OUR VIRAL EDUCATION
WE’VE had a blind spot with the coronavirus, even though its mortality rate is higher than that of the Spanish flu that killed 40 million.
To save ourselves we had no trouble banning travel from China. The US and countries like Italy did the same.
Now Australia is also banning travel from Iran, where the official death toll is 43.
Of course, China and Iran are easy to ban, not least because they are the “other”. But banning travel from a nice European country like Italy, so popular with tourists? So Western?
No country has yet done that, so tourists from Italy, which has more than 1200 coronavirus cases and 29 deaths so far, have kept flying around the world.
Result: they’ve brought the disease to at least 27 countries in five continents, including Brazil, Mexico, Algeria, Nigeria, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Greece, North Macedonia, Lithuania, Israel and Malaysia.
Maybe this won’t turn out to be a cataclysmic mistake – this time. Yes, there’s panic about this virus. It’s killed around 3000 people so far, including now an elderly Australian, and its mortality rate is over 3 per cent of people infected.
That rate may be too high. We can’t be sure how many people caught the virus but shrugged it off, since younger adults can suffer nothing worse than a seemingly light cold.
But that presumed morality rate is higher than that of the Spanish flu, which killed up to 50 million people over three years from January 1918.
Still, we might be lucky this time, at least “we” in the West.
While the death toll in
China is more than 3 per cent, outside China it’s lower than 1 per cent – albeit still up 10 times more than the flu.
That suggests people in richer countries have a better chance of surviving, thanks to better monitoring, medical systems and nutrition.
What’s more, medical researchers in the US, Israel and Australia say they could have a vaccine ready within 18 months, hopefully in time for Australia’s flu season next year.
But even if we can control the coronavirus until a vaccine comes, we’ve had a muchneeded dress rehearsal for a real catastrophe that’s possible later. Even probable.
Deadlier viruses and bacteria are out there. The plague, which in the 15th century killed perhaps half of Europe, still exists, still killing as many as 60 per cent of people it sickens.
We may be able to control the plague today, but add a mutation to that bacterium – or get, say, a deadlier form of coronavirus – and we’ll need to have learned lessons from these past two months. These are some of them: WE must be as ready to put travel bans on an Italy as we would on an Iran or a China. We should dare to cause real pain even to a friend.
WE need better stockpiles of protective equipment. Coronavirus in Australia is so far contained, yet we’ve still had shops running out of face masks and hand sanitisers.
WE are too dependent on China, including on students and tourists now blocked from coming here. Being dependent means we’re more likely to compromise our safety to get the money flowing.
THE World Health Organisation is hopelessly compromised and needs reform.
Let me explain that last point. WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus used to be the Health Minister of Ethiopia, where he was praised for some reforms but accused of allegedly covering up three outbreaks of cholera.
He is a member of a Marxist-Leninist party – the Tigray People’s Liberation Front – and at WHO tried to promote another Marxist, then Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, as a “goodwill ambassador” despite Mugabe’s notorious brutality.
During the coronavirus emergency, Tedros has seemed eager to protect China’s Marxist leadership.
A month ago, he criticised Australia and the US for imposing travel bans on China which helped slow the spread of the coronavirus. He also praised China’s dictatorship for its “transparency”, even though it locked up journalists and a doctor who’d tried to warn of the danger.
We need to have more confidence in the world’s top health bureaucracy when millions of lives are at stake.
And we need more confidence in our right to make even harder calls to one day save ourselves from something even deadlier.
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