Month: May 2021

Less Testing is Not Good for Covid Control

Several news reports and long threads on Twitter have pointed out that the number of covid tests across the country have fallen over the last few days. The total number of tests peaked at 19.45 lakh on May 1. They have since fallen to 16.64 lakh as on May 4. Other than not identifying people who have covid and don’t know about it, this is also not good for Covid control 

The following chart plots the total number of tests conducted every day, since May 20, 2020.

Source: https://www.covid19india.org/

Not surprisingly, as the number of covid tests have come down, so have the number of new covid cases. As of April 30, the total number of new covid cases was at 4.02 lakh, with the tests being at 19.2 lakh. They fell to 3.56 lakh as of May 3, when the number of tests fell to 15.05 lakh. As of May 4, the number of new tests stood at 16.64 lakhs, with fresh covid cases being at 3.83 lakh.

The following chart plots the fresh covid cases every day since January 30, 2020.

Source: https://www.covid19india.org/   

The fact that India hasn’t been testing enough has been true for a while now. As Bhramar Mukherjee, Soumik Purkayastha, Maxwell Salvatore and Swapnil Mishra write in The Hindu: “While testing and cases have grown at a comparable rate in the US, in India the growth in reported cases on an average has been nearly five times higher than the growth in testing. India is not testing enough.”

For the Indian case, the data for the period March 28-April 27 has been used, during which much of the recent surge in the number of covid cases has happened.

If we were to follow this method for the period between March 28 and May 4 (the latest data available), we get a similar kind of result. The number of fresh cases has risen at an average weekly rate of 45.98%, whereas testing has grown at 10.67%. This is in line with the point Mukherjee and her co-writers made in their piece in The Hindu. (Of course, it is also obvious looking at the slopes of the curves in the two charts).

If we look at a slightly longer time frame starting from March 1 and up to May 4, the average weekly growth in fresh cases stands at 43.58%, whereas the average weekly growth in number of tests is at 10.31%.

So, what does all this really mean? Let’s look at it pointwise.

1) Low testing leads to a lower number of fresh covid cases. This shows the central government and state governments where this is playing out in good light. With a lower number of fresh cases, they can claim that they are getting the pandemic under control.

2) With the number of cases falling, it also leads to a fall in what is referred to as the reproduction number. As Adam Kucharski writes in The Rules of Contagion, the reproduction number is “the number of new infections we’d expect a typical infectious person to generate on average”.

An estimate made by Sitabhra Sinha from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai suggests that the reproduction number for India dropped to 1.16 for the week ending May 3. This is the lowest since March 19, when it was 1.19. Hence, data suggests that the spread of the infection is slowing down, with an average covid patient infecting a lesser number of individuals around him.

Of course, the question is whether this is a genuine drop or simply another manifestation of not enough tests being carried out.

3) The advantage of testing more is that more people who have covid can be identified quickly. This improves the chances of people surviving the disease. But then this is not the only issue at hand, for the government.

As Ryan A Bourne writes in Economics in One Virus: “As economist Alex Tabarrok has explained, there’s good reason to think that there is an inverted-U shape of Covid-19 cases as testing numbers increase. At first, conducting more tests leads to finding additional cases.” Of course, this makes governments look bad in the short run. And governments obsessed with narrative want to control the growing number of fresh covid cases, this way or that way.  

4) Other than increasing the chances of survival, testing also slows down the spread of the epidemic. As Bourne writes: “When testing is widespread and regular enough, conducting more tests actually reduces Covid-19 cases…[as]… potentially infectious people can isolate themselves immediately and notify those they have been in contact with sooner.”

What this does is it minimizes “the window of transmission between people becoming infectious and ultimately isolating—the time the person would likely be out spreading the disease.”

It leads to a genuine slowdown in the transmission of the disease and not just a slowdown at the data level. Hence, it is important that the governments keep encouraging testing.

Dancing in the Dark

It’s been four weeks since I have stepped out of the one-room kitchen apartment in central Mumbai that I live in. Of course, that is if you ignore the few times I have had to go down to collect some stuff that was being home-delivered.

The building that I stay in is right on the road that goes to one end of the Bandra-Worli Sealink, which connects the island city to its suburbs, and given that, it is normally buzzing with some traffic 24/7. But the traffic has been missing over the last few weeks, as Mumbai remains under a lockdown to control the second wave of Covid.

In the silence that surrounds me, I can hear the birds chirping for once, like I could the same time last year. For some reason, the dogs are barking more than they usually do. May be they are not being fed as well as they usually are, as people continue to stay at home.

The ground behind my apartment isn’t noisy anymore with kids and adults not playing cricket. But the sirens of emergency ambulances dashing across the city can be heard loud and clear, any time of the day.

The good part is there is less traffic on the roads, and they can get to the hospitals much faster.

