A Ton

This is my hundredth post (although from my laptop’s point of view it’s post number 1100100 since 100 = 64 + 32 + 4).

... and Statistics

The number 360,960 looks frighteningly large. It’s the headline-grabbing number of new confirmed cases of covid-19 in India on 22nd April 2021. It was thus reported in The Guardian, a UK newspaper. as “a world record for any single country since the pandemic began”. By the time you read this the daily total may even be over 400,000 but that doesn’t significantly change the comparison we make below.

These sensational headlines are as dramatic as they are dishonest: They convey the false idea that India’s a basket case when it comes to daily covid figures getting out of control. 

But let’s look more closely. On 9th January 2021 the United Kingdom reached a peak of 89.3 new daily cases per 100 thousand. The corresponding figure in India on 22nd April was 26.4 (or 29.3 if you use the 400K figure). In either case the comparable daily rate in the UK was over 3 times worse than India’s, and England’s alone was even higher. Since the population of India is over 20 times greater than the UK’s, it’s hardly surprising that the country clocks up an alarmingly huge grand total even when it’s doing quite well on a daily basis compared with other countries.

The more honest headline might have been: “India’s medical infrastructure struggles to cope with a comparatively modest daily rate of covid-19 cases.” and this similarly serious but less eye-catching observation should also raise no eyebrows given how poor India is in per capita terms. Unfortunately the sober truth doesn’t keep the presses rolling and the anchors watched.

The Long and the Short of it

One of our sons (D) and his partner (L) had covid-19 at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. They both had the standard covid symptoms but there were no available tests to confirm the diagnosis at that time. D was off-colour for all of three days with symptoms no worse than a cold,  whereas L, our de facto daughter-in-law, has been laid low for over a year and is still suffering the debilitating consequences.

Like L, many long-covid sufferers have not had a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 virus or for antibodies against it, either because tests were not available when they were ill or because  the antibody tests they had were not sensitive enough (a problem with several of the early tests). 

Broadly speaking, there are three types of long-covid symptoms: 

1. The first type is characterised by “exercise intolerance”, whereby the sufferers have little stamina and get exhausted from even the smallest tasks involving physical activity.
2. The second type involves cognitive disturbances, such as a sensation of ‘brain fog’ and memory problems. 
3. The third type affects the autonomic nervous system, which controls things like heartbeat, breathing and digestion. Patients in this group can experience heart palpitations and dizziness for example.

L has endured an extreme case of type 1 symptoms, as well as some symptoms of type 2. There are some first-hand accounts from sufferers in this Royal Society video.

Medical researchers are exploring three possible biological explanations:

Hypothesis 1. Long covid is a lingering viral infection which can hide out of reach of the immune system (like malaria, chickenpox and HIV), perhaps producing some active viral proteins not detectable by PCR and other antigen tests.

Hypothesis 2. It is an auto-immune disorder. There is strong evidence of cases of an over-reaction of the immune system in the acute stage of covid when many patients died from so-called cytokine storms

Hypothesis 3. It is due to tissue damage caused by inflammation during the initial acute stage, damage for example to the lining of blood vessels restricting blood flow to the brain.

To date there have been almost 4.5m confirmed cases of covid-19 in the United Kingdom and in reality probably many more. The Zoe Covid Symptom Study based in King’s College London found that 1 in 50 covid sufferers still had symptoms 12 weeks or more after the acute phase. This means that getting on for 100,000 UK citizens have post-covid-19 syndrome, and that many of them will need long-term treatment and possibly be unable to work. These cases will place a significant burden on the economy and the medical services over and above the existing negative impacts of the acute covid-19 cases. For this reason, there is hope that more research funding will be channelled towards research into long-covid in particular and post-viral illnesses in general, attracting more medical scientists to direct their efforts to understanding these conditions and finding treatments. That could bring relief and credibility to the many others who have found themselves languishing in similar ways after other viral or bacterial infections. “It’s an ill wind …”

(This blog post is informed by an excellent three-page article entitled “Post-covid syndrome — The sting in the tail” published in the print edition of The Economist on 1st May 2021, page 69.)

