📰 Coronavirus | Grounding of planes partially hits IMD’s weather data supply
Data relayed from aircraft on temperature and wind speed are used in dynamical models
•The grounding of the country’s civilian aircraft has strangled a key source of weather data that the India Meteorological Department (IMD) uses for its forecasts. Officials, however, clarified that India’s annual monsoon forecast system was on track, with the first forecast scheduled to be issued in mid-April.
•Aircraft relay data about temperature and wind speed in the upper atmosphere to meteorological agencies the world over and this is used in the dynamical models, the ones which are run on super computers and relied on to give weather forecasts three days, or even two weeks ahead. “Inputs from aircraft are important for the dynamical models as it determines the initial conditions for these models,” D.S. Pai, chief forecaster, IMD Pune, told The Hindu. “However for the monsoon forecast, which is a long-term forecast, this isn’t significantly affected.”
•Beginning mid-March, India began restricting incoming international flights into the country and by March 24 had imposed a total shutdown on domestic air travel as well.
•This year, the IMD will likely rely on its traditional statistical forecast system — the workhorse, developed on the basis of historical data. India had begun to move away from this system and started to rely on its dynamical models as it better captures developing changes in the atmosphere. However, India’s dynamical models are still not as adept as meteorologists want them to be, for warning of a drought or extreme changes in monsoon rainfall. That, and limited data from aircraft as well as a general decline in land-based observations because of a shortage of manpower to send observations are forcing the agency’s hand.
•“We need multiple observations from weather stations from all parts of the country,” said Madhavan Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES). “Now that’s been reduced. But because weather services are an essential service we are working with reduced manpower,” he added. The IMD is a subsidiary of the MoES. A major factor for gauging the performance of the monsoon is the El Nino, a warming of the ocean waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This data is measured by observational data buoys located in the sea and relayed via satellite. “This data isn’t affected so far,” Dr. Pai said. The IMD issues its first forecast for the June-September monsoon in April and updates it in June.
•Aviation-generated data is also helpful to warn of developing thunderstorms or swings in temperatures that often begin at the heights aircraft traverse. “There are mathematical fixes that can be used to compensate for this. However, a lack of data for a prolonged period of time is a big loss for calculating weather trends and future climate patterns,” the IMD scientist added.
Why has India reacted to declining global crude prices by raising excise duties?
•The story so far: Till U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet the past week, on his conversation with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Brent crude prices had been declining in an unprecedented manner, touching an 18-year low. Mr. Trump’s assurance that the West Asian kingdom and Russia, major oil producers, would soon announce a production cut sent prices up again. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia and Russia had fallen out on agreements to cut production which would have kept oil prices up.
What has helped oil prices swing wildly both ways?
•Brent crude had tanked about 50% over the month of March and was trading in the region of $26 per barrel till Thursday. Prices jumped, and crude now trading at about $33 per barrel, after the U.S. President’s tweet that a production cut could be ‘as high as 15 million barrels’ per day. To set that in context, when talks on production fizzled out earlier, Saudi Arabia said it would raise its production from 9.8 million barrels per day (bpd) to 12.3 million bpd.
Why does it matter to the U.S. how much oil its competitors produce?
•Profits that companies make in selling oil depend directly on the cost of extraction, which is influenced by factors such as the terrain where the oil field is located. There is still a staggering quantity of oil in the world left to be extracted but the cost of extraction is increasing. For example, fracking, which helps extract oil from rocks, and which is a significant source for U.S. extraction firms, does not come cheap. So, a spike in production by Saudi Arabia and Russia typically drives down oil prices, following the traditional concepts of supply and demand. Beyond a certain point, U.S. producers may not be able to withstand declining oil prices, considering their costs. A January 2020 Haynes and Boone’s Oil Patch Bankruptcy Monitor report said that since 2015, when oil prices began to drop save for a few spikes in between, 208 North American producers have filed for bankruptcy involving $121.7 billion in aggregate debt.
•But now, if Saudi Arabia and Russia too are considering a production cut to help bring prices back up again, it is a signal that oil prices have gone too low for even these producers to profit from. Significantly, neither of these oil producers has publicly committed to production cuts.
How has COVID-19 influenced prices?
•With the virus which originated from Wuhan in China in late 2019 bringing global economic activity to a near-complete halt, demand for fuel is bound to have dropped significantly. This would have had a dampening effect on oil prices. After all, if you do not move out for work or entertainment but only occasionally for grocery shopping, how much fuel would you burn over the period of the lockdown? Even before the virus-induced lockdown, India’s consumption of petrol by volume grew a marginal 2% in February 2020, over April 2019 and diesel consumption fell by 2.2% in the same period.
What is happening to Indian oil prices?
