Two Covid19 family deaths within a year moves New York FinTech Entrepreneur to make observations while Indian healthcare system flirts with failure.

Getting out ahead of it... the family’s been getting smaller, so since I cannot visit and could not even speak to them prior to their passing I decided to make some notes for posterity.

Bias: I have traveled to India 7 times in my life. Seen the poverty first-hand. There is nothing like the chaos, color, smell, and hubbub of the experience to give a new appreciation for one's circumstances and the multitudinous abundance of life energy as varies from place to place on planet Earth. I am quite proud to be an American and would never want to live in India. I’ve made study of India over the years from afar as it is anthropologically relevant and significant. If one does not understand that region, with its many millennia of unique history, then one will be influenced without ever knowing how and die ignorant.

Unverified deaths: I have not seen the obituaries, corpses, or verified with next of kin. I take it on trust that the family is not lying about the facts of their passing. In India oftentimes the benefit of the doubt and/or familiarity (terms of kinship) is given to the extended family. Such was so in the case of the 1st death, uncle Sham, my father's 1st cousin. His widow was also hospitalized. The second death occurred two or three days ago. My father’s eldest brother, Vijay, died a few days after receiving his 2nd shot. There were underlying factors including diabetes. Diabetes is a disease with increasing prevalence in our world today. My uncle Vijay lived in the state of Madhya Pradesh, in the city of Bhopal. A place once made infamous by the Union Carbide industrial disaster of 12/1984.

Any first-hand accounts of Bhopal from me would be that of a child or teen. Here's a piece outlining details of the disaster and response. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bridgethanna/files/Unending_Disaster.pdf Accessed April 25th, 2021. Bridget Hanna forthcoming in Nongovernmental Politics edited by Michel Feher, Zone Books, April 2007 

Deaths in Madhya Pradesh are not typically reported by name in line with their more populous neighbors, such as Maharashtra. Still, they do make some headlines - https://in.news.yahoo.com/5-covid-patients-die-jabalpur-090639099.html

So I looked into the oxygen shortage because I am ever interested in knock-on effects to industry and supply/demand analysis as affects price discovery and markets.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/oxygen-shortage-here-are-some-industries-that-consume-industrial-oxygen-6801121.html

Some companies have dramatically slowed work as demand for oxygen purposed toward medical sector outcomes increased, notably Alang, the largest Shipbreaking yard in India, located in MP’s neighbor state of Gujarat.

Other industries diverting supply on orders from the capital include the petrochemical and steel industry.

That our family in MP accounted for 2 deaths was interesting in itself as a statistical anomaly of disproportionate impact, perhaps suggesting under-reporting of the actual figures in the summaries that were made public. Take it as a data point only. I cannot infer with confidence without proper statistics. Maybe ask your friends to see how many people who share Indian roots and still have family there have seen family members hospitalized or killed by Covid19.

A loss of faith in the Indian healthcare system could be a catalyst for increased emigration. Indian nationals have frequently sought opportunity outside the country, as there is a very competitive talent market and a very a-competitive compensation scheme for skill-comparable positions that are likely to be much more financially rewarding in 1st world countries, even in the case the employees being measured have worked for the same employer.

EX: A software engineer living in Hyderabad may be paid $22,000 a year.

https://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Engineer/Salary/3d607011/Google-Inc.

Versus $125,000 + in the US.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E9079_D_KO7,24.htm?experienceLevel=LESS_THAN_ONE

https://themoneyconverter.com/INR/USD

The difference in salary and strength of the currency makes it difficult to travel internationally because an average trip cost for a family (Indians regularly travel together because such excursions are infrequent and may only happen 2-3 times in a lifetime) is in excess of $5,000- $10,000 for a week. This makes it genuinely harder for international families to maintain ties. I speak from personal experience in this regard as the demand to visit is placed on the family with superior resources. Going to India is a pain in the arse. For those with the luxury of travel, there are many alternative destinations that are closer and much more attractive. On the other hand, because the rupee does not have a favorable exchange rate, it affects an individual’s mobility. That is not directly an argument for alt-coins, but if I were an Indian and familiar with programming, such regard, frustration, and intelligence would likely drive demand for the leverage potential, store of value, and currency appreciation inherit in the digital currency asset class as a whole to help create a better financial future for the family where investments in fiat currency are inherently unsustainable in re: globalization. Understand the demand folks…

In India, there are people who desire to improve outcomes for the family by finding work opportunities abroad. Many people desire such, so the motivation works in tandem with India's large population to produce an extraordinary level of competitiveness locally in the schools where top performers (1% of the 1%) are rewarded with the opportunity to leave. This is one of the reasons why wisely run nation-states recognize the value of high-skill immigrants and strategic programs by offering some small oxygen supplies to India in the present.

