Going Round A Coronavirus!

SREEKUMAR RAGHAVAN
The other day I was talking to my
friend in Bangalore over phone and naturally the talk was mostly about the
lockdown and its aftermath. The term 'flattening the curve' came up a few times
and my daughter Diyah overheard it. Later, she started asking what has Covid-19
to do with economics or mathematics! Having seen a couple of economics books in
my table full of charts and models, this question from her wasn't quite
surprising.
The novel corona virus is
supposed to have gone through several mutations but everywhere in the media it
has been represented as a ball-shaped organism with spikes. It has been
ingrained in the minds of children that whatever cartoons or pictures they draw
about Covid they naturally depict that shape. Funnily enough in a competition
titled Covitoons organised by Pallikkutam
(www.facebook.com/pallikkutamcovitoons), children were depicted as driving away
the Covid-19 ball shaped virus with a kick. Still others depicted people locked
up inside with face masks and gloves in complete confidence that the
ball-shaped virus moving outside will never enter. Then, naturally one tends to
look at coincidences!
It is often said that if you can simply utter the two words demand and supply,
you can teach economics to parrots! The ‘flattening the curve’ diagram which is
now widely shared shows two curves plotted along a graph with number of corona
cases depicted on the Y-axis and time shown in the X-axis. In badly affected
countries the curve will have a rounded shape like the hump of a camel. When
the number of positive cases fall, the curve will flatten. This is a simple
graphic which is being used by experts to convey in simple terms the reality of
the pandemic.
To make matters simple for my
daughter, I made her draw the rounded and flattening curves in a graph both
having corona virus. In the rounded curve, the virus is full-blown and round
while it gets flattened in the second curve. (See Picture above)
Round faces
As you go out in the street, you again come across round faces-people
struggling inside facemasks and singing praises of the medical personnel who
keep it on throughout the duty hours. New designs with protrusions that turns
your face into a dog’s snout. It remains to be seen how many new innovative
designs will come out in the market as we are destined to wear it for years to
come. Again, concerns about heaps of disposed facemasks piling up in rivers and
seashores were brought to light. It again represented the ‘round or hump’ shape
of ‘flattening the curve’ concept that has come to symbolise the discussions on
pandemic spread.
U, V, W Shape Recovery?
Even as everything seems round about the pandemic, the economists are worried
about economies that have turned flat. Who thought only engineers, architects
and medical men are the only ones to think in terms of shapes! The
traditionally ‘curvy’ people the economists are discussing about what will be
the shape of global economic recovery. Will
it be U, V or W? V or U-shaped recoveries are possible only if certain sections
of the economy are opened and people go back to work. This means there is no
further spread of the virus and effective vaccines are developed. But die-hard
pessimists argue that rapid lifting of lockdown can cause a W-shaped recovery
where a rebound will be followed by a relapse. That is indeed bad.
As I was finishing off this piece, my wife raised the alarm about my rounding
tummy caused by lack of exercise. Again, caused by this dreaded round Coronavirus!
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