Until recently it was all normal. The hustle and bustle ofdaily life, heaving streets in the city-centers, it was all fine in most partsof the world. In less than a month the world woke up to the scare ofCoronavirus outbreak which has changed the course of life. The virus thatoriginated in Wuhan city of China on Dec-31 has so far left 3 lakh sick and11-thousand dead. Many effected countries are under Coronavirus lockdown.Shops, offices, schools, business, malls, stores are all shut and the trafficis off the roads. The places look ghost-towns, empty and deserted with eeriesilence. They do not understand how this reality was imposed on them and whenthis whole nightmare will end. The virus has spread to more than 150 countries;the news channels flooded with information about the outbreak telecast nonstopon the issue, causing fear and panic. The WHO has already declared theCoronavirus outbreak a pandemic. People are confused, sad, anxious and helplessand don’t know when they will be able to get on with their lives. It is eerilyuncertain. The disease is spreading like wildfire and there is no vaccine orsome treatment for it as yet and people don’t know how deadly it actually is.The experts believe that it can affect 60% of the globe if left unchecked.Nobody in their wildest dreams would have ever thought that we will be passingthrough such a phase of life.
While COVID-19 spreads rapidly, more than 90% of itspatients make a full recovery. The pathogen causes respiratory illness withsymptoms such as a cough, fever and in more severe cases, difficulty in breathing. Theviruses spread typically when an infected person coughs or sneezes, sprayingdroplets that can transmit the virus to anyone in close contact. TheCoronavirus is named after the crown like spikes that protrude from its surfacewhich allow the virus to bind to and infect human cells. The research hasstarted worldwide, the scientists are rushing to find a promising candidatedrugs to fight this epidemic virus that could help patients recover sooner. Theworld’s most powerful supercomputer called IBM’s Summit equipped withArtificial Intelligence at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in US has been pressedinto services. In February, the researchers used simulations to screen througha library of 8,000 known compounds to find those which are most effective againstthe corona virus that are most likely to bind to the main spike protein of thecorona virus to limit its ability to spread and infect host cells. Thesedrugs included chemicals, herbal medicines and natural products that have beenalready approved in humans. The researchers programmed the Summit to search fora very specific type of compound in view of the Chinese researchers publishingin January a report revealing that the virus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, wassimilar to the Coronavirus. The summit narrowed down the list of 77-compoundsin just two days which could have taken few months by normal computers.
The fight against the Coronavirus is just one exampleof how supercomputers have become an essential part of the process of discoveryduring a global outbreak of an infectious disease that has no known treatments.The Summit has nearly 4,600 nodes and with each node having computingpower equivalent to the thousands of our laptops. They are like thousands ofgeneral-purpose computers all working for you on the same problem at the sametime, what we call parallel computing. It takes a problem, chops it intopieces, assigns to all the individual nodes and then brings all those piecesback together to reconstitute the solution of the problem. The Summit performs200 quadrillion calculations each second, roughly a million times morecomputing power than the average laptop. The simulations can examine howdifferent variables react with different viruses and each of these individualvariables can be comprised of billions of unique pieces of data. It is notcertain whether any of 77-compounds will work or not. If any of the compoundswork, it should be much quicker than the typical drug development process toget its approval and widespread use. If it works in animals, scientists couldskip the initial safety trial in people and go straight to testing drugs fortheir effectiveness in those who are sick. Developing drugs is a very lengthy,complex and costly process and it is quite uncertain that a drug willactually succeed or not. It can take many years for a new medicine to reach themarket from the time it was discovered. In case of Corona we may see hype inthe claims of drug-making but only time will tell.
As the news about COVID-19 deaths becomes more and morewidespread, people are on tenterhooks and one doesn’t know how to respondbecause it is something which has happened to us for the first time. There aredevastating scenes from Italy. The big mistake was that at the start of thefirst hit, people continued to lead their lives as usual and took to thestreets for work, entertainment and engagements in social gatherings. TheItalian took it lightly until many thousand deaths and countless people wereinfected and Govt sends police to patrol streets to enforce restrictions tokeep people in their houses. If the restrictions are lifted then cases willinevitably soar again. Now staying at home has become a national duty for them.The national lockdown has led to a renewed sense of unity among Italians. Butpeople in many countries including India are still not grasping the gravity ofthe crisis when it has become a matter of life and death for them. Onlyrestrictions and lockdowns of hot spots will slow the spread of Coronavirus,whether it is Kashmir or any part of India. Acting severely is the onlypossible way to beat the spread of the virus. Of course, we have to follow allthe guidelines including the most important one of maintaining socialdistancing. Let us be optimistic and reassure ourselves not to lose our faithor confidence. Death is not certain, but the contagion is real.