-The Indian Express Last week, the ICMR brought out an advisory on pooled testing, ideally in districts where incidence of COVID-19 is low. Faced with criticism about insufficient testing and the reality of limited resources, India has decided go for pooled testing in districts where no cases have been reported. This would on the one hand give data on whether these really are zero-case districts, and on the other, save resources. * What...

-The Hindu The trend across developing countries is to give State governments as much discretion as possible India urgently needs to increase fiscal support for COVID-19 relief and rebuilding. Among comparable developing countries with similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, India has spent the least as a share of its GDP. While the Central government has announced measures amounting to 0.8% of GDP, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that State-level relief...

-India Spend Team The public distribution system (PDS) is meant to play a key role in disbursing government support to the poorest Indians during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. However, the system leaves more than 100 million people excluded from its reach, as per academics Jean Drèze, Reetika Khera and Meghana Mungikar, because the central government uses 2011 population figures from the last census to calculate state-wise PDS coverage. Under the National Food...

-Scroll.in The large proportion of Tablighi positives is simply due to the large number of people who were tested from the event, even as overall testing remains low. Like the rest of the world, India is battling the coronavirus pandemic. However, here the public conversation over the past week has focussed inordinately on only one facet of the disease: its link with the Tablighi Jamat, a Muslim religious group. A Tablighi Jamat event,...

-The Hindu The pandemic can be slowed only by a lockdown as well as by ensuring universal mask use Flattening the epidemic curve (case distribution curve) is the need of the day. On the curve, Y axis and X axis represent case numbers and time, respectively. A normal epidemic curve is bell-shaped, with an early ascending slope (first phase), a peak (second phase) and a declining slope (third phase). The area under...