Quarantine may end but will we be too fat to get through the door?

Paris:04.04.2020

The coronavirus has shaken the world like nothing else. But beyond the terrible toll of death, economic devastation and fear, the virus is likely to leave another lasting mark. It is going to make us all fatter.

“I don’t know if we are going to come out of this experience stronger, but we will have gotten fatter,” warned nutritionist Beatrice de Reynal, who said that was only one thing to do — eat less.

“It is going to happen to us all, even if we try to exercise,” said Julian Mercier, a French sports, health and cooking coach. With more than a quarter of humanity under lockdown, and with many worried they will get the virus next, the temptation to comfort eat was hard to resist.

By doing little or none of the physical activity we normally do, an adult is likely to burn off up to 400 fewer calories a day, said dietician Jennifer Aubert. Which is why we have to reduce our portions and move as much as we can — as long as it is not to the fridge and back.

Other experts point to people who have panicbought a cupboard full of fresh food, finding themselves duty-bound to eat their way through it. Being alone and coping with the stress of the situation, as well as worries about whether they will have a job to go back to, can tip people into over-eating, the British Nutrition Foundation warned.

It is advising people to embrace the lockdown to learn to “put together healthy meals” which “can be a source of enjoyment and help your well-being.” Not everyone cooks, however, says Pascale Hebel of the French CREDOC research institute. Which can lead to a heavy reliance on fatty and salty ready-meals and tinned food.

Others warned against using food as a way of soothing children forbidden to play with friends. “To avoid problems it is easy to make spaghetti bolognese that everyone likes rather than to fight to make them eat spinach,” Mercier said. Experts were unanimous that cooking for yourself and structuring your day with regular meals and physical activity, were vital if we are to come out of this in decent shape. AFP

MUST FIGHT THE CRAVINGS

THE SPEAKING TREE

Corona Is Here, But Where Is Karuna?

Karan Singh

04.04.2020

The grave crisis that has developed worldwide due to the spread of a tiny, invisible virus, reminds me of the samudra manthan story, the mythological churning of the milky ocean. Continuous churning went on for centuries, in which devas and asuras, both participated in the hope that great gifts would emerge. Instead, suddenly, a dark and deadly poison, the garala, emerged and spread worldwide. Devas and asuras fled in terror, and it was only when Shiva, Karunavataram, the incarnation of compassion, collected the poison in his hands and swallowed it, thus containing it in his own throat which turned blue (hence his name Neelkanth) that the churning continued and great gifts began to appear.

If we consider the violent churning that the human race has indulged in over the last few centuries – the ruthless exploitation of nature, the cruel destruction of millions of plant, insect and animal species, pollution of air, earth and oceans, the unsustainable high protein diets and consumption of strange animals and reptiles – it has, at last, thrown up a new garala that threatens the very existence of the human race. Perhaps this is nature’s way of telling us to slow down worldwide for a while so as to enable her to regenerate, which she seems to be doing rapidly, during the human lockdown period.

To expect Shiva to appear once again and contain this poison is, to say the least, unrealistic; nonetheless, we urgently need the compassion he embodied so that together, we can meet this challenge. This must extend not only to victims of the virus but to those millions whose lives have been uprooted in the process.

The sight of lakhs of migrant workers desperately trying to walk hundreds of kilometers to get back to their villages was heartrending. Have we seen a countervailing upsurge of compassion? Shakespeare’s immortal words in The Merchant of Venice are apt: “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath : it is twice blest / It blesses him that gives and him that takes.”

That is the karuna we need. The present crisis has taught us that firstly, despite attempts by several world leaders, notably President Trump, to trash globalisation, the fact remains that in any major worldwide crisis we will all sink or swim together. The ancient Indic ideal of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam remains valid.

Secondly, it shows that our basic health infrastructure remains woefully inadequate. ‘Sharir madhyam khalu dharma sadhanam’ – the body alone is the foundation for all dharmas. Unless we triple the percentage of GDP that is at present allotted to health and education, we will never be able to safeguard the welfare of the weaker and most vulnerable sections of society.

A restructuring of our national priorities is long overdue.

Thirdly, this crisis has given us the opportunity to stay home, look within and develop our intellectual and spiritual capacities, regardless of which religion we may belong to. We have to find within ourselves, springs of compassion – karuna – that alone will be able to confront this deadly Corona challenge. We do not need large congregations; just quiet prayer and meditation are much more effective. As the Upanishad says, “Within the furthest golden sheath resides the immortal Brahmn. That, effulgent, light of lights, that is what the knowers of the Atman know.”

