-The Hindu They seek waiver on some provisions of world agreements that regulate intellectual property rights to expedite steps to contain pandemic India and South Africa, in a formal submission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on October 2, sought a waiver on certain provisions of the international agreements that regulate intellectual property rights to speed up efforts to prevent, treat and contain the COVID-19 pandemic. In the communication, the countries said there...

-IndiaSpend.com As researchers caution against declaring India's second COVID-19 wave to be less deadly than the first, we look for clues in excess mortality data from Kerala and Mumbai to shed light on India's comparatively low COVID-19 mortality Chennai: More than one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, India is beginning to take the first steps towards answering a key question--is there something unusual about COVID-19 mortality in India? Mortality is at the...

-The Hindu The U.K., South Africa and Brazil variants have been currently detected in 86, 44 and 15 countries respectively, India being one of them. The government on Thursday issued a fresh set of travel guidelines, with India reporting the presence of U.K., South Africa and Brazil mutant variants of the SARS-CoV-2 which have demonstrated increased transmissibility, as reported by the World Health Organization. All the three have been currently detected in...

-The Hindu Subjective well-being and income are intricately linked The question whether the rich are more satisfied with their lives is often taken for granted, even though surveys, like the Gallup World Poll, show that the relationship between subjective well-being and income is often weak, except in low-income countries in Africa and South Asia. Researcher Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators, for example, report that the correlation between household income and reported life...

School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...