Subcontinental drift: India’s covid spike

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. For more than 20 years, the United Nations has maintained a peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's still nowhere close to keeping the peace. We examine the institutional and the human shortcomings behind that deadly failure. And consider the baked bean. Depending on how much exposure you've had to British or American culture, you'll be imagining one of two very different things. We dive into the unctuous history of baked beans and how those two recipes diverged. But first— India has just surpassed Brazil as the world's second-worst COVID-19 hotspot. 4.2 million cases and rising fast. Yet the country has been steadily opening up since May. Yesterday, the metro system in Delhi resumed. From the very start of the pandemic, India seemed particularly vulnerable, both economically and epidemiologically. Its wobbly health system, enormous informal economy, dense urban centers, and multigenerational households elsewhere all added to the risk. So the country's swift imposition of a sweeping lockdown in March seemed entirely necessary. But it was announced with little notice and then haphazardly enforced brutally squelching the economy, but not the virus.

Around the same time that the world became alarmed at COVID, say early March, it was virtually undetectable in India.

Alex Trevelli is The Economist's India correspondent based in Delhi.

The first few cases were in big cities. They were all people returning from countries with active infections. And local authorities were reassuring Indians that there was no community transmission. That is, Indians weren't giving it to Indians except those who'd been abroad.

And how has it progressed since then?

So it really took a turn between March 23rd and 24th. Lockdown. When Prime Minister Modi announced an immediate lockdown, 4 hours after it was announced, it was on, in effect lasting almost 2 months, at least 6 weeks, in which no commercial activity or going outside was possible. This is crushing to the economy, to many people caught in the middle of it, but, uh, the rate of infection stayed low and slow. Since then, it's gone up and is now galloping away at a rate that's starting to rival that of Brazil, uh, on a per capita basis. On a total numbers basis, India is racking up more cases of COVID every day now than anywhere else in the world. To put in perspective just how quickly India is sickening right now, you might look at the fact that China recorded 86,000 COVID infections during the entire pandemic. That's less than India is counting every single day now. Over each day of the weekend, India counted 90,000 new infections.

And what's the evident cause of that uptick now?

Well, it seems that testing and tracing, as quickly as India increased its capabilities, was never quick enough to actually catch up to the disease. And of course, the lockdown did end at a certain point. So India has been opening up from its lockdown since May, which was exactly the time that the virus was really sort of hitting its stride. And so without a lockdown and without cases having been contained in isolated bits of the country, it's really been free to infect Indians wherever it finds them.

And what about the geographic spread? Is it everywhere? We've spoken on the show, for example, about how well things seem to be going in Kerala for a while.

The disease is now virtually everywhere in India. Even the remotest bits have recorded incidents of it. And some people will blame this on the nature of the lockdown. One of the biggest problems that was created by the sudden and total lockdown was the fact that it left India's migrant workers without work, without sustenance, And so rules or no rules, many millions of these people were forced to trek across the country, hitching rides on lorries, even walking on foot. And that was about the time that you started to see COVID spread throughout all of India's states and regions. However, whereas the number of infections counted just gallops along, the number of deaths attributed to COVID is relatively low. Compared to some other parts of the world, in particular European countries.

And why is that?

I think the most convincing study I've seen suggests that it's all down to the fact that Indians are younger on average than people living in Europe. If you look at, uh, the number of people who are killed by COVID and the different age cohorts, a lot of variation between countries, but if you adjust for age, find the average victim, Indians are dying at around 1% of treated cases, not very different than you see in the West.

So one bright spot at least, and certainly not as bad as some might have feared, but it sounds as if the lockdown may have done serious damage to the economy.

Yeah, it's been absolutely devastating. We now have since last week a release of quarterly GDP figures, and it shows that India's economy shrank by almost a quarter. That's Nearly 24% loss, likes of which you haven't seen anywhere else in the world. No other big economy was hurt nearly as badly. If you look at an equivalent figure at the US, it was about 9%. That's only the formal economy. India has an unusually large informal economy, and there are a lot of reasons to think that it was even, uh, more badly affected, which is one reason that even with, uh, the viral caseload increasing, there's really no one calling for such drastic measures again. It seems instead as if the attitude is let the doctors go to work, everyone for himself, guarding themselves and vulnerable family members. And in some parts of the country, it looks as if people are pretending that there's nothing else to do.

But is the attitude also that that's been a failure of the government? I mean, what's the feeling on the ground?

I have to say there's not much of a sense of blame being directed towards the government. The figure of the prime minister is immensely popular, no less so since the lockdown. And in fact, this is hardly the first grand sudden gesture that the government under Mr. Modi has made. They don't seem to affect his popularity whether they succeed or not. And it's widely understood that India is not to blame for the fact of the outbreak. I think instead it's being treated more like an act of God, which the finance minister called it just the other day.

But to your mind, does that mean that these worrying numbers will only become more worrying if people chalk it up to act of God and go about their daily business?

