India has become the fifth country to successfully isolate the virus strain of Covid-19/Corona Virus (means scientists have successfully obtained a pure sample of the virus, which they have contained outside the human body and can then study) after Japan, Thailand, United States of America and China – Link here
In 2003, it took a few months for scientists to fully sequence the 29,727 nucleotides of the SARS virus genome. In comparison, it took around a month for Chinese scientists to do the same for the SARS-Cov-2 corona virus, the genome of which is comparable in size to the SARS virus. That’s because the technology used for sequencing improves with advances in computing power, and today’s machines are orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we used two decades ago. This is also why testing a patient for corona virus today takes a few hours and costs around Rs5,000 – Link here
If one look backs at last decade or so, business & industries across the globe have been transformed or killed by tech. Old economy are getting outdone by new age digital player or transformed into new business model. This volatility is in turn visible in stock market. One wonders if same gets visible in medicine, where developing vaccine earlier would take anywhere in range of 1-5yr, which now might take less time because of digital transformation, availability of super computing power along with machine learning and AI, democratization of tech – five countries identified Corona strains in span of short time, earlier probably it used to be only one or two. One wonders if its Digital revolution, that might just be tool/weapon that may help us humans conquer Corona, given USA already started clinical trial for vaccine – 1st person in US gets experimental corona virus vaccine – Link here
Another interesting point, Corona first showed up sometime in Nov’19, it was in December that china altered WHO about unusual cases of pneumonia in Wuhan. Sometime around 22/23-Jan China shut down Wuhan and signaled risk to global community, from there on things just got worse for China. It wasn’t until March when China got situation under control (thought it exploded globally) and going by new cases are considerable slowed down (Link here) it looks situation in China is under control. So china took rough 4-5months to get things under control and now it has started sharing learning and sending experts to other countries – Link here and Link here so learning curve would be substantially reduced for other countries.
He has 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and nowhere to sell them – Link here
The economics of cruise ships – Link here
Business case study: How a CEO learnt to deal with corruption inside (and outside) her company – Link here
Opinion | India can use Yes Bank debacle to chase China in Crypto – Link here
The World Is One Big Carry Trade – Link here
India’s Kings of Capital – Part I: Uday Kotak – Link here
The Power of the Human Spirit – Link here
Chad ‘repaying $100m debt to Angola with cattle’ – Link here
Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics – Link here