Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Lots of people all the world are hoping (praying?) that there will soon be a vaccine for the coronavirus. I’ve always felt that optimism for a vaccine as solution is misplaced. Here’s why. Origin matters : Let’s face it: if China or India developed a vaccine, would most of the world trust it? Obviously not, so any vaccine has to come from the West for people to trust it. And therein lies the rub. Clinical trials take, like, forever : Any new medicine or vaccine needs to be tested first. Obviously. For side-effects. To check if it actually works. And Western systems have unfortunately demonstrated an “inability to start and run clinical trials faster”, writes Matthew Herper. Siddhartha Mukherjee had described this exact problem in the context of possible AIDS medicines in The Emperor of All Maladies : “(Clinical trials) were all well and good in the cool ivory towers of medicine, but patients affected by a deadly illness needed drugs now .” Ethics of RCT (Randomized Co...

You’d think that ever since the aeroplane was invented, geography would matter less and less when it comes to the course of nations. But you’d be wrong, writes Tim Marshall in his aptly titled terrific book, Prisoners of Geography . Take Russia, a country with a huge “geographical disadvantage”: “Russia is vast. It is vastest. Immense. It is six million square miles vast; eleven time zones vast.” From a Russian perspective, its sheer size acts as a barrier to conquest. From its western border to Moscow is such a long distance that any advancing army would need “unsustainably long supply lines”. The same holds for any attack from the eastern side. Wait a minute, you say, who’s going to attack Russia? But the right question is how Russia views things: “By 2004… every former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia was in NATO or the European Union.” Putin sees NATO right at his door step, and it makes him very nervous. Being such a vast country inevitably has meant most of the Rus...

In the fight against coronavirus, you’d expect that tech solutions, as in smartphone apps and location tracking, would be vastly superior in the land of Silicon Valley (and the West in general). But as with all things coronavirus, it’s the East that has used tech better… In January, when China issued the lockdown in Wuhan, they used old-fashioned barricades. But by the time they reopened Wuhan on April 8: “At checkpoints throughout the city, police and security guards demanded that anyone seeking to come and go present a QR code on their mobile phones that rates the user’s risk of catching the coronavirus. Green codes granted unrestricted movement. A yellow code required seven days of quarantine. Red meant 14 days of quarantine.” More and more countries have created such apps to track coronavirus. Many of them don’t just help the government, they even notify users if they’ve been close to infected people. The most downloaded such app till date? India’s Aarogya Setu app, ...

Many are put off by the endless variety on offer for pretty much every item out there. The variety forces you to make a choice, pick one item over the others. That requires a comparative analysis which in turn means gathering information about each option. Even with Google at your fingertips, that’s not easy. And therefore, we feel pressurized, writes Seth Godin: “We feel the failure of a bad choice in advance, long before we discover whether or not it was actually bad.” If you’re rational about it, getting so stressed by such choices is, well, irrational. After all, most of the time, the choice doesn’t really matter all that much, in terms of money, or time, or the finer details of what one option offered over the other. And therein lies the rub: we are not rational beings. We are ruled by emotions more often than we care to admit. To make matters worse, when it comes to making choices, multiple emotions are involved, as Godin points out: -       Fear ...

There are studies in the US that suggest that the coronavirus has spread much, much more than the official numbers indicate. A Stanford study, for example, suggested that the infection rate in a California county is 50 to 85 times higher than reported! Balaji Srinivasan questions that study: “It would be wonderful news as it would imply we were much closer to herd immunity at a lower cost than people thought.” Don’t believe something just because that’s what you want to hear, he warns. He then analyzes the study, its methodology, and asks many valid questions. It’s one thing for individual studies to be wrong, but the US government has to use some model to decide on its course of action. Unfortunately, as Sharon Begley wrote, the model they picked seems totally wrong . You’d think the US would use a tried-and-tested epidemic model. Like the model with the long track record: “The most established, dating back a century, calculates how many people are susceptible to a viru...

This is a question more and more people are asking about India : “How has the country, whose per capita income is just tenth of the US, avoided being flattened by the pandemic?” The authors, Anup Malani, Arpit Gupta and Reuben Abraham start with the 3 commonly cited reasons. Epidemic hit India later than the West : Incorrect, say the authors. The first cases landed in Kerala in end Jan. And other cases arrived in early March. Lockdown and social distancing have worked : Maybe, maybe not, they write. The virus has a gestation period, so there is a time lag between the lockdown and its effect. In any case, there are several well-known events violating the lockdown e.g. Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi, migrants at Bandra etc. And even if the lockdown has worked, it raises a scary prospect: “If India’s caseload is low because of the lockdown, it will not help when the lockdown ends.” Not enough testing and thus the reported numbers are wrong/low : Yes, we don’t have enough te...

Lockdowns, in whatever degree, impact the economy. Obviously. But the economy is an abstract entity. And it is real people who run into money problems and get laid off. There was a pic of a protest by such folks against the lockdown in Ohio, USA, about which Alex Tabarrok wrote : “It wasn’t a large protest, about 100 people, but they look pretty angry. They want to reopen the economy.” One protestor said: “We have children to feed, businesses to run, employees to pay, and Ohio must end this shutdown now.” On the other hand, those who have the savings or jobs that can last an extended lockdown want their country to be more China-like, says Charles Harris: “What I'm seeing now is a bunch of people begging, almost unknowingly, to be more like China. Some of the U.S.'s own values might be getting eroded now out of fear. It's so hard to say.” This debate is going on in almost every country. Given the sheer numbers of those badly impacted by lockdowns, Tyler Cow...