I think it's inevitable that these numbers are going to get worse. The pace at which cases are being counted has only increased. There's no other country in the world where you see that, certainly no large country. That is to say, people are getting sick at a faster rate now than they were last week, the week before, and so on. And with the population of nearly 1.3 billion, it can keep growing for a while. It looks kind of hopeless, as hard as the medical workers are trying to contain the disease at this point. I think the hope is to minimize loss of life before this thing burns its way through the whole population.

Alex, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

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For more than 20 years, the United Nations has had a peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's their largest in the world, with more than 16,000 soldiers and police. They came to oversee a ceasefire after a brutal civil war and to try to establish a lasting peace in the Central African country. But as the MINUSCO mission, as it's known, drags on, the violence just continues. And now the UN is under pressure to leave.

Earlier this year, I visited Beni, which is a beleaguered town in northeastern Congo. I went to the MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping offices, which I'd visited before, and it was a vast complex of different buildings inside this compound.

Olivia Ackland writes about Congo for The Economist.

When I went there again, all that remained of the offices was a field strewn with rubble. There were shards of glass across the grass. There were scattered bricks and blackened earth.

In November last year, The MONUSCO offices were burnt down by the very locals they were there to protect.

People stormed the offices. They tossed in Molotov cocktails. They set them on fire. And UN staff fled. The remains of the offices were looted.

The protest was sparked by the killing of 8 villagers the day before, just a mile from the UN compound.

And nobody came to help. I spoke to a man who'd witnessed the killings. He said that the killers were uniformed Congolese soldiers. He said that they rounded up his neighbors and shot them. He's really lost hope. I mean, this really encapsulated the problem with the peacekeepers. For 6 years, there have been terrible attacks in Beni. This man told me that he feels completely abandoned, that he can't trust the Congolese army. He doesn't believe the UN are going to help him, and so he's lost hope. And that's how lots of people I spoke to in Beni feel towards the UN. They see them all around the town, but they feel inadequately protected.

So it sounds as if the UN peacekeeping mission is not keeping the peace.

So it hasn't managed to keep the peace, and it hasn't really kept the peace for 20 years. It turned up in 1999 to oversee a ceasefire during a war that killed between 1 million and 5 million people. And so it's hung around to try and bring peace to Eastern Congo, which is an enormous challenge in itself. There are over 100 armed groups hiding in the forests across Eastern Congo.

And so after that 20-year presence, what is the situation on the ground like now?

So armed groups have multiplied in the last 5 years. There's still a huge violence. This year alone, 1 million people were displaced by violence in Congo. Some of the worst fighting recently has been in Ituri province. Where two rival tribes are clashing. Over 1,000 people have been killed, mostly hacked to death with machetes. 60 schools have been attacked, children have been raped. And the situation's horrific, and sadly doesn't seem to be getting any better. Few people seem to really trust the UN to keep them safe. There was a poll in 2018 by an NGO called Peacebuilding Data. They surveyed people in Eastern Congo, and only 15% of those that they surveyed believed that MONUSCO would really keep their village or neighbourhood safe. There's been so much violence for so long that people just don't trust any institution, and so there are a lot of conspiracy theories. I also spoke to the head of civil society in Mangina, which is a village near Beni which is particularly violent, and he voiced some of those conspiracy theories that he was saying, "Oh, MONUSCO are giving money and food to the enemies, and they're in cahoots with the rebels," basically. Which is clearly absurd, but it's just descriptive of people's mindsets. The people really don't know who to trust, and they don't believe that anybody is really helping or protecting them.

But why has it been so hard? Why can't a mission of that size establish itself and establish trust after all this time?

So, I mean, it's an incredibly challenging thing to bring peace to Eastern Congo. The Eastern provinces are vast, 10 times the size of Switzerland. Much of them are covered in jungle, in dense forests. It takes a long time to move around. There aren't many roads. And so once UN soldiers have arrived, rebels have often melted back into the bush. I spoke with Leila Zarougi, who's the MONUSCO head in Congo, and she said that they always felt they could have done more. We never do enough to protect people that end up killed. It's always something that we We will let me think.

There is no doubt about it.

But it's just an incredibly difficult mission.

And if the Congolese people are wary of the peacekeepers now, what does the state think of them?

So they can only stay in Congo as long as the government wants them to. And they are obliged to work together with the Congolese army. But the Congolese army is deeply untrustworthy. Lots of its members are very badly paid, very unruly. They work together with rebels, some of them tipping rebels off, selling them arms. There's also some evidence that not all of the UN troops themselves are trustworthy. There have been lots of accusations of rape from UN troops in Congo, particularly from the early days of the mission. Even today, if you go to a MONUSCO barracks or a MONUSCO building, their walls are plastered with posters reminding soldiers not to have sex with underage girls, not to pay for sex.

So given the scale of the problem and the scale at this stage of the failure of the mission, is there a point to having UN troops on the ground there?