•The country’s oil bill may have fallen in the recent past and could remain low if Saudi Arabia and Russia do not behave as the U.S. President expects them to, but Indian end-customers may not benefit. Indian prices of petrol and diesel have remained steady.
•Between March 2014 and April 2020, the price per barrel of the Indian crude basket fell from $107 to $21. The average retail selling price of petrol in Delhi has fallen by ₹1.82 from March 2014, to ₹69.59 per litre in February 2020. Of this amount, the portion that goes to the Centre in the form of duties has more than doubled from ₹10.38 to about ₹23.
•In March, the Central government reacted to declining international oil prices by raising excise duties by about Rs. 3 per litre on fuel sold in India, such that the end user saw little or no change in the retail price. This was only the latest in a series duty increases over the past few years.
Why the excise duty hike?
•Even before the virus-induced lockdown paralysed the economy, the government had been battling a fiscal deficit problem. The nearly four-year-old Goods and Services Tax has not immediately yielded robust collections; consumer demand has fallen and there have been calls to put more money in the hands of the consumer, fuelling expectation of a tax cut. The Centre could not afford a blanket cut in income tax rates but it did offer taxpayers the option of moving to a lower tax slab without deductions or rebates.
•With international oil prices declining, the government has used the opportunity to keep end-user fuel prices stable while increasing its own prospects for collection. With consumer inflation being largely influenced by poorer supply of specific food items, and not necessarily by rising fuel prices, the government has chosen to keep Indian end-user fuel prices stable with higher taxes to augment its otherwise-emaciated kitty.
•Before the COVID-19 lockdown was announced on March 24, there were reports that the most recent duty hike would give the Centre ₹43,000 crore for the fiscal year 2020-21.
📰 Coronavirus: TCS uses AI for drug discovery
The researchers have identified 31 candidate molecules to target the main protease which helps the virus replicate
•Scientists from TCS Innovation Labs in Hyderabad are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify new molecules which might have the potential to target specific parts of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Using new methods, they have identified 31 candidate small molecules, which may serve as inhibitors of the chymotrypsin-like protease, one of the key drug targets in the fight against COVID-19.
•The results have been posted in a preprint repository ChemRxiv. Preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals.
Target proteins
•The genome of the novel coronavirus codes for several proteins that have crucial roles in entry of the virus into the host cell, its replication, assembly and host-pathogen interactions. Some of these proteins that help the virus perform its functions are common targets for drug developers. Among these drug targets are the spike protein, which helps the virus attach itself to the host cell and enter it, and viral proteases which help it replicate.
Role of viral protease
•“The viral RNA synthesises two long polyproteins when it infects human cells via a human cell surface protein. The role of the protease protein is to cut the polyproteins to individual proteins, so that new viruses can be assembled. This is important for its replication and survival,” explains Arijit Roy from the Life Sciences Division of TCS Innovation Labs, Hyderabad, in an email to The Hindu.
•The chymotrypsin-like protease or the main protease primarily does the function of cleaving the polyprotein into proteins and the papain-like protease also aids in this process. The former was chosen as the drug target by the group for their research.
•First, using a database of approximately 1.6 million drug-like small molecules from the ChEMBL database, the researchers trained the generative deep neural network model. As a second step, the network was re-trained with protease inhibitor molecules. This was done with a view to narrow the focus of the neural network on to a smaller subset of the chemical space. “We trained the system with all available protease inhibitors and asked the pre-trained model to produce more new molecules that possess the characteristics of protease inhibitors,” says Dr. Roy, who is an author of the preprint. “Finally, we checked how well these newly produced molecules can bind to the target protein — chymotrypsin-like protease of the virus.”
•Starting from a space of nearly 50,000 molecules, the team has made a short list of 31 candidates. Two of the designed molecules had a high degree of similarity to Aurantiamide, a naturally occurring antiviral-compound.
•“Our aim was to create new molecules which possess the characteristics of protease inhibitors. We checked, whether these molecules retain all the drug-like properties. We also checked how easily they can be synthesised. All these were part of the AI-based model,” says Dr. Roy.
•Drug discovery is a complex process, needing several layers of validation before the drug may come in use. In this work, the researchers have brought down the time taken for the initial step of designing suitable candidate molecules for testing from years to just a week, reinforcing the power of AI in handling huge datasets.
Clinical trials
•“TCS has signed an MoU for collaboration with CSIR. The clinical trials will take time. The first step is the chemical synthesis and biological testing in vitro, followed by pre-clinical testing on laboratory animals,” he says.