How we made the coronavirus pandemic

It may have started with a bat in a cave. But human activity set it loose

David Quammen

04.04.2020

The latest new virus that has captured the world’s horrified attention is known as “nCoV-2019.” The name, picked by the Chinese scientists who identified the virus, is short for “novel coronavirus of 2019”. It reflects the fact that the virus was first recognised to have infected humans late last year — in a seafood and live-animal market in Wuhan — and that it belongs to the coronavirus family, a notorious group. The SARS epidemic of 2002-3, which infected 8,098 people worldwide, killing 774, was caused by a coronavirus. So was the MERS outbreak that began in 2012 and still lingers.

Despite the new virus’s name though, nCoV-2019 isn’t as novel as you might think. Something like it was found years ago, in a cave in Yunnan, a province roughly 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan, by perspicacious researchers who noted its existence with concern. The fast spread of nCoV-2019 is startling — but not unforeseeable. That the virus emerged from a nonhuman animal, probably a bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem spooky — yet, it is utterly unsurprising to scientists.

One such scientist is Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a senior author of the draft paper that gave nCoV-2019 its name. It was Shi and her collaborators who, in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people. Shi and her colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human pandemics.

In a 2017 paper, they set out how they had found coronaviruses in multiple individuals of four different species of bats, including one called the intermediate horseshoe bat, because of the half-oval flap of skin protruding like a saucer around its nostrils. The genome of that virus is 96% identical to the Wuhan virus. And those two constitute a pair distinct from other known coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS. In this sense, nCoV-2019 is novel — and possibly even more dangerous to humans than the other coronaviruses.

Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a private research organisation that focuses on the connections between human and wildlife health, is one of Shi’s long-time partners. “We’ve been raising the flag on these viruses for 15 years,” he told me. “Ever since SARS.” During the second study, the field team took blood samples from many Yunnanese people, about 400 of whom lived near the cave. Roughly 3% of them carried antibodies against SARS-related coronaviruses. “We don’t know if they were exposed as children or adults,” Daszak said. “But what it tells you is that these viruses are making the jump, repeatedly, from bats to humans.” In other words, this Wuhan emergency is no novel event. It’s part of a sequence of related contingencies that will stretch forward into the future as long as current circumstances persist.

Current circumstances include a perilous trade in wildlife for food, with supply chains stretching through Asia, Africa, the United States and elsewhere. That trade has now been outlawed in China, on a temporary basis; but it was outlawed also during SARS, then allowed to resume — with bats, civets, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many kinds of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as the one in Wuhan. Current circumstances also include 7.6 billion hungry humans: some impoverished and desperate for protein; some affluent and empowered to travel every which way by airplane. These factors are unprecedented. No largebodied animal has ever been nearly so abundant as humans are now. And one consequence of that abundance, that power and the consequent ecological disturbances is increasing viral exchanges — first from animal to human, then human to human, sometimes on a pandemic scale.

We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.

We are faced with two mortal challenges. Short term: We must do everything we can to contain and extinguish this nCoV-2019 outbreak. Long term: We must remember, when the dust settles, that nCoV-2019 was not a novel event that befell us. It was — it is — part of a pattern of choices that we humans are making. THE NEW YORK TIMES

FOREWARNED: The consumption of civets, possibly infected by bats, caused 2002-03’s SARS outbreak

CAGED TOGETHER: Wet markets bring diverse animals and birds, from ducks to hens and wild birds of prey, in proximity, causing the transfer of dangerous pathogens

EWS quota: Govt tried ‘edu handicap’ plea to push age concession for upper castes

Subodh.Ghildiyal@timesgroup.com

New Delhi:04.04.2020

As the government has a rethink on the proposal to relax the eligibility age in employment for upper castes under the 10% quota, it now emerges that social justice ministry tried to overcome the hurdle of the economically weaker sections’ “competitiveness” by arguing that the poor suffer from an educational handicap and should be provided relief.

Age relaxation and increase in number of attempts for job examinations for poor upper castes is a contentious issue. The social justice ministry (MSJ), as reported by TOI, has withdrawn the Cabinet proposal it had circulated this February.

