Jan 1, 2021

2020 : A look back - Part 1

The year 2020 would go down in history as when the world stood still. The coronavirus pandemic brought never seen before measures by governments all over the world restricting human movement. 

During the course of the year, I was cataloguing all interesting news in my news website at https://vibhurishi.pythonanywhere.com/ . When I started the site, it was because I wasn't very happy with the noise in the news websites. It becomes difficult to sift through all the news to get to where I wanted it to be. For a good look at how I evolved the site through the year, have a look at my twitter trail where I documented the changes I had put in as the year went through.

 Additionally I also took part in an accordion playing competition during the year. It was a great feeling to be ranked 10th in the world wide amateur section. You can listen to my playing on youtube below and please leave a like and a subscribe if you can :)



Without much further ado - Let's Analyze the news. This will be a free wheeling writeup on the various things which happened in 2020. This post has become very long and I haven't even covered everything, so I am posting this as Part 1 and hoping I will be able to blog another post sometime soon.  This is a Long Read.

 

 

The overall covid statistics shows that we have reached almost a 100 Million infections with almost 2 Million deaths. Most statistics talk about a death rate of about 2%, but that is not a good indicator as 2 million deaths is no small thing. BTW, though it makes amazing headlines, only 9 deaths by sharks in 2020. 

If we track by countries , we see that USA tops the list, with India a distant second. 

 

One interesting thing is that some countries like the UK do not report the recovered people. This makes me suspect that the Actual total cases are nearer to 100M than the 83M as currently being reported. 

The category #coronavirus gives a comprehensive view of the last year. It spans 1000+ news links. Its too large to put here, so I would recommend you just scroll through the website for the things that happened. I will touch on a few things below with dates in bold, and links to the various categories and searches on my website for you to easily see.

WHO

The WHO (World Health Organization) has a major role of coordinating through the pandemic.  The murmerings of the new virus strain started to bubble up in Jan, and on Jan 14th, WHO set the alarm bells ringing by warning hospitals worldwide. It finally declared the new coronavirus a pandemic on March 11th by which time it had spread to the rest of the world, with Europe being declared the new epicenter by 14th March. A month later on April 15th, Trump said he is halting the funding for the World Health Organization. The WHO continued to struggle through the year with many disbelieving the WHO, compounded by the fact that WHO kept changing their recommendations. Indian minister Harsh Vardhan was elected as Chairman of the WHO executive board on May 22nd. It was not till July 8th that WHO finally admitted that the coronavirus could float in air. 

CHINA

China was the place where it all started. By 26th Jan, the death toll was 56, by Jan 31st it was upwards of 200, the epicenter being the city of Wuhan. People feared that the smog spreading over Wuhan in early Feb was because the authorities were burning the dead bodies. India started to evaculate its citizens from Wuhan with special flights on Feb 6th, while Kerala reported its first few cases of the Wuhan virus on 3rd Feb. In its crackdown on any information which shows the govt in a wrong light, China also arrested the doctors in Feb who warned about the coronavirus. The whistle blower Li Wenliang himself died due to covid infection on 7th Feb. By 17th Feb , Covid-19 had killed more people than the SARS outbreak of 2003. However, by the end of Feb, the cases outside china started to exceed those in China. China also made an engineering marvel by setting up an entire hospital in Wuhan on Feb 1st - in just a week. By 11th March ( just 2 months after the initial virus detection) the temporary hospitals were closed down. By now people had started blaming China for the virus due to consumption of animals in the wet-markets in China, but by mid March, China started to blame the rest of the world. China also started to export covid test kits, which were found to be highly inaccurate. Jumping into the the WHO fray with Trump withdrawing support, China pitched in with promising funding into WHO. On June 15th , China went into lockdown again by closing of the city of Beijing due to an outbreak there. After that the virus seems to have petered down there, with not much in terms of news. 

INDIA

 

India started of with disbelief. The government initially was hardly serious about it , with a circular on 29th Jan recommending ayurveda and homeopathy. The Hindu Mahasabha went a step ahead with them planning a cow-dung party on March 3rd to fight covid. A great effort was put in to get Indians in Wuhan airlifted back to India, where all the evacuees were tested negative. As an aside , a classmate of mine was in the crew of the initial Air India flights to Wuhan. India also saw people running away from hospitals when initially detected with news coming in from Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra among others. All sorts of predictions were being made as to how the virus wont survive in the summers, and a Junior Health Minister also saying sitting in the sun will keep the virus away,  which prompted experts warning against this false hope as early as on March 10th.

