“How are you doing, love?” I call to my husband from the living-room floor, where I now sleep each night on a roll-up foam sleeping pad that my daughter has used on camping trips, topped with a couple of thin blankets. It’s quite literally hard to sleep on the floor, but after trying the couch and then, on the floor, the couch mattress — a bit of fabric stretched over some coiled rings — the floor itself has been a relief.

The only person I have touched in a week is my two-year-old daughter. Every selfie I take of us is a photograph of me trying to inhale her. The streets outside are empty, the ambulance sirens constant, the sunshine an insult. Beyond our windows, the city is running out of ventilators. Stores have signs in their windows that look lifted from the apocalypse films I loved back when I thought they were metaphor rather than prophecy: due to the spread of COVID-19 we are indefinitely closed. My daughter and I haven’t left the apartment in four days, ever since I became symptomatic.

Companies in India are scrambling to ensure that the millions who staff the back offices of Wall Street banks and take on work outsourced by firms from airlines to insurers can keep going as the nation mandates increased work from home amid a spike in coronavirus cases.

VG Siddhartha's CCD brand carried the tagline ‘A lot can happen over coffee’. And for V G Siddhartha, it did. How then did the 21-yr-old heir of a fortune who decided to carve own path, gave India its first coffee chain, was among the first to spot the IT trend, cashed in on Bengaluru’s real estate boom, and moved among the powers and shakers, end up as a 60-yr-old broken man on a bridge? The Indian Express on the life and death of India’s coffee king

The virus was first confirmed in the country on Jan. 20 when a 35-year-old Chinese woman who flew from Wuhan, China to Incheon international airport, which serves Seoul, was isolated upon entry into the country. In the four weeks following the incident, South Korea managed to avoid a major outbreak with only 30 people contracting the virus, despite many interactions between those later confirmed as being sick and hundreds more people being identified as contacts of the sick patients.

This changed with the emergence of “Patient 31.”