The Evening Wrap Welcome to the Evening Wrap newsletter, your guide to the day’s biggest stories with concise analysis from The Hindu. We hope you are staying home and staying safe. Here are the big stories that you need to follow today: Testing times After West Bengal complained about the accuracy of coronavirus testing kits yesterday, the Rajasthan government today said it had stopped using the rapid testing kits sent by the ICMR. The State government said the kits were only 5.4% accurate (instead of giving 90% correct results) and therefore useless. A quick explanation here. The rapid test kits, of which around 5 lakh were procured recently by the ICMR, are not diagnostic tools. They don’t identify whether the virus is present in the body. Rather, they test for whether the body has been exposed to the virus and developed antibodies in response. In theory, they are supposed to work even for people who are asymptomatic. They are useful as a surveillance tool – they help us figure out the extent to which the virus has spread in a cluster or a particular area. But medical experts say this is not a foolproof method. For one thing, the test is not likely to work in the period between infection and the body's development of antibodies, and this period varies from person to person. Recently in Kerala, for example, a man tested positive for the virus on the 29 day of isolation! Today, at the daily Health Ministry briefing, ICMR’s R Gangakhedkar said that three more States were asked if they had similar complaints. “We have come to know that the positive RT-PCR [reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction] samples showed a lot of variation, 6% to 71% in some cases.” He added, “We have, therefore, decided not to ignore the findings. Eight teams will be sent to the fields for validation of the kits. We will suggest to the States not to use the Rapid Tests for a couple of days, after which we will be in a position to advise them. If the kits are found faulty, we will take it up with the manufacturer.” No incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will temporarily suspend immigration in order to protect the jobs of Americans. “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” Trump said on Monday evening. The U.S. President could be trying to push States to open up, after weeks of lockdown, a DC source who works in the economic policy area told The Hindu. With more than 22 million Americans seeking unemployment benefits over the last month, and a Presidential election round the corner, Trump has been keen on opening up the U.S. economy. Last week, he issued an advisory telling States they could open up by May 1 or before. Some States such as Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina — all headed by Republican Governors — are planning to ease restrictions. Warning against hate speech Cautioning Indians in the UAE against a spate of religiously derogatory posts, India’s Ambassador to the UAE said such behaviour would not be tolerated. In the past month, at least six Indians have lost jobs or face charges over social media posts linking the coronavirus pandemic to the Muslim community in India. “India and UAE share the value of non-discrimination on any grounds. Discrimination is against our moral fabric and the Rule of law. Indian nationals in the UAE should always remember this,” Ambassador Pavan Kapoor said in a tweet on Monday, indicating how strongly the government has taken many such cases that have come into prominence recently. The tweet also referred to PM Modi’s earlier statement that said the Coronavirus “does not see race or religion”. Crude joke? Our mini explainer on falling oil prices Oil prices have become something of a joke since last night. The price of a barrel went down to $3 at some point, then $1, and eventually into negative territory – with the benchmark price of crude in the U.S. crashing to as low as minus $37.63. In other words, if you were living in the U.S and had storage facilities, you could have charged, and been paid, thousands of dollars for receiving and holding crude oil! How did this happen and what does this mean? Well, when someone talks about the price of oil, they are talking about its projected price next month, based on what speculators are willing to pay for it. These electronic deals, which happen without any actual exchange of physical stocks on a daily basis, are called futures trades, and they help everyone – from oil refineries to heavy consumers such as airline companies -- to hedge their price risks. Traders usually sell their holdings to buyers – to actual physical users of oil – a day or two before the settlement date. This is the date by when, as per their futures contract, they would have to had take actual physical delivery of the notional stocks they had purchased at a certain speculative price, when they made the deal in the past. Tuesday was settlement day. Traders had two options – either find buyers for their electronic holdings, or personally take physical delivery of barrels of crude oil. But thanks to the worldwide shutdown of economic activity due to the Covid-19 pandemic --- think of the humongous travel ban and all the planes that haven’t flown in weeks, all the cars not driven, and thus all the oil not consumed – the demand for oil has collapsed. However, oil producers haven’t been cutting production. Excess supply and very low demand can mean only one thing: collapse in prices, deflation. Since energy consumption is a proxy indicator of economic activity, and oil is one of the most widely consumed forms of energy, the fact that traders don’t think oil is going to be in much demand in the next couple of months suggests that economic activity is going to take a while to pick up – as and when countries lift the lockdown. Not great news. Covid watch: the numbers The number of positive coronavirus cases reported in India stands at 19,984 at the time of publishing this newsletter, with the death toll from the virus at 646. Maharashtra reports yet another massive surge in Covid-19 positive cases, with 552 new cases in a single day taking the cumulative State tally to 5,218. Kerala recorded 19 new cases today. Indian made model Scientists from Chennai, Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi and Goa, who are interested in epidemiology and modelling, have come together to build a model that can help predict outcomes of the disease under different scenarios. This model, named INDSCI-SIM, is the first detailed, State-specific, epidemiological, compartmental model for COVID-19 made in India. The model can compare the effects of multiple non-pharmaceutical interventions — such as different types of lockdowns, quarantines, and expanded testing — in altering the trajectory of the pandemic. “The secret of a good model is to capture all the details that are relevant to understanding the spread of the disease. INDSCI-SIM accomplishes that,” said Gautam Menon of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai and AshokaUniversity, Delhi. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow. | 
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