The hugely popular game, Monopoly , was invented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie who was not a fan of capitalism, but left-wing in her views! “The problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman… stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.” In a political magazine, she described her game and how it reflected life: “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” Surprisingly, she came up two sets of rules for the game: “An anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.” I loved Monopoly as a kid. So too does my 8 yo daughter. As does almost every one of her friends. As a kid, it’s the closest thing to dealing with money: buying, ...

For some time now, the EU has been calling for Internet access to be made a universal right for all mankind. Anyone who opposes making it a right gets tarred with the brush of supporting government censorship by withholding Internet access: think China in Xinjiang, Iran when protests break out, or India abrogating Article 370. Proponents of the idea, however, are mixing up two different issues: (1) That everyone needs Internet access today is obvious. (2) But that doesn’t mean it should be a right . Why not? What’s the problem here? Look no further than Alex Tabarrok’s piece on what happens when people treat electricity a right… in India. He quotes this study to explain what happens gradually: “Because electricity is seen as a right, subsidies, theft, and nonpayment are widely tolerated.” Inevitably then, the electricity companies bleed money. If selling/ transmitting more units of power means greater losses, it is but rational that: “Distribution companies try to se...

Why has there been such a sharp difference in the impact of coronavirus between East and West? From everything I’ve read, it seems like the root cause lies in the value systems of the two sides. Ironically, the very values and beliefs that served  the West so well have now become an albatross around their necks. Definitions, Definitions : Take the basic question asked from early on, “Is coronavirus airborne or not?”. Believe it or not, the word “airborne” has a very different definition than what the layman thinks! Ed Yong explains : “When people are infected with respiratory viruses, they emit viral particles whenever they talk, breathe, cough, or sneeze. These particles are encased in globs of mucus, saliva, and water. Bigger globs fall faster than they evaporate, so they splash down nearby—these are traditionally called “ droplets .” Smaller globs evaporate faster than they fall, leaving dried-out viruses that linger in the air and drift farther afield—these are called “...

Odisha and Punjab have extended the lockdown beyond the planned date of April 14. Most political parties (80%) have said that whenever the lockdown is lifted, it should be done slowly and in phases. That individual states may still choose to prevent inter-state movement etc. Modi too has been giving indications that the lockdown will be extended… All the signs are pointing in one direction. The new cases per day have certainly increased over the last 7-10 days: But the problem of getting supplies continues. In Wuhan, China ensured that food packets would be dropped at everyone’s door during the lockdown. No other country has been able to ensure such a delivery system, which is why everyone else’s attempts at lockdowns are anywhere between non-existent and far less stringent. Plus, a “hard lockdown” is constitutionally illegal in many countries. Plus, as Chidambaram rightly says , all governments needs to ensure money transfer to the poor happens regularly. Much harde...

If you wonder how far machine learning has come, read these lines by Ben Evans: “We used to call this ‘things that are easy for people but hard for computers’, but really, it was things that are easy for people to do but hard for people to describe to computers. The breakthrough of machine learning is that it gives us a way for the computer to work out the description.” Today’s social networks are largely automated: algorithms decide what shows up on your feed, be it on Facebook or YouTube or Google Search. Almost always, no human has any role in deciding shows up on your feed. And therein lies the paradox: “Yet they (the algorithms) are also totally dependent on human behavior, because what they’re really doing is observing, extracting and inferring things from what hundreds of millions or billions of people do.” And that raises interesting (and uncomfortable) questions: “What does this tell us about abuse of the platforms, and how much might machine learning ch...

When plants are bitten, they emit a “chemical scream”, writes Ed Yong. That means they emit chemicals in the air that do one or more of the following: Confuse or repel the pests; Attract wasps or other insects that would attack the predator! Signal other parts of the same plant to ramp up defenses. Sometimes, these signals can spread across entire fields warning other plants in the vicinity. Neat, right? But wait, it gets even more fascinating. The silverleaf whitefly can “hack this communication system”! Somehow, in ways not yet understood: They change the warning signal of the plant to convey the wrong type of threat (microbial v insect). Even better (or worse, depending on whether you are pest or plant), this “faulty intelligence” can then make the plant “ more  susceptible to the whiteflies”. And since, as mentioned at the top, the signal percolates to the entire field of plants, the entire field is now ripe for the picking. The field in this m...

It was just a couple of months back that China locked down Wuhan, the point of origin and epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic. To almost everyone outside China, it felt like a brutal measure. The West smirked: it was just the kind of response a communist government would undertake. No free society would tolerate such measures, they said. Strangely, the West hardly anybody paid attention to South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore who took similar measures, along with a lot of random testing to gauge the extent to which the virus had spread/was spreading. And as the virus seemed to come under control in those countries, the West didn’t bother to check if the measures (lockdown and random testing) were instrumental in how the situation had played out in those countries. To be fair, the West had reason to be confident. Previous outbreaks like SARS and H1N1 were contained, and barely spread to the West. And the GHS index that tracks global health security measures to deal with...

What fraction of infected people are dying of coronavirus? Some sites and reports are using this formula:   That formula comes up with low ratios. Unfortunately, it is wrong. Why? Because most cases are still ongoing/active/open and they could end either way: in recovery, or in death. The right formula to use is: By that second formula, the death rate globally is 19% . That means 19% of infected people died. It does not mean 19% of people in the world have died. With me so far? So far it was just logical thinking, but now it gets messy across different countries. The death rate in UK today is a staggering 93%, while Germany is at just 4.6%. How can there be such a huge difference in death rates across rich Western countries? Are Germans that much healthier than the Brits? Are healthcare systems that different in the two countries?  Nope, the answer lies elsewhere, as this article says: “If a country carries out more tests, and also identifies people ...