The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) is running through the world’s population like a freight train.
Almost three months since it jumped from snakes — or pangolins or bats or wherever it came from — in Wuhan, China, in December, it has killed 4,718 people, made 128,00 sick in 111 countries, crashed stock markets and it’s just been declared a pandemic. So far, it has just affected nations mainly in Europe and Asia which have organised medical services and resources.
It has changed the face of nations. Europeans are banned from the United States, Italians — all 60 million of them — can’t leave their homes unless they are going to hospital to a supermarket; China has restricted the movement of more than 500 million people; and churches, concerts, sporting events, schools and universities are closed or banned.
Africa has reported less that 120 cases — 24 in Algeria, 67 in Egypt, 17 in South Africa and a smattering of a case or two in Sub-Saharan Africa. The thing about the countries reporting many cases is that they have the healthcare systems to carry out testing.
The rest of Africa either does not have the virus, has the virus and the attendant mortality but does not know it because they are not able to test or has the virus but it is in the initial stage where it spreads quietly, asymptomatically, quietly, as has happened in so many other places.
The obvious question is how concerned we should be about this virus. Some leaders, such as President Donald Trump of the US, have sought to reassure their people, telling them that it is no worse than the seasonal flu, that the seasonal flu actually kills more people.
The fact of the matter is statistics so far show if you are below 30 years and are healthy, your risk of death is 0.2 per cent, 1.3 per cent for those in their 50s and 8 per cent for the elderly who are more than 80.
I have been trying to track the percentage of recoveries and so far I have seen between 50 and 60 per cent.
So if average mortality rate is 3.6 per cent, and the recoveries are 56 per cent, there is a whole there of about 40 per cent which I haven’t quite figured out, maybe it consists in people who are infected and ill, but not yet in the mortality or recovered categories.
In any case, the mortality calculations are dicey; they rely a lot on the amount and quality of testing because they are a percentage of those tested. If the testing is poor, a mortality calculation will over-represent the rate at which people are dying because there could be many sick people who recover but went undetected.
Different have taken different measures to address the problem. Listening to WHO officials, I have formed the impression that first and foremost, every effort has to be made to keep the virus out of a country.
If you fly into Beijing today, don’t be surprised if you are quarantined for 14 days before you are allowed into China. Such is the seriousness to prevent a return back to China from foreign lands.
The testing and isolation of travellers is an unpleasant but necessary measure against infection.
The second is quick, extensive testing of suspicious and effective contact tracing. Therefore if a patient is suspected to have the virus, the patient is quickly tested and all the persons he or she came into contact with are tracked down and tested, and the people they were in contact with, if necessary. This is possible only when the virus is under control.
As soon as community transmission sets in on a large scale so that it is not possible to tell who infected who, that’s where the social distance measures – keeping two metres away and not coming into contact with each other – come into effect. This is not to say that all these measure can’t be applied all at once, they most probably can.
Following this story, I have heard many experts say that the biggest risk of the coronavirus and the sickness it causes is a situation where the healthcare system is overwhelmed and doctors, where there are doctors, are helpless to save lives. I have heard of cases in Italy where ICU treatment is administered in hospital corridors.
I have also heard discussions about cases where doctors are forced to choose who between patients all who can potentially be saved if there was equipment and beds.
Our systems are fragile, the cost of treatment is high, our drug procurement systems are corrupt and therefore expensive, there is no efficient national health insurance and our doctors have never had to deal with a pandemic of this nature.
From a personal perspective, I think it might be good to be prepared and ask yourself: what would I do if I got infected? If the beds in government hospitals are full, do you have a way of paying for private healthcare?
Secondly, if you must self-quarantine, how do you do it without exposing your loved to danger? What are your plans for parents upcountry who are old and in poor health and whose access to medical services is not good?
As a country, do we have supplies of medicines and safety equipment? Have we trained healthcare workers? Do we are medical teams in the police and military ready to enforce quarantines?
As we pray that this nightmare comes near us, unfortunately we have to start preparing for the worst.
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