Double Definition

If it were from a standard synonym crossword, the solution of following clue

Newspaper offence (5)

might be LIBEL. However, this double definition clue is inspired by a cryptic crossword in the Sunday Times created by Robert Price, and the answer begins with the letter T. It might help solve it to know the name of a British broadsheet famous for its salmon pink newsprint.

PS I now realise that Robert Price's actual clue: Newpaper taking offence was better than my doctored version because the solution is a "taking offence".

Pick of The Week

In addition to Tim Morey's cryptic crossword puzzle in every issue, The Week magazine (UK version) sets its news-hounds fossicking through other journals' crosswords for their "Clue of the Week". Here are three nuggets of cruciverbalist gold they dug up recently.

I take sustenance after ten (6 letters, from The Times Jumbo)

As we know, each cryptic clue has both a definition and some cryptic word play, which together point to the answer. Moreover, the definition is always a string of words at the very beginning or at the very end of the clue; thus in the above clue the definition could be "I take", or "ten" or "after ten" and so on; the definition can even be the whole clue with the word-play embedded in it -- these are known as "&lit" clues. To solve the above clue, it helps to know, or consult, the periodic table, and to realise that when "ten" is written in digits, it can also be read as two letters.

The second clue is due to Kairos in The Independent.

Fun was had in bed cavorting as newlyweds? (7,3,4)

Look out for the anagram signifier.

And finally, a very lateral clue with some gallows humour devised by Imogen for The Guardian.

Death - by hanging? (8, first letter C)

Good Books Lately

The English (and subsequently British) East India Company was founded in 1600 to trade in East and Southeast Asia and India, and it was so ruthlessly successful that by1750 half of the World’s trade passed through its ledgers. Its army of over 200,000 soldiers, which outnumbered Britain’s army, was used to impose military and administrative rule over large parts of India. Its brutal, high-handed and insensitive behaviour to towards Indian cultural and religious traditions led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A year later, realising that the East India Company had grown too big for its boots and become an embarrassment, the British Government brought in an Act of Parliament to transfer direct control to the Crown. This marked the start of the British Raj, which absorbed the Company’s armies and took over its governing and administrative powers (and continued to exercise them until Clement Attlee’s post-war Administration granted Indian independence in 1947). 

I am grateful to two reading groups in my South Warwickshire town for some outstanding books I have read this year. There was The Sealwoman’s Gift, which I praised in a February post below, and now our April read: The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell. When the sepoys (Indian soldiers) stationed in the garrison at Captainganj are asked to bite the bullets for their new Enfield rifles, they suspect that the bullets are greased with a mixture of ox and pig fat, anathema to India’s great religions, and turn on their British officers. Those officers left alive run to the nearby town of Krishnapur, remotely situated on the vast North Indian plain.(Although the town is fictional, the story has roots in the notorious North Indian town Lucknow, which underwent a 6-month siege in 1857, as part of the Indian rebellion. The author acknowledges his debt to a large mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses in Lucknow, Cawnapore and elsewhere during the Mutiny, which spread to many parts of the country)

The few officers that escape with their lives join the British representatives of the Krishnapur Raj, who retreat to the Residency compound and dig themselves in for the long haul. They manage to hold their hurriedly-fortified enclave for four months against constant assaults from the sepoys, but as their supplies of food and ammunition dwindle and the rains wash away their improvised defensive mud wall, so their layers of ‘civilised’ conditioning, their social hierarchy and their body fat are slowly stripped away too.

This novel is beautifully written with great wit and intelligence; it is well paced and is a sensible length too. It has a rich cast of memorable characters, embodying so many clearly-recognisable human types; it abounds in dramatic action; It combines tragedy, comedy and farce without compromising its serious intent; It is a universal story, raising many issues that are relevant to the world we live in now. Above all, is a brilliant commentary on the human condition.