Cresting: India’s second covid-19 wave

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Before the pandemic, there were about a million species in danger of extinction. Now many of them are under even more pressure. We look into the causes of a troubling rise in wildlife poaching. And researchers have long had a dream of using optical tricks to see around corners. It's not easy, but the technology is coming along, and a new experimental setup has taken pictures around a corner that's a kilometer and a half away. First up, though, a new wave of COVID 19 is washing over India. On Sunday, there were more than 68,000 new confirmed cases, the highest it's been since the first wave in the autumn. On the same day began wholly the festival of colors, Indians tossed brightly colored powder and water balloons at one another to mark the beginning of spring. But this year's celebration were decidedly more subdued than usual. So far, more than 12 million people in India have been infected with the coronavirus, and the number of Deaths has topped 160,000. The fatality rate has been lower than expected, but the speed of infections this time around has people worried. And while the country's vaccination program is underway, inoculating such a huge population will be a mammoth task.

It's slowly sinking in that this is a full on second wave of the virus.

Max Rodenbeck is our South Asia Bureau chief and is based in New Delhi.

What's different this time from India's first wave is the numbers are going up really quickly, but also it's very uneven. So large parts of the country haven't really felt the wave yet. But big cities and parts of India that are exposed to the outside world are experiencing this wave pretty full on right now.

And what's the reason behind this sudden spike?

India's first peak was in September, when briefly, India had more new cases than any country in the world. And so its second wave seems to have been with a similar kind delay, behind a lot of the rest of the world. There are many reasons behind the surge. There are certainly new variants and they've made their appearance in India. There's one study in the state of Punjab, for example, which showed that nearly 80% of all the cases where they'd actually sequenced them genetically had come from the more virulent UK variety. That's been making headway in Europe. It's also, as elsewhere in the world, there was a weakening of restraints that people had been using. Mask wearing had fallen off. People had been gathering much more often, Schools had reopened. There was a lowering of the guard in a big way.

And you say that the geographic distribution of this evident second wave is different from the first. Are there other things that distinguish it?

One thing is that it seems much faster. In the city of Bombay, for example, Mumbai, the numbers have gone up by a multiple of six in just a couple of weeks. And the other thing is the people infected this time seem to be younger. The demographic is slightly different. That might have something to do with India's vaccination drive also, which prioritized older people.

And if part of the reason behind this wave is the loosening of restrictions, is that to say that the government is considering tightening them again?

Yes, but the government is taking a slightly slower approach. Last year, at the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, the Indian government adopted one of the harshest lockdowns in the world. And I think in retrospect, it was realized that that was probably too harsh. India's economy was probably hit more badly than any other large world economy. It shrank by about 24% in just three months. So there's an understanding that a massive total national lockdown is just not on the cards. Again, what's more likely is local lockdowns. This is already starting to happen in the worst affected States such as Maharashtra in central India, where there are local lockdowns and curfews in some cities. At the same time, the government is wary of offending people. And it's also in the middle of an election campaign. Four very large Indian states are having their local elections right now, and the ruling party at the center is fighting in those elections, and they don't want to stop their election rallies. So that's going ahead. There was a big restriction put in place for one of the largest religious festivals, a Hindu festival in northern India, which usually attracts tens of millions of people. That was scheduled to go ahead as recently as February, but that has now been sharply curtailed and the government has asked people to stay away.

And you mentioned the vaccination effort. I mean, broadly, how is that going in India right now?

It's going slowly but surely slowly. Because of India's sheer scale in numbers, vaccinating 1.4 billion people is really going to take some time. So India is doing well. They've vaccinated something like 60 million people, but it's not a big percentage. Two or three million people are getting a shot every day. But experts say that if India wanted to blunt this wave of COVID that number would have to be more like 10 million a day. And it doesn't look like India can achieve that anytime soon. It's partly also a question of just producing enough vaccine. India is the world's largest producer, but it also has commitments to supply foreign countries. So it's going to be difficult to cover both domestic and international needs. And for the time being, the government has put a kind of freeze on shipments out of India.

Do you think that foretells a greater amount of concern of protecting India's own supply in the future?

Yes. As in any democracy, the pressure is very strong on the government to look after its own citizens first. So it's a delicate game to play when you're also the world's major supplier. So it does look like there are more kinds of vaccine that are going to come on stream in India in the next couple of months and that the producers of the vaccines that are currently being done here will be cranking up production. But that may come too late to really stave off the wave of COVID.

When we spoke, when the pandemic was first underway and the case numbers and deaths in India seemed to anomalously low, there was the suggestion that if coronavirus were to take hold in India, that it would be apocalyptic scenes. Have those been avoided? Do you think there is any Prospect of that kind of collapse of the health system that was worried about before.

