Here we go again…Each decade brings
its own international health crisis. During the last one it was Ebola and MERS,
and in the one before that, SARS. These emergencies terrify and, as humans, we are
usually not able to process the threat without making up stories and spreading foolish
ideas all over the place. And in today’s internet age, destructive memes take
on lives of their own. We dig ourselves into a wormhole in which more and more
bizarre ideas propagate themselves and breed new ones. How do we climb out of
the hole, is the question.
It is not as if we are still in the
dark ages. We know a lot more about how things work than we did in the days when
people believed that epidemics, such as these, were a pestilence inflicted by an
angry or vengeful god. Interestingly, there is, by the way, another type of “plague”,
locusts, the likes of which was also thought in ancient days to be inflicted by
a god fed up with human misbehaviour, currently playing itself out in Eastern
Africa. As in the case of a virus outbreak, there is absolutely no need to
invoke angry passions to explain how this other ecological threat arose.
Back to the current virus outbreak.
There has been speculation that the virus, now named officially COVID-19,
made a species jump from exotic creatures like bats or even reptile – snake, no
less (horror of horrors!) to us humans, biologically unready to handle the
challenge. Protection against such challenges requires some level of
naturally-occurring immunity and/or immunity induced through preventive immunization
which, incidentally, reminds us of the need for public health vaccination,
wherever available. But that is another story, previously
commented on in this forum. In the current situation, at-risk humanity (the
majority of us) are an easy target for this novel virus, resulting in the epidemic
that is now running uncontrolled in China and threatening to go global too. The
public health authorities in China are doing their best to promote practices designed
to limit the incidence of exposure in the community until the herd immunity we
mentioned earlier develops, and/or, until an effective vaccine is designed,
tested, manufactured and distributed in what is, predictably, a long series of
steps.
What do we do while we wait? And
how do we manage reasonable fears without being part of the problem? Scientists
are doing their bit, proceeding in an orderly manner, trying to understand the
behaviour of the virus. And with the WHO taking
charge of managing the public relations aspects, latter-day soothsayers and
snake oil merchants are, hopefully, made irrelevant. It is still necessary, though, to clarify how you
separate apparently infected individuals from the non-infected. Do you mask and
glove your entire population, sick or apparently well? Or, do evacuate your
citizens from China, thereby risking turning a local epidemic into a worldwide
pandemic? Is it right to lockdown Wuhan city or Hubei Province? Do you impose total
exclusion from individuals travelling from China? It is one thing to quarantine
one or two luxury cruise ships, but it is quite another to seal off an entire
country with the third
largest landmass from the rest of the world.
China itself has compounded the difficulties
by initially not allowing the truth of the potential epidemic to get out as
soon as it should have. But that is predictable: Like authoritarian governments
everywhere, shooting the messenger and suppressing information is the first
order of business whenever an uncomfortable truth is delivered. Thus was the
unfortunate Dr Li Wenliang, who was the first to alert the Wuhan authorities
about the emerging crisis, and who has since died, was put through the Chinese disinformation
mangle. It is little comfort that he has received validation, post
mortem, albeit.
Knowing what to call the new virus
is a good first step. CoViD-19, has the ring of authority in it, commanding us
to Keep Calm and Carry On.
Tell
Fren Tru
