The Hindu Editorial Analysis : 6th March 2023

06/03/2023

Table of Contents

The Hindu Editorial Analysis

The Importance of Reading The Hindu Editorial: Reading The Hindu newspaper has several benefits, including improving reading skills, facilitating comprehension, staying informed of current events, enhancing essay writing, and more. For individuals aiming for a career in banking, reading editorials is crucial for vocabulary building. In this article, we will examine today’s editorials, provide practice questions, and highlight important vocabulary words.

Being prepared.

Three years after strict enforcement of its Zero-COVID strategy, China abandoned it abruptly, leading to a jump in cases each day — an estimated 250 million people were infected in 20 days in December, according to the media, overwhelming hospitals and crematoria.
Based on 30 genome sequences deposited between October and December and 14 genome sequences in December alone from China, the BF.7 appears to be the dominant variant.
Though this variant was found in many countries, including India, months ago, there is fear that the uncontrolled spread of the virus in China may result in newer variants with an even higher transmissibility.
For instance, the BF.sub-lineage with three additional immune escape mutations already seen in other variants has been found in some people arriving from China; these mutations may increase transmissibility further but will not increase disease severity.
With a case surge in a few more countries, India has taken the right and proactive measures to be ready for any eventuality.
With over 90% of the adult population already fully vaccinated by July this year,over one-fourth of adults also boosted, and a large percentage of the population also naturally infected, the chances of India witnessing large-scale deaths as seen during the second wave last year from existing variants are slim.
In fact, given that a large percentage of the population enjoys hybrid immunity from vaccination and natural infection leading to all Omicron sub-lineages causing only a mild disease, the focus in India should not be on daily new infections but only on any increase in hospitalisations, particularly ICU admissions.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the Health Ministry has urged States to only ramp up genome sequencing (and not increase testing) to track new variants as the virus evolves by accumulating mutations.
The pace of genome sequencing in India has to be scaled up soon after a dramatic slowdown this year.
The Government in an effort to minimize the chances of the spread of new variants has introduced 2% random post-arrival sampling of international passengers and mandatory RT-PCR tests for arrivals from China and four other countries.

Practice Questions:

How the government is making efforts to minimize the spread of new variants of corona?
What does the health ministry urge all states?

Important Vocabs:

Lineage– the series of families that somebody comes from originally
Crematoria– a building in which the bodies of dead people are burned
Mutation– a change in the basic (genetic) structure of a living
Severity– state of being severe
Accumulate– to collect a number or quantity of something over a period of time