It'S still anyone's guess. I mean, one of the unexplained things is that India has a very low death rate. Some people say India doesn't count well enough, and that's possibly true, but even so, the death rate is below where it would be even if you didn't count enough deaths. So Indians are simply not dying in the numbers that they are in other countries. I mean, if you take the whole of India, the number of people who die in car accidents every year is about the same as the number of people who died last year from COVID So some of those initial fears of mobbed hospitals, which didn't play out, maybe India will be lucky again. Natural immunities combined with vaccination will keep things okay, but with changes in variants and so on, it's always good to be cautious. The trouble is that India does have a weak medical system in the end, there aren't enough doctors, there aren't enough hospitals and so on. So if the numbers really get out of hand, then India will not be able to handle it. But so far, so good.

And I know we're very much still in the middle of things, regrettably, but.

On the whole, how would you assess.

India's record on the pandemic more generally in comparison with other countries?

Like almost every country, it's been a little bit hit or miss. Politicians like to claim that all credit is due to them and that none of the responsibility is theirs for things that go wrong. The government has done some things quite well. The current vaccination program is pretty good, but also some things have been serendipitous. It was a private Indian company that decided to just go ahead and start producing vaccines, even without any aid from the government. And that's one of the reasons why India is able to have a big vaccination program going. So I'm afraid it's a bit of a roller coaster ride. And with the second wave coming in, it's anyone's guess how it's going to play out.

Max, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, check out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show Notes. Already this century, several species have gone extinct. The Pinta giant tortoise from the Galapagos, the eastern cougar that once roamed across the Americas. And the Caspian tiger, one of the world's largest big cats. It seems that soon another will be added to that list. The Northern White Rhino.

I recently met Najan and Fatu, who are the only two surviving Northern White Rhinos on Earth.

Avantika Chilkati is one of our international correspondents.

It was at Old Pejada Conservancy in Kenya where they live and there they're known as the gulls. So these two, you know, they're the last of their subspecies and they're not the only ones who've been brought to the edge of extinction because of poaching and environmental destruction. And that's a problem that's really been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Well, we can speak about the larger problem in a bit, but tell me more about these white rhinos.

I was shown around the conservancy by one of their caretakers, he's a man called James Mwenda.

What I think, and with my experience staying with them now, is extinction is sort of like something overwhelming, that aspects of being a dark infinite road where animals go and never come back.

He told me that you can really sense the emptiness and the loneliness in them which comes from being on the verge of extinction. Given there's no surviving males, modern science is the only hope to keep the Northern White alive. So every three months of late, the girls have gone through this very invasive medical procedure to harvest their eggs and these eggs are rushed to Italy to be fertilized in a lab with frozen sperm from long gone male Northern White Rhinos. And the ordeal just leaves them exhausted for days.

You can imagine it's very demanding for the animal, so it's not an easy procedure for them.

Richard vine, who runs Ol Pejeta Conservancy, he told me there's pretty small chance of reintroducing a viable population back into the wild. But you know, even if they fail, he seemed to think it was a good thing that this whole disaster was getting a lot of publicity for the wider problem of conservation.

They have become ambassadors for extinction. So they have generated massive publicity around the whole issue of biodiversity loss and extinction because they're a charismatic species. People can't believe that a charismatic species of this size and kind of charisma could be going extinct.

Even before the pandemic, the United nations estimated that there are 1 million plant and animal species at risk of dying out.

And you mentioned that the pandemic is making matters worse because it's led to an increase in poaching. I mean, why is that?

There's two main reasons. Firstly, these Protected areas have been emptied of tourists because of lockdowns. There was a recent survey that suggested 90% of tour operators in Africa have seen their bookings fall by at least 75%. That's a problem because tourism funds conservation work. When you as a visitor go to a state run park, a private reserve, a community conservancy, whatever, you pay a small fee quite often to enter the protected land and for a bed in a posh camp. And without that cash, these places can really struggle. As Richard vine told me, 70% at.

Least, of our income, our annual income is from tourism. So the hole, the financial hole that we're left with is massive.

He said that money is crucial not just to pay for staff, but also things like vehicles, tech security that goes into anti poaching efforts.

It's a multi layered, multifaceted, complicated security operation that has to operate 247 to be effective to prevent rhinos being poached. That comes at a huge cost.

Without the usual revenue from tourism, these guys have had to cut their costs and that's meant scaling back some of their security. The same is true elsewhere. It's not just an old pejada. Parks have been cutting back on the area they patrol. They've been reducing very expensive things like nighttime operations. And all of this is just to save money.

And you said there were two reasons that the pandemic has been bad for poaching, one being the tourists and security concerns. What's the other?

Yeah, so the second reason is that the communities that live alongside these protected areas, they're really struggling. A lot of them have jobs that rely on tourism. Some of them lead tours or they help maintain lodges. Some of them even just supply these lodges with fruit and veg. I interviewed Michael o' Brien Onyeka, the senior vice president for the Africa field division at a nonprofit called Conservation International. And he said it's been so devastating that people have been turning to illegal hunting just to feed their families.

