Here We Go Again-CORVID-19

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