Coronavirus impact | E-commerce firms staring at bleak sales in post-lockdown period too

Largely what e-commerce platforms sell is discretionary expenditure like electronics, fashion and general merchandise.

Kamalika Ghosh

April 21, 2020 / 07:00 PM IST

In a sudden U-turn from its April 15 guidelines, allowing e-commerce companies to operate, the government has put a spanner in their plans by restricting e-commerce companies to trade only in essential goods and groceries.

In a notification on April 15, the government had put out a list of sectors that would be able to resume operations partially from April 20, provided it maintained social distancing norms. The list included e-commerce companies like Amazon, Flipkart and others.

However, a day before they were supposed to resume operations, another notification from the government disallowed e-commerce from trading in anything but essentials.

"This will create a level-playing field for small retailers," Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said after the home ministry came out with the notification.

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COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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