Pune's Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine maker by volume, is placing its bets on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine candidate AZD1222 with CEO Adar Poonawalla stating he would start manufacturing at personal risk.
'Both the governments and people have to recognise that this is a long race, not a short sprint.'
Fresh guidelines issued by the Union home ministry on Wednesday permit industries operating in rural areas to run from April 30 with strict social distancing norms.
The test used now, called PCR (or polymerace chain reaction), uses a nasal or throat swab sample and identifies the virus. These tests take at least five hours to give results. The rapid test, on the other hand, uses a blood sample and gives results based on detecting the presence of certain antibodies that react to the coronavirus protein.
'We can't rule out the fact that the virus might have changed in such a way that it's actually causing more harm to young people.'
Also, the recovery rate in COVID-19 patients has progressively improved from 13.06 per cent to over 25 per cent in the country over the last 14 days. Addressing a press briefing, Joint Secretary in the ministry Lav Agarwal said the doubling rate of COVID-19 cases in several states is better than the national average.
"We have received complaint from a state yesterday and so far discussed with three states. Too much variations have been reported in results of rapid test kits and RT-PCR kits. We advise states not to use them for the next two days," ICMR's Dr Raman R Gangakhedkar said.
'Premature lifting of the lockdown will spread the disease from asymptomatics, and those undetected, to the whole community, ushering in prolonged misery, preventable and avoidable deaths, famine and social unrest,' warns Dr Debashish Danda.
Around 52.46 per cent of the patients have recovered, the health ministry said. The number of active cases stood at 1,53,178 while 1,80,012 patients have recovered, it said in the daily COVID-19 update.
'Have discreet, separate corona and non-corona hospitals for treating these two categories of patients.' 'Concentrate on your non-corona patients as well.' 'Because then your diabetics, your hypertensives, the ones on dialysis, the asthmatics, who, if and when they get corona, are the ones who are going to require more intensive care and are going to be more at risk of death.'
'By ruffling dignified feathers, and by polarising its audience, Kabir Singh has put movies and art back into our public discourse,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Predictions are that numbers will continue to rise till May end and maybe in the first half of June will be our peak.'
'Without it, it is going to be much, much, much, much worse.' 'In the meantime, we really need to work on a sort of war footing, given that it is a natural disaster, provide relief, provide essentials, till we get biological herd immunity, we need to get economic immunity, and also social immunity.'
Sreehari Nair is *not* impressed by this lot of films at all.
A group of young women and men have had enough of moral policing in Kerala. On Sunday, November 2 they plan to meet at Kochi's Marine Drive and stage a somewhat unique protest that involves... kissing.
