ScienceGuy

In the circle of family and friends, there has been a lot of discussion about India's poor COVID management. Although I do not disagree with them, the situation could have been managed in a better fashion given the late onset of COVID relative to the rest of the world. But the point I disagree with them is on the relative performance of India. I have heard that the great USA is improving, even neighbouring countries like Pakistan has improved, then why not India. COVID seems to have been wiped out from the rest of the world but why India keeps on struggling from such a long time. The charts resorted to for comparison purposes is the daily cases, sometimes positivity rates and more. The charts (shown below) obtained from (www.ourworldindata.com) also shows the improving status of the world and worsening Indian situations. Great news for government's arm-chair critics, they got few more cannons in their tanks! However, what these data show are only the front-end big breaking head

The novel corona-virus continues to puzzle researchers around the world, thereby raising risks to magnanimous scales. However, the good news is that the human efforts are matching its levels as well. One such research was performed by Dr. Daniel Jacobson’s group who utilized worlds second fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennesse and studied around 2.5 billion genetic combinations. Even with such powerful super-computer, it took more than a week. Their results have been published in the journal eLife in early July. The research is summarised below using a flowchart for convenience.  Basically, COVID enters through binding to ACE2 receptors present in higher concentrations inside the nose. Upon entering it attacks other places with higher ACE2 concentration, that is, intestines, kidneys, heart etc. Interestingly COVID not only attacks these receptors but it also increases the concentration of these receptors at places where they are present in low or medium concentrati