Injecting a healthy dose of harsh reality into coronamania

It was truly a sight to behold. Long lines of AIPAC delegates from North America and around the world queued up to see the sophisticated Sheba Medical Center showcase in the Washington Convention Center last week, which highlighted a multi-purpose field hospital and interactive ARC innovation start-up display.

As the delegates observed the field hospital with wonderment, almost all of them parroted the same line:

“You are a Newsweek world Top-10 hospital, so we expect Sheba and the State of Israel to find a cure for corona…” After exiting the field hospital, they hurriedly pocketed a souvenir bottle of Sheba’s antiseptic hand wash. When I inquired as to why this was so important to them, the response was: “All of the drug stores have no more antiseptic hand wash left on the shelves.”

While I kvelled after hearing the first sentence, I cringed after hearing the second.

Sheba Medical Center has indeed been making headlines in major media around the world during the last few weeks, including in this newspaper. Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, Sheba’s director general and his chief innovation officer, Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, who appeared center stage at AIPAC’s opening ceremony, have activated all of the center’s advanced medical tools – led by five tele-medicine technologies to treat and interact with Israel’s coronavirus patients, who are ensconced in a quarantined complex. By the time you read this, some of the patients will have been released: healthy and oh, so happy to be reunited with their families.

While Sheba is currently a world leader in combating head on the coronavirus and the COVID 19 disease it causes by combining the ingenuity of our doctors with game-changing technologies, the mass media – as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN – are losing the larger battle to create global awareness and a cure for a more common and far more deadly viral phenomenon: the FLU!

Statistics don’t lie. According to the Worldometer website, there have so far been approximately 92,000 coronavirus cases and about 3,250 deaths around the world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA reported that through the end of February, there were approximately 40 MILLION cases of flu illness there, with nearly 30,000 deaths. The WHO reports that during this past flu season alone, over 250,000 people perished on a global scale.

Science has progressed to the point where doctors and researchers can identify the genetic codes of both the flu and coronaviruses. Scientists know that most flu viruses originate in Asia. In an age where Artificial Intelligence, genomics and predictive analytics are playing game-changing roles in creating precision medical treatments for patients with a variety of mild to severe illnesses, the time has come for the UN and WHO to marshal the world’s top doctors, scientists and researchers, in order to wage war against these deadly viruses. The resources and technologies are available to get ahead of these maladies before they wreak global physical and fiscal havoc.

We don’t need apocalyptic fictional Hollywood zombie movies to show us the future when reality is staring us right in the face – with solutions within our grasp.

The writer is the international spokesman for Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer in Ramat Gan.