Shock
Two-years-ago, around this time, India went into a lockdown, the first of the many to come in the numerous waves of the COVID-19 pandemic that was to follow. Conservative estimates peg the deaths in India…
Two-years-ago, around this time, India went into a lockdown, the first of the many to come in the numerous waves of the COVID-19 pandemic that was to follow. Conservative estimates peg the deaths in India…
The big themes that will drive the world into the next 10-years are: Changes in the globally connected economy. Climate change. Technology: automation, AI, data. Changes in the demographic dividend. We are the fag end…
The pre-2014 version of Indian history, particularly the independence era, does not have in it much of an acknowledgement of the mistakes that happened at time. All the tragedies from that time, particularly the violence that followed the partition, finds little accountability in the history books and official version as someone’s responsibility. It is something that organically happened that nobody has any ownership for.
As predicted, India has had enough of trying to contain COVID-19 and states are now starting to push ahead with reopening, as if the pandemic has disappeared. This is particularly true in states like Karnataka. The disconnect is pretty bizarre to see. In Karnataka, the numbers have been trending up for a while, but the authorities are focusing mostly on how to get things going again.
A crisis like COVID-19 is not something that cannot be managed in a country. It can be, provided there is the will and direction from the government to rally its people.
A well-implemented registry can preserve patient anonymity and also present a picture of the country’s health without lag that runs into months, weeks or years. It can be done, but that does not mean it will be done, if recent experience is anything to go by.
Whether you like the way things are playing out or not, what is abundantly clear is that the India of the first 65-odd years of it is existence is now a thing of the past.
I am fairly certain that India will be one of the last countries to get the pandemic under control and our best-case-scenario is early 2021 for this. Considering that we were one of the last big countries to get hit by it, it should give us a good idea of how badly we have fared at doing this.
Review of ‘Defeating Face Liveness Detection by Building Virtual Models From Your Public Photos’ by Yi Xu, True Price, Jan-Michael Frahm, Fabian Monrose from the compsci department at Chapel Hill, NC.