Changing topics to control of virus spread while recognizing the incredible diaspora of the Indian people…

Customs officials from countries receiving traffic from India should be sure to do their own independent testing pre-arrival as a strategy of mitigating information perceived to negatively influence third parties could also produce myriad strategies manifesting aspects of the endemic corruption plaguing the largest democracy on earth (including falsified or fraudulent testing at airports). If we’re going to contain the spread of variants, new tests need to be created that are designed to detect different forms of the virus and administered properly. It sucks to have to say this, but if I may be slightly patriotic for a moment… there was a massive sacrifice of opportunity on the part of regular citizens through the last year of WFH, self-quarantine procedures, and vaccinations that have helped to reduce the number of cases in the US. It would be akin to spitting on this effort NOT TO practice and implement policies against versions of the virus that can kill among the immunized.

https://nypost.com/2021/04/20/dozens-of-passengers-test-positive-for-covid-on-flight-from-india/

Call centers may shift locations. Cost-efficient scaling of this industry that relies on low-minimum wage hiring of people with trainable skills (functional linguistic skill) has found a ready market over the past few decades in South and SE Asia. In India, companies benefit from a bi-lingual population and cost-benefit favorable investments as compared to investing in real estate and local operations where the dollar is strong. That industry is also affected by WFH. Think of how easy it is to change an employee's behavior when a manager can walk around on the customer service floor and listen in person to how an experience is being delivered. The alternative is a call-transfer that places an undue burden on the customer where sensitive information has to be re-shared and the new connection may be subject to latency or signal attenuation issues (especially in a WFH or decentralized operations setting where connection strength is not being provided at a pre-arranged level of quality through a support contract with the IT provider). Training is much more difficult to provide when operations are decentralized and may take on a big-brother aspect that can be "creepy" and demotivating to an employee depending on the skill of the middle manager (LOL). Perhaps you have spent more time on hold since the pandemic started... If this pandemic continues to spread rapidly and manifest new variants that are capable of evading immune-responses produced by early vaccines, then industries that rely on Indian English-speaking support (notably: call centers) may stand to become less efficient or shift more volume to places like the Philippines. With cybersecurity and issues of identity theft ever more in the spotlight, organizations should take care as to how PII is being handled when data travels internationally.

I think that’s all I want to share for now. Hopefully, this abbreviated accounting and current-events summarization of issues surface some new or better understanding about what’s happening abroad. I hope that India can “get its act together”, but I’m not optimistic. Not like it matters when you have a billion people, eh? 

In closing, I will make a brief acknowledgment to the fallen. This post may never reach the eyes and minds it should have. I invested many years of time, effort, and purpose in building an international network to make it possible for collaborations to happen later in life as we worked together to address the world's problems. However, my generation has been in many ways marginalized by the unfortunate timing of the fraud-induced sub-prime mortgage market collapse that led to the Great Recession of 2008, the weak Obama-era job market, and utterly disadvantageous user-information analytics that are used for investments in product development made by behemoth technology companies, such as the one that acquired LinkedIn, that we rely on for common services from computing to hosting to development. We also compete by limiting the information provided to such platforms and by reducing our perceived digital footprint. Given the strategic reduction in connections (from 600 + to ~200) made with intent to A. experiment with the Dunbar's number and B. to limit my exposure to forms of passive C2B and B2B surveillance capitalism that can occur through connections, international or otherwise, not actively being monetized, the desirable outcomes (peace, understanding, a better world) have become less likely to manifest. In this is pitted an individual's interest against the greater good. So, enjoy your privilege, and if you want more perspective like this… reach out to me directly and I’ll share with you some of the other ways we are using intelligence. Or perhaps, some kind words about Vijay.