A painting of the surface of a red blood cell, with the cell membrane on top and lots of haemoglobin (red) at the bottom. Illustration: Illustration by David S. Goodsell. doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-008.
Between April 15 and September 14, India’s COVID-19 case load skyrocketed. The Government of India had imposed a lockdown in late March but in hindsight it may have come too early, failing to flatten the curve whatsoever. Or maybe the curve did flatten more than it might have otherwise. Either way, the metaphorical train didn’t slow during the lockdown, but seemed to accelerate until it burst into flames.
Industrial activity and trade nearly came to a standstill around the country. Traffic vanished from the roads, rails, from the sky and seas. People were confined to their homes for weeks on end with little forewarning. Shaking hands and hugging became taboo; even queues and crowds – so much a part of the Indian way of life – seemed anathema to society’s healthy existence. Social gatherings were out of the question.
Yet this sudden halt, which threw us off our inertias of motion in so many painful ways, seemed unable to slow the novel coronavirus itself.
One standout effect is that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) sometimes temporarily knocks out the infected individual’s senses of smell and taste. Imagine now the pathology of the pandemic worldwide, especially at its crests: how devoid it was of comforting touch and familiar sounds, how eerily debilitating it might have been minus the neuro-cultural wonder that is flavour. Indeed, as the pandemic surged across the world, much of our experience was guided by the one sense that remained: sight.
So what did we see?
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1. Unknown origin
One of the most important things we didn’t see, and still haven’t per se, is where the virus originated. The novel coronavirus underwent a zoonosis before the pandemic: it crossed the species barrier, between an animal living in the wild and humans. Knowing which species this was, and which other species the virus could have infected before, could help researchers understand the virus’s evolution and identify attributes that help develop medicines against it, and future pandemics of similar provenance.
However, China – in whose Hubei province the first COVID-19 infections were reported – has consistently refused access to the region’s wet markets and other sensitive sites, partly to stay in control of the narrative and partly to avoid feeding conspiracies that China ‘manufactured’ the virus and let it loose on the western world as a form of biowarfare.
Its government has also insisted that only the WHO will be allowed to investigate the virus’s zoonotic origins, after the pandemic has wrapped up. If this is what eventually happens, the investigation is likely to be a dud. It may be too long a time after the purported zoonosis, and may leave the WHO further entangled in allegations that it has cut China too much slack.
2. The virus as villain
While the virus’s exact provenance remains obscured, and conspiracy theories about its “true purpose” hover at the edges of mainstream discourse, the image of the virus was cynically linked to other ideas of the enemy.
This new invader, resembling in many diagrams a weapon out of Star Wars, became a pretext to further demonise minorities, supersede rights and liberties, and consolidate power. The virus was ‘deadly’, making war or martial law appropriate countermeasures.
How the virus looked – to our eyes, to the mind – was and is important because we need to keep the real enemy in sight, and ignore diversions. As the scientist and illustrator David Goodsell has shown, the novel coronavirus is a benign marvel of evolutionary and cell biology, like countless other microbial life-forms. Instead of a sphere studded with foreboding pins, like some kind of Slipknot mask, the virus was a veritable garden of biochemical activity. It just takes the right eye to see it.
3. Visible research
All was not lost, however. There were some silver linings – and one of the brightest was the public demonstration of the usefulness of preprint papers, and open science more broadly. The paradigm of scientists freely sharing their findings – effectively putting public welfare in front of personal gain – scored an early victory when Chinese scientists sequenced the novel coronavirus’s genome and made them accessible to scientists around the world for further study by February.
And as the virus spread around the world, scientists sequenced the strains they had access to and uploaded the data to accessible databases. Many also uploaded related research to preprint repositories such as arXiv, bioRxiv and medRvix, instead of waiting for their manuscripts to slog their way through the ‘conventional’ publishing process and ultimately to be locked up behind paywalls.
As it happened, post-publication peer-review – when scientists critique their peers’ work after a paper has entered the public domain – more than matched up to the (claimed) merits of its pre-publication counterpart. All together, the improved access to scientific knowledge of the virus and its disease helped scientists make better choices about what problems to study and how, helped journalists to ask the right questions and better, and ultimately did not undermine the nuances of research the way preprints’ detractors had said they would.
4. Hidden figures
In the silver screen’s ‘riches to rags’ trope, a once-wealthy plutocrat is forced to perform manual labour. As the man gets to work, he feels runnels of salty water flowing down his cheeks and forearms. He stands up in surprise and exclaims, “What is happening to me?” An amused coworker tells him simply, “This is sweat. Get used to it.”
A couple weeks after March 24, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a three-week lockdown nationwide with only four hours’ notice, lakhs of daily-wage workers left India’s megalopolises for their native towns and villages. They were like those beads of sweat, appearing as if by magic when the going got tough, and on the face of a country that had simply forgotten about them. Indeed, we all saw them in a way we’ve never seen them before – experiencing a neglect far beyond what they’re usually subjected to, standing exposed on highways and beside railways. Many of them collapsed, sometimes to their deaths, because they had walked for tens of kilometres without food or proper shoes. Many of their families also died of hunger.
