How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

No shrinking violets

Feminism in Pakistan

I S L A M A B A D

A drama about female vigilantes breaks taboos

Shining a spotlight on a different sort of woman

---

44

Asia

The Economist

September 5th 2020

2

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to just 67,000 known deaths. That is a low

rate by global standards, although many

covid-related deaths are thought to be go-

ing unrecorded around the world, making

comparisons unreliable. A paper by Minu

Philip, Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian of

the National Bureau of Economic Research

suggests that few Indians are dying be-

cause its covid-19 sufferers are younger

than those elsewhere. After taking pa-

tients’ ages into account, the difference all

but disappears. 

More startling are the results of surveys

that analyse blood serum. They suggest

that a fairly high proportion of urbanites

may have already had covid-19. The rele-

vant antibodies were detected in 41% of

samples collected in Mumbai in July and in

nearly 57% of samples from its slums. They

were also found in 23% of tests in Delhi in

June and in more than 28% in August. In

Pune, a prosperous city of 7.4m in Mum-

bai’s hilly hinterland, the proportion of

those with antibodies was more than half.

Many in India are growing stoical about

the virus’s spread. The national media are

once again full of celebrity tittle-tattle.

When Pranab Mukherjee, a former presi-

dent, died on August 31st, the government

declared a seven-day period of mourning.

That he had been on a ventilator suffering

from covid-19 for the last three weeks of his

life was barely mentioned.

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Keeping calm and carrying on