnected world, it is important to have a standardised phraseology that conveys the same thing to every person around the world, and helps countries prepare better.
    • The categorization helps countries take specific actions that are necessary to target just that particular scenario.
    • For example, India imposed travel restrictions to China from very early on as the cases they were all imported from China.
    • Later, as cases started being imported from other European countries, flight and visa restrictions were put in place for those countries.
    • India has now shut itself to individuals coming from all countries — this is because the virus is now confirmed as circulating in at least 177 countries and territories.

    Worldwide, in which stage is the COVID-19 pandemic now?

    • The pandemic has spread to nearly every country on the planet. In most, though, it is in the stage of either imported cases or local transmission.
    • Among the countries where community transmission seems to be operating are China, Italy, Iran, South Korea and Japan.
    • China adopted a graded approach in dealing with the infection but the epicentre, Hubei, was in a state of complete lockdown at the peak of the infection.
    • It something that Italy has now effected in a bid to stop the virus from wreaking more havoc, given the country’s ageing population.

    How long before India enters community transmission?

    • It is totally unpredictable. Some doctors perceive that community transmission is inevitable; other experts feel it may have already happened.
    • There are some reports of one strain having less mortality. If indeed a milder strain has come to India, it could change the course of the epidemic.
    • There is another theory that all the various viruses circulating in South Asia and the generally lower levels of hygiene may give us some immunity.

  • Can Vitamin C prevent or cure novel Coronavirus infection?

  • The strategy of ‘Shelter in Place’

    What is the news: As India observed a “janata curfew” from 7 am to 9 pm on 22nd March refraining from making any non-essential movements, they are implementing a version of what is referred to, most commonly in the United States, as a “shelter in place” order.

    What exactly is a “Shelter in Place”?

    • In the context of the US, it is not a precise legal term, and its meaning and implications vary.
    • It conveys the broad idea of a set of restrictions being put into place, but follows not set definition.
    • Broadly, “shelter in place” orders everywhere social distancing, which is the key to “flattening the curve”, that is, spreading out the incidence of infection over a longer time so that healthcare systems are not overwhelmed.
    • Ultimately, the intent of the protocols is to decide what people should and shouldn’t do based on a particular threat to the public.

    Indian concept of self-imposed curfew

    • There is no exact definition of a “Janata curfew” — the PM has laid down guidelines for what Indians should not do, and authorities have taken steps to ensure compliance through appeals, advisories, and executive action such as invoking prohibitory orders.
    • In the cities, traders’ associations and housing societies have voluntarily put curbs on themselves in response to the PM’s call.