India’s Covid-19 pain is another warning for us
HOW many more warnings and reminders do we need?
What is it about humanity, in general, that won’t believe the evidence in front of us and act responsibly?
Are we all so accustomed to personal freedoms that we are unwilling to sacrifice some of them?
Do we truly, in this current evolution of the species, care so little for our “herd”?
Have we evolved into a community of “seeing is believing” before we take an existential threat seriously?
The evidence is before our eyes. While we cannot see the Covid virus, the heartbreaking, devastating scenes from India should add to the visual evidence of danger we have already seen.
People dying on pavements or on stretchers as their family cries in despair around them. Hundreds of thousands. Days of setting case and death records. And nothing anyone can do to help because there are no more beds and oxygen runs out. Mass funeral pyres spiralling smoke above cities and towns.
According to the BBC, most troubling in that country’s current surge is a new variant called B.1.617.
It emerged in India and is showing something that scares the heck out of scientists: it appears to have a double mutation on its spike, the bit that clings to our cells.
Science is still studying it, but it is feared it is more transmissible and antibodies may battle to block the virus. Easier transmissibility means more victims and “breeding” time for it to find new ways to outsmart us, our antibodies and our vaccinations.
It’s so hard to comprehend that something as minuscule as this virus can outsmart the species that travel to the far reaches of space and lands craft so far away there are too many zeroes in the number of light-years or kilometres to count for “normal” people. But that’s what it is doing.
We have brilliant minds around the world analysing and sequencing the genetics of this thing.
We also, however, have those on the other side of the brain scale and refuse to believe this is not a hoax or a conspiracy.
While these people exist, the happy little virus is using us as its playing field, spawning and recreating and using a dizzyingly short time to outmanoeuvre our clever folk.
So here’s a reminder: you may never get Covid, or have such a weak version that you don’t even know about it.
You may get it and survive just fine, with no long-term effects, and carry on your happy little life.
It could also make you desperately ill and leave you with chronic illness that lasts the rest of an unhappy life.
You may die and leave everyone around you with pain and hurt for the rest of their lives.
You may also be the breeder of the version that conquers current vaccinations and it all has to start again.
The world is a different place for us now. At least until we control or conquer it, we must find a way to make the best of our short time in it.
THE world has been transfixed this week by the tragedy unfolding in India. Just over a year ago, the closest to what they are experiencing now was playing out in Italy.
The Italian lesson played a large role in our government imposing one of the harshest Covid-19 lockdowns in the world and, most importantly, letting the science – and scientists – take the lead in addressing this crisis, rather than political considerations.
The world took heed of how we behaved and countries in the northern hemisphere gradually began implementing increasingly tougher restrictions, just as we started successfully emerging from our ours.
We have had our scares along the way; the second wave was one and yet – for some reason – we have managed
IF YOU drive on the same road often, you may have developed an innate self, vehicle and road symbiosis where you can predict, even in the dark, where a pothole is and dodge it every time, especially if you’ve hit it before.
This mind and pothole telepathy is telling or two things.
How far we can stretch ourselves, before we snap. And how far beyond the impoverished spectrum is our government willing to whisk us. Let me explain: South Africa's municipalities need R51 billion to avoid collapse. They could owe their creditors so much on their own. I don’t think that highly of their corruption.
Lower revenue collection rates, non-payment and illegal connections are a few more heavy rocks in the R51 billion bag, or a total collapse of municipalities. About R35bn of the debt is to Eskom.
This is how South Africa is stuck between a rock and a dark place.
The people say it’s the government. The government says it’s the people.
But it is the people who will pay. With candle lit, empty dinner tables.
These people are recipients of taps without water. They are Olympic swimmers in pit toilets. Conductors of conniving electricity connections. They are magicians.
While you master telepathy to dodge potholes, they have advanced to filling their stomachs with food for thought.
Squeezing water out of a rock has been frowned upon by the world’s population, since the invention of time.
Water is money, we are the rock, and the government is squeezing time and again, like how they handle triggers on pump action shotguns loaded with rubber death. I say death, since we have established that a bullet kills, rubber or lead.
As to how far beyond the impoverished spectrum our government is willing to whisk us: Well, the people bearing the burden of the billions say the government isn’t bothered with bowling us straight back to the dark ages. And I don’t mean a few years ago when load shedding became a thing. Or recently, when it graduated to reduction. We either pay up or dark down, like we do when the government squeezes.
Blessed are the fat cats in seats, not the people, when the government sneezes.
The power crises has brought about an emergence of a new breed.
When black power is enticed by white money, white elephants are born in townships.
It has become politically correct to say “township”. Everyone lives in squalor, there are just colourful tin cans built around us.
Clouded under a web of illegally connected wires. We too are the problem.
Everyone wants a plug. But nobody is building circuits.
We are kicking sand, and nobody is building castles.
Where do we get the audacity to play matador when we know very well that the government is the bull? Too often we get trampled on and they don’t bother checking under their hooves.
While you master telepathy to dodge potholes, “the people” have advanced to filling their stomachs with food for thought.