-ThePrint.in At ThePrint’s Off The Cuff, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan sought to bust many myths around Covid-19, including its rumoured origin in a Wuhan lab. Bengaluru: A vaccine for the Covid-19 could emerge in about a year, World Health Organisation (WHO) chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan has said, even as she sought to highlight the possibility of the novel coronavirus becoming a seasonal virus like the influenza, or an endemic infection. In conversation...

-The Telegraph The pandemic has given surveillance tools legitimacy in the eyes of civil society which at other times might have been more concerned about privacy issues Among the “seven” to-dos that Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed for the country on April 13 while announcing the extension of a nationwide lockdown was a call for citizens to download the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app. It would help “prevent the spread of [the] corona infection,”...

-ThePrint.in This is the moment to thank farmers. You don’t need thali or taali for that, you just need to ensure they get a fair price. Then we can kickstart India’s economy. As many states in north India begin their food grain procurement operations and more and more news begin to filter in from rural India, we can see one of the biggest blunders of the ongoing coronavirus lockdown strategy: it might...

-The Hindu When testing is done for people within a cluster, the number of positive cases seem to be higher, and vice-versa Generally, the number of positive COVID-19 cases increases when the testing rate increases. However, this is not always the case, as data from Gujarat show. Who gets tested determines the number of positive cases more than how many get tested. In Tamil Nadu, the number of positive cases went up when...

-NDTV It is difficult to detect asymptomatic cases and they can be found out only after tracing the contacts of people who have beentested positive, the top scientist said, adding that testing everyone is almost impossible. New Delhi: 80 per cent of people with coronavirus in India are asymptomatic, or do not show symptoms of the infection, and this is matter of worry, a senior scientist at the country's top medical research...