📰 Update on India’s war against COVID-19
This involves detection, protection, prevention, prescription and, not the least, participation
•Since early March, our war against COVID-19 has been making steady progress in India. This has involved detection, protection, prevention, prescription and participation. Purposefully, private groups, industries, medical fraternity, scientists and technologists have joined hands together with the government in this war, both through financial contributions and participation by involving their R&D expertise. Government agencies such as DST, DBT (and its BIRAC), SERB, CSIR, ICMR, DMR, MHFW, DRDO, and others have announced several grants focusing on specific aspects related to this war, while the Tata Trust, WIPRO, Mahindra, the Wellcome Trust India Alliance and several multinational pharma companies have come forward in this joint effort.
Detection, prevention, protection
•The first thing is to detect whether a person has been infected by the virus. Since COVID-19 spreads within the moist part of the inner nose and throat, one measures the temperature of the individual around his nose and face, using a thermo-screening device (as used with arriving passengers in airports, or entering buildings and factories). Better devices of greater speed, detail and accuracy, such as whole-body scanners which depict body temperatures with colour codes on a computer monitor have come about from abroad. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has been offered 1,000 digital thermometers for screening, and 100 full-body scanners.
•Clearly India needs these by the thousands. This need has triggered some computer industry people in India to make such body scanners here at home, a positive step. We hope these can come about at the soonest.
•Once an individual is tested positive this way, it needs to be confirmed by doing a biological test to make sure that it is coronaviral infection. Until a month ago, we needed to import kits to do this. Today, more than a dozen Indian companies (most notably by the MyLab-Serum Inst.duo which can make several lakhs of these kits a week) have made them, each certified by the national body. This has rapidly expanded the scale of reliable testing rapidly across the country. Once tested positive, the patient has to be isolated and quarantined in appropriate centres. This has been done with remarkable speed and reliability, as mentioned below.
•An important way to protect oneself against the invasion by the virus is to wear a mask. We constantly hear about how these are not available or sold at exorbitant cost. The notion that it is not always necessary is wrong. As the well known infection expert Dr. Jacob John of Vellore clarifies (The Hindu, April 2), it is vital that we mask ourselves as we move about in streets, since the virus is also airborne. Towards this, even as many entrepreneurs and firms across India have started making these at affordable costs, social media such as WhatsApp show the typical jugaad ways of using a baby diaper (unused!), male banian (unused!), the pallu of a saari, or dupatta and such. Happily enough, after the government clarifications and advice on this matter, more and more people are now seen to mask themselves. TV channels are also doing a useful service by inviting experts and asking them to offer relevant advice to people who have specific questions and doubts about protection in specific individual instances.
•In this connection, a very recent piece of advice on protection has been given to people wearing glasses, (and also to eye doctors whom they consult) by my colleague Dr. Muralidhar Ramappa of the L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad. He says: (1) If you wear contact lenses, switch to glasses for a while. (2) Wearing glasses may provide a layer of protection. (3) Do not skip your eye exam, but take precautions. (4) Your eye doctor may recommend some more precautions. (5) Stock up your prescribed eye medicines, if you can and (6) avoid rubbing your eyes.
•In addition to what the Central and State governments and notable private hospitals (for example, Apollo, Medanta and others) have set up as isolation and quarantine centres, several private agencies have helped set up these in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Haryana, West Bengal, and helped equip them (for example, Infosys Foundation, Cyient, Skoda, Mercedez Benz, and Mahindra). These are some examples of how governments and private agencies have joined hands — as they say: We are all in this together.
•Another exciting advance towards protection (and prevention of spread) has been the large scale production of incubators, ventilators and devices to monitor the individuals who have been placed in such quarantine centres. Mahindra has successfully made ventilators in large scale at affordable prices, and DRDO has come up with a special kind of tape in order to make patient protection gowns for clinicians, nurses and paramedics.
Can India offer drugs?
•While the possibility of a preventive vaccine for large scale use in India is at least a year away, we need to turn to molecular and drug-based approaches, in which India has great internal expertise and teams of excellent organic and biological scientists. Rightly, the government and some drug companies have turned to them to locally prepare and use several drugs (favilavir, remdesavir, avigen and such), and also modify them using well-known methods. Indeed, the CSIR has already roped in organic chemists and bioinformatics experts who can predict the 3D structures of proteins, so as to look for potential areas on their surface to which molecules can fit (lock and key approach). I have every hope that with such team efforts, India will come out with ‘made in India’ drug molecules to overcome this killing virus. Yes, we can.
•Despite their full knowledge that millions of people have settled in cities and large towns, as daily wage labourers, far away from their families in villages, State and Central governments did not plan ahead for them, nor did they plan to reimburse their wages during the lockdown which blocked their getting back home. This led to a toss of social distancing and possible community spread. Social distancing is, alas, not in Indian culture, while herd mentality is. This could have been thought of by the social scientist advisors to the governments, and could have been avoided.
