Fear, panic not the best way to fight a pandemic
The lockdowns in Italy, Spain, France, Britain, the United States and of course India in the wake of the coronavirus (or
Covid-19) outbreak is a necessary response, but it hides the fact that governments and people the world over are running scared of the virus. It is the not the best way of grappling with the pandemic. The exponential infection rates which caused the panic, and rightly so, will be flattened out in the new few weeks and months, but we have not seen the last of Covid-19 yet. It is likely to return next winter. All governments and the medical fraternity, including doctors and researchers, hope that they would be armed by then with some form of vaccine or other medication. The greatest fear haunting governments is that if too many people are infected with Covid19, the public and private health systems cannot cope with it, and the health infrastructure will crash. It is to stop the people’s run on the healthcare system that governments are anxious and eager to prevent the infection spreading so that people do not get it, do not develop the symptoms and fever, and they would not require hospital care. Even if a fraction of those testing positive for Covid-19 were to fall critically ill, the entire hospital system would break down.
Microbiologists and virologists know only too well that viruses are an inherent part of the protein chain, though there is the definitional disagreement whether viruses are anterior to the emergence of early cellular life or they came after. There is, however, near-unanimity of the view that viruses are not to be classed with living matter as they cannot replicate themselves. There is no getting the world of the viruses. We must learn to deal with them, and thankfully there are just over a dozen viruses from among millions of them which threaten the life and well-being of humans and which need to be combated through vaccines and retroviral medications. So, the reality is that the medical fraternity can combat Covid-19 through the discovery of a vaccine which may need to be updated regularly as in the case of the flu vaccine.
At the moment, however, the justified panic response of the governments through widespread lockdowns has sent out a message to the people that Covid-19 is fatal, and if they are
Covid-19 positive, and if they develop the pneumonic fever which is its signature, then they will die. It is an exaggerated fear and the statistics prove that it is not so. In the more than 400,000 people who have been infected with it, nearly
100,000 have recovered and around 30,000 people have died. Without resorting to arguments about percentages of mortality rates to score statistical brownie points, it can be readily inferred that all those who are infected would not require hospital care, though they would need to be quarantined wherever they are, including the home, and that all of them would not end up in an intensive care unit and they would not require ventilators.
Many of those who have died are not merely the aged, but they were suffering from other serious ailments, which have now been classified as comorbid conditions. There is then a need to understand that Covid-19 is a viral fever, which can turn fatal, but it need not. The fear of governments and that of the public health system managers is that they would not be able to cope with it if too many people need to be admitted to hospitals and if a large number of them were to require critical care should not be the sole factor in describing the pandemic. And they want to put the fear of the pandemic in the hearts of people, which is not a bad thing when there is no ready medical remedy, but it should not push people into mental morbidity, which is counterproductive. But the desire to control the contagion by emphasising the dangers should not push people to the brink of panic and breakdown. There is also the need to cut through the myth of general perceptions that young people are immune to it, and that the old have no defences against it. The young could catch the viral fever and the old could manage to either escape the fever and they may survive the fever through medication and critical care.
There is a sense of helplessness among doctors and researchers right now that they have no known medication to counter Covid-19 successfully, and it is this that is spreading the air of gloom and doom. The medical fraternity feels less confident when it is not armed with a tested vaccine or medicine to fight Covid-19. But clinical data about the 100,000 or so people who have recovered from the infection, as well as the information connected with the 30,000 or so who died because of it, must provide enough clues to the doctors of dealing with it, and telling people that
Covid-19 does not mean a death sentence. The new viral strain is dangerous and can wreak havoc on the health of large populations, which is unacceptable. But what is needed is a field strategy of dealing with it through what is at hand by way of medication and other precautions. Lockdown is a partial response, and the doctors as well as medical researchers are fully aware of this truth. They are looking for breathing time for them to sequence the Covid-19 genome and create the antidote to successfully battle the pathogen. Lockdown is a way of buying time. It does not eliminate the threat posed by Covid-19.
The epidemiology of
Covid-19 need not be restricted to the figures of those who tested positive, who passed through the phases of infection and survived, and also those who did not. What we need is also the other aspect of the pandemic — the people who survived the symptoms and what was the available medication that saw them through it. The co-morbidity conditions have to be a necessary part of the Covid-19 mortality profile.
The new viral strain is dangerous and can wreak havoc on the health of large populations, which is unacceptable. But what is needed is a field strategy of dealing with it through what is at hand.
The medical fraternity feels less confident when it is not armed with a tested vaccine or medicine to fight
Covid-19. But clinical data about the
100,000 or so who have recovered... must provide clues...