Yeah, so even though the mission has not managed to achieve its aims, depressingly, I think the situation would be worse if they weren't around. I mean, the UN peacekeeping soldiers are definitely much more trusted than the Congolese army, and often they're the only ones who are actually trying to keep people safe. When people flee violence, they often do go and huddle around the MONUSCO bases because they feel that they might be a at least slightly safer there. MONUSCO also brings in a lot of civilian staff, and the civilian staff do a lot of work to document abuses by rebels or by the Congolese army that would otherwise go unnoticed. A lot of aid agencies operating in Eastern Congo also rely on MONUSCO's planes and armed escorts to ferry them around, to get them access to particularly beleaguered areas.

And so what happens here? If the best that can be said is it would be worse without them, how will they continue with this mission?

So they're under pressure to pack up and leave. The Security Council commissioned a report which said that they should try and be out by 2022. This is not going to happen because they need to meet certain criteria. The Congolese army needs to be in control of vast swathes of territory in the east, which will frankly not happen by 2022. But they are under financial pressure. American cuts to peacekeeping operations has squeezed MONUSCO's budget to $1 billion a year. Whereas before it was nearly a third more than that. And they're under pressure to reduce in size and to become less expensive. And I think if they did try and pack up and leave too quickly, there would be a gaping hole which would only be filled by rebels and predatory soldiers. So I fear the violence will continue, but if they left in a hurry, it would only get worse.

Thanks very much for joining us, Olivia.

Thanks very much for having me on the show.

For plenty more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, subscribe to The Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com/intelligenceoffer. Beans. They're, as the old rhyme goes, good for your heart. And where I grew up, baked beans are good for a barbecue. But here in Britain, baked beans are a surprisingly different dish.

A million housewives every day pick up a tin of beans and say, "Beans, beans, Heinz." Britain and America are two countries divided by the same baked bean.

Josie de Lappe writes about food for 1843, our sister magazine.

In Britain, baked beans are fast food. They go on a potato, they go on toast, they go with breakfast. They come out of a can, they're quick to prepare, you can jazz them up with cheese, with other flavorings. In America, they're quite a different dish. It's a slow-cooked thing. They're beans that are baked at a low temperature for a long time in quite a thick, sweet sauce that isn't at all like the one that you would get out of a can in Britain.

Okay, so which one is the original? What is the first baked bean?

If you're going to make an argument for one of these being original, then I think the Americans have it. Native Americans cooked beans slowly using perhaps deer fat or bear fat. They used pots which they dug out ovens for. At some point, they started adding some kind of maple sugar. These were a really slow dish that they were making for a long time. Then you got the Pilgrims coming to America, and they kind of borrowed this dish. And it was a real boon for them because, as devout Christians, they weren't allowed to cook on the Sabbath. So you could put a pot of beans to start cooking on the Saturday evening, which could then cook overnight, and you had food ready for you on Sunday.

And how did this make its way over to Britain?

So beans really came to Britain with Heinz. Heinz began making them at the end of the 19th century in America, and they expanded in the UK at the beginning of the 20th century. And it really became part of the English breakfast. It was adopted very enthusiastically by British people. And now Heinz has a factory in Wigan in the north of England, which is the biggest food processing plant in Europe, and rolls out about 3 million cans of beans every day.

But as you say, these are fundamentally different dishes on different sides of the Atlantic. When and how did they diverge?

They are very different dishes. In Britain, you're using the same kinds of beans. You're still mainly using navy beans, which are known in Britain as haricot beans. But the sauce is a very tomatoey one. It's less sweet. I mean, it is still actually a very sweet sauce. It's got a lot of sugar in it, but you cut it with vinegar, and it is a very different flavor. And I think that one thing that's quite a popular kind of meal in Britain, you wouldn't get it in a recipe book, but it's the on toast meal. You know, it could be scrambled eggs on toast, it could be mushrooms on toast, and beans on toast has sort of really slotted into that group of meals very comfortably.

As the acknowledged economist expert on this point, which of the beans is better, the American or the British?

Look, I mean, the British ones have the advantage that they are very quick. You know, you can pour them from the tin to the bowl, you can heat them up in the microwave, and they last for years in the cupboard, so they are ready to go at any moment. The American bean, I think, is a sort of proper dish. That's something it takes hours to cook. It has real soul to it. But I think as somebody who grew up very much on Heinz baked beans, the Proustian flavour of those wins out for me.

But the way you're talking here, it's as if no British person has ever made baked beans from scratch.

I would be willing to bet that there are very few people in Britain who would try and do that. I think with baked beans, I think because people start eating them in childhood, there's a real emotional connection. It's not just about creating— I think to make it yourself would just— you'd just be making a different thing. That's why if I were going to make baked beans, I would make an American version, because then I just, you know, I wouldn't be disappointed by it not being the flavor of something I'm used to coming out of a can.

I think before you make that decision, you should take some time and make your own batch of American-style baked beans and then tell me your preference.

All right, it's a deal.

Josie, thanks very much for joining us.

Jason, it was my pleasure.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.

Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover and to help you to better manage your health? We're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit optum.com to learn more.