The government itself would soon scramble to ‘accommodate’ them in its plans to arrest the virus’s spread, but the damage – so to speak – had been done. We had no option but to see them, to notice their suffering, and to acknowledge their existence beyond simply being humans who could get infected and ‘drive’ the epidemic.
5. Healthcare workers
Just as the people engaged in India’s informal sector came to light, so did the country’s healthcare workforce. In March, Prime Minister Modi had asked the country’s people to show themselves on their balconies and cheer for healthcare workers. The gesture turned out to be meaningless. As India’s COVID-19 epidemic wore on, many doctors, nurses and other hospital staff were often seen on city streets, protesting for better wages, working hours, residential facilities and labour rights. Hospitals themselves were frequently overwhelmed because they hadn’t prepared on time or had prepared too little.
There is some scattered data to show that more people also fell sicker than they would have – and thus also incurred more expenses – because they avoided treatment for want of insurance, poor treatment of insurance claims or simply because they wanted to avoid exposing themselves to the novel coronavirus. The Wire Science also uncovered evidence that parts of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Telangana were underreporting deaths due to COVID-19. In most cases, hospitals would simply refuse to part with cause-of-death certificates or prevaricate.
At one point, the state of Maharashtra tweaked the definition of deaths due to COVID-19, potentially wiping 1,200 COVID-19 fatalities from its record. It’s as if these victims got COVID-19 and became invisible.
6. Animal kingdom
As fewer humans stepped out, the volume of motorised traffic dropped and industrial activity nosedived, the air got cleaner – however briefly – as did the water. Sarath Guttikunda analysed air quality data from the National Capital Region – “the only city with a sizeable number of operational air quality monitors” – and teased out what he argued could be the baseline background levels of PM2.5, PM10, nitrogen dioxide and ozone.
The most dramatic changes pertained to the last two: nitrogen dioxide comes from vehicle exhaust – and its atmospheric concentration plummeted during the lockdown. Ozone concentration increased because its apex chemical ‘predator’, nitric oxide, was in short supply. But dramatic as they were, they were also quickly reversed as the ‘unlock’ got underway – an indication to the country’s residents of what counts as meaningful change.
Only two changes were (arguably) more dramatic. One, the Ganga river became so clean in some parts, thanks to the absence of industrial effluents, that at least one water expert wondered if sewage treatment plants are an eyewash. And two, cities located close to forests – or on land that once was a forest – began seeing more ‘wild’ animals on the streets and within gated complexes.
Spotted at someone’s home in Delhi!! pic.twitter.com/4HG9vMhQ7V
— HGS Dhaliwal (@hgsdhaliwalips) July 9, 2020
Have you ever seen Yellow frogs. Also in this number. They are Indian #bullfrog seen at Narsighpur. They change to yellow during monsoon & for attracting the females. Just look how they are enjoying rains. @DDNewslive pic.twitter.com/Z3Z31CmP0b
— Parveen Kaswan, IFS (@ParveenKaswan) July 13, 2020
7. Housing poverty
A collective named ‘Politically Math’ published an analysis in April this year, following a flurry of preprint papers attempting in different ways to model India’s then-nascent COVID-19 epidemic. The authors wrote that most of the models that had been publicised treated India’s urban population to be distributed equally inside its cities, and also assumed every person would be equally mobile (or immobile) during the lockdown. This is obviously not true, as the authors went on to say.
Caste and class differences segregate people, and class in particular leads to differences in living conditions so stark that a public health plan devised for one group could backfire for the other. The few examples of this disparity that hit the national headlines this year were situated in Maharashtra – particularly Pune and Mumbai – but there’s no reason to doubt similar stories unraveled in all of India’s cities.
In Mumbai’s Dharavi area, the population density is fully one order of magnitude higher than the world’s densest city (Manila), clean running water is a treasure and multiple families share their toilets. Together with the plight of traders, merchants and transporters around the country, whose income depends on face-to-face transactions, it seemed as if both the government and half-baked epidemiological models had shoved these inconvenient realities under the rug.
8. Shadows of the virus
Is the novel coronavirus pandemic to blame for what has happened this year? Consider the basest facts. A new virus began spreading among humans. Its tropism was such that it spread easily among humans – at least more so than its cousin, the SARS virus, but less so than the measles virus. It was also less deadly, but because it spread so fast, it could infect a lot more people in the same circumstances in which the SARS virus might have infected fewer. As a result, the number of deaths was high, and increasing rapidly. The fact that asymptomatic people could shed the virus as well didn’t help.
So humankind responded by implementing distancing protocols, and by insisting on basic hygiene practices. Thus far, the line of reasoning is fairly straightforward. But from here, to wherever we are today, has been a long deviation from the ‘natural’ or even the ‘humane’ course – a deviation that only our politics and our prejudices are responsible for.
Even now, there is such a thing as avoidable suffering, and it exists because we have chosen not to do the right thing. The virus isn’t responsible for its existence, and the virus can’t liberate us from it. What it can do, it has already done: infect us, and by infecting us, illuminate where science ends and where we begin.