With the downturn on this tourism revenue, we have seen massive increase in harvesting of bush meat, primarily as a protein source for communities.

You know, people, elephant carcasses that have been found in protected areas nowadays, they don't just have their tusks hacked off. Their bodies have quite often been stripped for meat too.

When you're out of job, out of livelihood sources, and you see impalas or antelopes running around your backyard, I would, you know, if I mean, put in.

That position and what's being done to address the problem? What can be done to address the problem?

For a lot of the people in this industry right now, the big goal is to keep rural communities in work. And, you know, that's not just to stop hunting hard up. Villages are also really easy for international poaching syndicates to hire. They need people who are familiar with this terrain to do their dirty work. And the other thing is it will help defend against poaching if, you know, conservancies and parks can diversify their revenue stream so they're not just relying on tourism money.

And then there's the matter of illegal wildlife trade that got the Northern White Rhino in trouble.

Right. And as Mr. O' Brien Onyeka pointed out to me, the theory that COVID 19 originated in a Chinese wet market, it's just reminded people it's dangerous to.

Meddle with wild animals because Covid is a zoonotic disease. You've seen China during this period tighten its wildlife trafficking rules and enforcements. So that has additionally raised reduce the prospect for people to traffic in illegal wildlife and which directly impacts the incidence of poaching.

It's probably a long shot, but the real hope is that the pandemic shows people just how dangerous the illegal wildlife trade really is for humans as well as animals.

Thanks very much for your time, Avantika.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Imagine a hostage situation or a raid to capture a terrorist. For all the technology that the police and the military have, they can't see, for example, what's behind a partially drawn curtain. Rays of light tend to go in straight lines. So that kind of seeing around corners is impossible if done in a direct way. That's why researchers have long been trying to do it indirectly, optically, technologically. It's really difficult. So years of trials have resulted in only sketchy images over short distances. That is, until a recent breakthrough.

A team of scientists in China have demonstrated ways to see around a corner from a distance of almost one and a half kilometers.

Gilad Amit is the Economist's science correspondent.

This blows all previous records out of the water.

Seeing around corners, though, what exactly does that mean? How does that work?

So I'd like you to imagine, Jason, that you and I live in apartments that face each other across a busy road and that we're in the habit of staring into each other's homes. Now, if you hide behind a barrier, like a curtain, for example, I won't be able to see you directly. But if there's a mirror positioned in the right way on a nearby wall, I might be able to see you in that. And that's because Some of the light that hits you bounces off the mirror and then makes its way to my eyes. In theory, you don't actually need a mirror to do this, so long as the wall has some degree of reflectivity. Light that bounces off your body bounces off the wall and then makes its way towards me as well. The information it contains will be much more jumbled than if I was using a mirror. But sufficiently smart mathematics can, in theory at least, reconstruct its journey. And that's the principle that researchers have been exploiting for years to try and see around corners in what's called non line of sight imaging.

Okay, and how about this new demonstration? How did they do the same thing.

Over a kilometre and a half?

The main obstacle that needs to be overcome is that very little light comes bouncing back off a wall. And that returning light is where the information about the hidden object is contained. So you want to maximize how much you collect. So the team that broke the record, they did this between two buildings in Shanghai. They did this in a number of ways. First, they provided their own light source. They fired a laser at the wall that boosted the amount of useful information they'd get back after all those bounces. Second, they used extremely powerful detectors to collect every single particle of light or photon that made the return journey at that distance. There are very few survivors. For every billion billion photons fired across the gap, only one or two return. And finally, an obvious touch in retrospect. They carried out the experiment at night to minimise the amount of background light that might interfere with their imaging.

So is that to say that this challenge of seeing around corners is now solved?

It can now just be done?

I guess it depends on how fast you want to see around a corner and in what level of detail. The principle has been established for a while. This is several hundred times further than anyone has done it before. But there are a couple of limitations. Capturing the data in Shanghai took a couple of hours. So every time light bounces off a wall, you lose some of the information because the light is scattered in all possible directions. So the object that you want to take a picture of has to be quite close to the wall. The distance used in this experiment was about 75 centimeters, and that's quite close to the upper limit. To go any further, one researcher told me, you'd need a laser so powerful that it would start burning a hole in the wall.

So as things stand at the current state of the art, how might it be put to use?

There are a couple of industries that are interested in this work. The military have funded work like this in the past. Applications include scoping out a battlefield, knowing which buildings in a hostile city contain civilians, that sort of thing. NASA has also been interested because if you could put such a laser on a satellite orbiting a distant world, you could in theory see inside tunnels or caverns or other subsurface spaces without needing to actually put someone on the surface of the planet. And engineers in the autonomous vehicle industry have also been interested. They would love it if their cars could spot a speeding motorist just before they came hurtling around the corner. These sorts of applications remain years, if not decades in the future. But the arrival of results like this, which are so much better than previous records, suggests that other extraordinary advances are possible.

Gilad, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and we'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.