When MSJ’s proposal was first red-flagged in August 2019, the DoPT said that age relaxation could only be given after observing if a particular quota was being filled or not. It even cited the time lag between the implementation of SC/ST/ OBC quota and the provision of age-attempt relaxation to these categories.

“A candidate because of his poor financial background would not be able to access and afford better education and complete the qualifying degree within the normal limit of age as mandated by the government at present. He/she would be able to complete education and obtain qualifying degree only after taking additional number of years. It is, therefore, felt that he/she would be able to get the true intended benefit of EWS reservation only if the age relaxation of 3 years as available to OBCs is provided in direct recruitment to Central government jobs,” argued the Cabinet note, seen by the TOI. As it appears, the reasoning tried to undercut the argument about the EWS’s competitiveness.

PM’s call to light lamps is to boost morale of nation: BJP

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi:04.04.2020

BJP on Friday dubbed the opposition’s criticism of PM Narendra Modi’s call to people to light lamps on Sunday an “anti-national” outlook which cannot see the government’s decision to help the poor and boost the morale of the nation as it fights the coronavirus.

Speaking to party leaders from Uttar Pradesh, including MPs, MLAs and the state president, BJP president J P Nadda said when the nation is united under PM Modi in its efforts to combat the pandemic, Congress and other parties are showing their “ideological bankruptcy”.

“To talk such nonsensical things even during this hour of crisis highlight their conspiracy to divide the country,” he said as the nationwide lockdown entered the 10th day.

As BJP welcomed the PM’s announcement, Union minister Prakash Javadekar said, “PM Narendra Modi has made an appeal to all of us to ... illuminate our surroundings by lighting candles, diyas, torches or flashlights standing on balcony or at door step while maintaining social distance. We welcome this unique step of PM, which will boost the morale of the people.” he said. “Let’s awaken the spirit of togetherness in the fight against coronavirus,” he said.

BJP’s national media chief and Rajya Sabha MP Anil Baluni said, “Congress first family is full of negativity and has been giving irresponsible statements. The impact is bound to reflect down the line and it also reflects their mean mindset. I urge Congress leaders to behave sensibly and help combat the crisis. There will be enough time to do politics in future,” Baluni said.

India’s first luxury hotel hosts doctors, nurses on Covid-19 duty

Reeba Zachariah & Sumitra Debroy TNN

04.04.2020

Mumbai: Barely months back, the iconic Taj Mahal Palace, the country’s first luxury hotel situated along the Gateway of India, was throbbing with guests who had flown in from all over the world for the holiday season. Now, its ornate interiors are hosting a series of call rooms for physicians.

With guests emptying out following a travel ban and government looking to expand facilities to combat the coronavirus pandemic, the management has opened the doors of the swank property to house medical staff and ease the pressure on the overburdened public health machinery. Hospital workers in south Mumbai will now be provided accommodation in the hotel’s well-appointed rooms so they can cut down on commute time, rest close to their place of work, and not fear spreading the contagion among family members.

It is not the first time that the Taj Mahal Palace, owned by Indian Hotels Company (IHCL), has provided back-up for healthcare.

During World War I, it was used as a hospital, providing 600 beds. Built in 1903, the Palace, with 285 rooms and nine restaurants, is India’s first luxury hotel. An architectural gem, its design is an amalgamation of Greco-Roman, Islamic and Gothic styles topped by a red-tiled Florentine dome, sitting 240 feet above street level. In addition to the Palace, IHCL has kept its other four hotels in the city at the disposal of doctors and nurses on Covid-19 duty. An IHCL executive said a wing of the Ginger hotel in Andheri East has also been offered as a quarantine centre for Covid-19 suspects. The staff of KB Bhabha Hospital in Bandra has checked in at the nearby Taj Lands End. n Dr Mohan Joshi, who is managing the Sevenhills Hospital in Marol which has a 400-bed isolation facility, said doctors have been allocated rooms in the Taj hotels since Tuesday. “Many of the staffers used to come from far off suburbs such as Kalyan and Virar. The commute itself was taking over 2-3 hours.” A nurse told TOI that for the 7am shift, she had to leave her house in Vasai around 4-4.30am and walk for at least two kilometres to reach the designated pick-up point. A BEST bus would drop her to KEM Hospital, Parel. “It’s not only the walk. The bus gets overcrowded and there is no way to practice social distancing,” she said. Doctors working in designated Covid-19 screening or isolation centres have also been facing resistance from their families or housing societies.

WAH TAJ!