By this time the Indian government started getting serious about the threat. on 10th March flights from European nations were stopped temporarily ( rather a long temporary band as it seems). Delhi was among the first states to take stems with the Kejriwal lead state government declaring an Epidemic on 12th March and closing schools and colleges. Its never been the same again with classes going online now. The CEA was still insisting nothing wrong with economy by predicting a 6% GDP grown on March 13th . In fact, the Indian GDP shrunk by 23.9% in April-June quarter as published on Aug 31st ( leading to a #ResignNirmala twitter trend on 1st Sep). By 15th March, land borders were also closed. By 22nd March all flights were stopped. On 22nd March, PM Modi also urged all people to observe a 'Junta Curfew'. Aside: as soon as I heard this, I was very alarmed. This seemed like a precursor to something big coming as we have faced in the earlier demonetization. We immediately went out and stocked for a  month and I advised everyone I knew of to do the same. It was not an overreaction , as just 2 days later on 24th March, PM Modi imposed the most total lockdown India has ever seen since Independence, giving only a 4 hour notice to 1.3 billion people. This immediately lead to a rush to the local shops with people rushing to stock up. The lockdowns meant no employment for millions of daily wage workers. With no public transport available, and no money available, India saw a mass migration of people walking hundreds of kms - the likes of which had not been since the partition of India since 1947. Who can forget the large crowds shown at Bandra station on 15th April as the lockdown was extended further ! On 1st May, another 2 weeks of lockdown was proclaimed. The govt started plying trains to facilitate the returning migrants, but there were many reports where the laborers were forced to pay for their fares with the center refusing to disclose details of train fares charged to migrants. There were further reports of minorities being denied aid by the government during this crisis. The migrant crisis also reached the global scale with Ivanika Trump tweeting about it. News outlets were quick to change the tune from Modi doing the best thing by imposing lockdowns to Modi being squarely responsible for the migrants plight and how the lockdown was wasted by the government doing nothing and thinking a chant of "Go Carona" will actually make it go away, instead of following scientific implementations. Delhi govt was also soundly criticized for the hotspot it had become by end of June, prompting the govt to come up with an app for finding free beds ( to mixed success).

A shining light in all this was Sonu Sood who came forward as a huge help in getting the labourers and their families back to home by helping procure food and permissions with his small group of friends.

By mid-May, India overtook China's tally of confirmed cases and was on track to overtake Iran. It was 11th on the rankings. By 29th May, it was 9th in the list. By 6th June, it was 5th.  3rd by June 30th, overtaking Russia. By 6th September , India was seeing more than 90k new cases per day. On 7th September India became the 2nd most impacted country in the world, next only to the USA where it has remained so far.  Most studies say that India has under-counted the covid numbers both for infections and deaths. A July 21 study in Delhi estimated that 25% of the people already had got covid. A study of government data from 14th Oct estimates nearly 1 in 5 deaths for patients with co-morbidity.

Opportunism was at its worst during this time. Citizens from Bangalore to Mumbai complained about false positive tests, of having inordinate waits for their tests to come back, and fleecing by the medical fraternity. Patanjali started to advertise that they had the cure for Coronavirus on 27th June, to backtrack after a backlash and government probes by 30th June to say it was an immunity booster. Their name for the drugs "coronil" was allowed.

USA

USA's handling of coronavirus has been really lacking so far. As of 1st Jan 2021, USA has the dubious distinction of being the no 1 in the world with total cases as well as highest number of deaths at 350 thousand deaths. The CDC has been warning people of the impact of the virus from early Feb with the US declaring a public health emergency on Feb 1st itself. However, the political landscape has lead to a situation in which the government, lead by president Trump has routinely denied that the pandemic is a threat and spreading falsifications. By 26th March, there were already 1000 people dead due to Covid 19 jumping to 36,000 deaths by April 18th. Fauci was on the forefront cautioning that US could reach 200,000 deaths (which has come true) if people were not careful. Joblessness took off with 6.6 Million people going without jobs. By April 3rd the death toll was 5000. On April 23rd Trump made a bizzare comment about using disinfectant injections, which lead to people actually drinking disinfectants and dying. Obama called the handling of the pandemic an "absolute chaotic disaster". The economy had taken such a beating that Trump called for opeing up in mid-May 'vaccine or no vaccine'. Elon Musk also opened his Tesla factory, which resulted in an outbreak among the workers. Like India, the numbers may not be reported correctly in the USA, with the CDC stating that the cases may be as high as 10 times higher than that reported. America followed a flip flop of lockdowns and opening ups as the cases surged. By July 23rd , over 1000 deaths per day were taking place. A biker rally in South Dakota became a super spreader event linked to a quarter million cases. on Sep 22 , death toll in the USA passed the 200,000 mark, and 300,000 by Dec 15.

 

I will continue this in a new post where I go over the other happening in the year including how the vaccine trials worked. In the meantime, feel free to search for news that interests you on my website at : https://vibhurishi.pythonanywhere.com/

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)