What I can also hear loud and clear is the buzzing of my phone. The SOS cries on Twitter and Facebook have been going up by the day. People have been asking for help, even begging in some cases, for hospital beds, oxygen cylinders and all kinds of medicines.

As more and more cries for help hit social media, the responses seem to be coming down. I guess people are either getting comfortably numb or there is only so much that they can do.

Also, it’s finally hit me that quite a few families living in apartments around me are dysfunctional, perhaps they always were, and have now finally had the time to fight it out and figure it out. Of course, given how close we live to one another, noise travels from one apartment to another.

In all this, the father and son duo, who are my next-door neighbours, continue to play cricket on the verandah, with the father asking the son to bowl just as bowlers bowl in the IPL cricket tournament that is currently on. Who would have thought that IPL would happen during a pandemic and become a moral issue?

But then if capitalism is not a moral issue, what is?

The slumdwellers continue to drag water in buckets placed on a board with wheels, something very peculiar to Mumbai, and very difficult to visualise, unless you have seen it.

The grocery store and vegetable vendor I get my supplies from have become technologically savvy. They now take orders on WhatsApp and accept payments on Google Pay.

And that’s the beauty of capitalism, people adapt to make life easy for others and profitable for themselves. But when they overdo it, it becomes a moral issue.

In one way, everything has changed in the world that I live in. In another, nothing has.

The young guy, living in an apartment below my floor, continues to blast Bruce Springsteen. The Boss is singing Dancing in the Dark.

“Messages keeps gettin’ clearer
Radio’s on and I’m movin’ ‘round my place
I check my look in the mirror
Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain’t gettin’ nowhere
I’m just livin’ in a dump like this
There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere.”

Each time he gets to singing Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself, I cannot help but wonder why this song hasn’t become an anthem for the times that we live in.

Bored, tired, jaded and hopeless, that’s how I feel right now.

And perhaps so do many others, who are waiting it out.

This piece originally appeared in the Khaleej Times under a different headline. 

Kabhi Capitalism, Kabhi Socialism…

Some of you think that I have suddenly turned socialist (or I am probably revealing my true self now) because I think that free vaccines against covid for everyone is a good thing.

Yes, I can afford popcorn at a multiplex, I can even afford the most expensive multiplex tickets in India. But that’s not the point here. The pricing strategy of vaccines is not about me or you for that matter, it is about the nation at large, and that is the context in which my writing on vaccines should be seen.

Economics to me is not mathematics as it is to many people. I believe in looking at the context and then writing what I think is right. And a free market doesn’t work in every context. 

I have explained this in my pieces in great detail (you can read them here, here and here). Those interested in an informed argument can read the pieces. Those who aren’t, well, you have already decided which side I am on. And any amount of reading won’t change that. 

Last year when the covid epidemic broke the Indian economy’s back, I suggested increased allocation to NREGA and money being put in Jan Dhan accounts, in the very first piece I wrote on rebooting the economy. 

This is not something a firm believer in free markets would suggest. But I did. Because I thought it was important in the situation we were in. The government implemented these steps (not for a moment i am saying that they did it because I suggested them). Later on, I also suggested that India needs an urban NREGA.

I also suggested that the government should cut the GST on automobiles by 10% and cut the rate of income tax, so that people would be incentivised to spend more (the government didn’t do anything like that). These would have been seen as pro-market moves. 

But all along my thinking was how can more money be put in hands of people, irrespective of whether it was socialism or capitalism. The brackets don’t interest me. 

Over the years, I have also believed that rates of taxes on all forms of incomes should be the same (for which the stock market guys have really abused me in the past). 

When covid broke out, the government decided to put a price cap on airline tickets. I didn’t see any of you free market guys saying anything against the government limiting the price of airline tickets. Why should that be done? Who travels by air in India? Do I need to specify that? All the talk about incentive now. Is incentive only important for Serum Institute? What about Indigo, Spice Jet, Go Air, Air India? Unka kya?

But a vaccine can be sold at any price.

The point I am trying to make here is that if you thought I would be doing free market free market all the time, then I didn’t lead you there. You only saw the things that you wanted to see. 

It is easier to understand someone once you have bracketed them, identified them to believe in a certain kind of ideology. I get that. But then that’s not my problem. You thought I was the right echo chamber for you, clearly, I am not. There are lots of echo chambers on the internet, you can easily find one, where you fit.

I believe in what the former Bank of England and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, writes in his new book Value(s): “ideologies are prone to extremes, capitalism loses its sense of moderation when the belief in the power of the market enters the realm of faith“.

If you don’t understand what this means, I suggest you read the third volume of my Easy Money trilogy. 

I can only say that any of the isms of economics are not an ideology for me. We have all seen what strong ideological beliefs can do to any country.

If you still don’t get it, again, that’s not my problem.