Curse Of The Corona

Disaster movies sometimes seem not so far-fetched after all. We have not been short of judgement day prophecies of various hues in recent times. But this can be the scariest morality tale of them all: a mystery virus threatening humankind. The reality is more banal in its causative chain, but fear of the unknown is very much its part --- and justly so. As the novel coronavirus explodes like clusterbombs across the plane — over 80 countries have been hit, with nearly one lakh infected -- where does India stand? It's a 'known unknown'. We only know that we do not know.

- Ajay Sukumaran, Jyotika Sood and Siddharth Premkumar 

The virus, according to one theory, was transmitted to humans via snakes (again, we do not know). But we do know that China, the epicentre of this bio-earthquake, is quietening down. Its massively organised state apparatus has helped taper off the threat, after over 3,000 deaths. Can India likewise martial a counterforce? About 10 days into their semester break in mid-January, a group of Indian medical students fled Wuhan just before the shutdown. From that populous capital of the central Chinese province of Hubei, where the metaphorical snake first bit, they made the seven-hour high-speed rail journey to bustling Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, and caught a flight out to Calcutta. “It was a tense few hours of waiting in the train and then in the airport terminal. We had tickets, but didn’t know if we would be sent back,” recollects one of them, a third-year medical student who subsequently became India’s first case of the novel coronavirus infection that causes the flu-like COVID-19 disease. She hadn’t planned on coming back for the break, but the growing uncertainty convinced her of the need to go home to her parents. Now, she has recovered and completed a 28-day quarantine. All three infected people in Kerala have recovered, as the state put its famed healthcare system on high alert. All over the globe, about 50,000 people have recovered.