My COVID 19 Journal: Entry #1

 30th June, 2020

This virus is all over the world. It’s not going away. It will be a part of our lives from now until somehow we can find a way to eradicate it. We haven’t eradicated the flu in hundreds of years. I have little hope for the COVID-19 being eradicated. So each year there will be casualties. Each year there will be a fresh surge of the virus. The question is - will it still be a pandemic or will it be restrained to an epidemic? Or locally contained?

It’s a new virus. 

There may be a few people living who went through the Spanish Flu of 1918 to tell us what it was like. Pictures and movies may have captured some of life as they knew it then. Even so, it wasn’t a global pandemic such as this is. Since then, we’ve had a World War, and multiple advancements in every aspect of life. We’ve had countries born. We’ve been to the moon and back. We’ve seen the rise of international terrorism. The computer is now an ubiquitous part of our lives. We’ve even learnt how to deal with scarier diseases like Ebola and HIV. 

So what makes Covid-19 such a hotly debated topic? 

My take (and feel free to disagree with me - but keep it clean, folks) is:

The newness of the virus (remember it’s been only 6+ months since it’s “discovery”) means we are still learning about it. 

So what have we learnt so far?

It’s contagious. By touch. By bodily fluids. And to some extent by air. 

People can be carriers without experiencing symptoms themselves aka asymptomatic patients. But, they can infect other people.

People of all ages can be infected. From babies to geriatrics - nobody is safe. However, the vulnerability varies with age. 

The virulence of the infection affects people differently. Some die. Others recover. Some quickly. Some not so quickly. 

It takes about 14 days of incubation to start manifesting.

There is no vaccine for it. 

There is no cure for it.

Not yet. 

And there won’t be one for a while. 

(I’ll touch on this in a bit).

Countries have shut down their economic machines in the face of these immutable facts.  Governments are struggling with how to deal with it, while at the same time keeping the country alive. The biggest challenge seems to be to provide a unified strategy towards finding a path towards a safer and more normal mode of life. 

Countries are so much more entwined with each other than they were in 1918. Physically and virtually. It should have been apparent that this would spread with global travel. What is surprising is that no one - not one single country - came forward to say - we need to step up as a global community and work with China and Italy and Iran - three of the most affected countries at the very beginning - to contain this. And therein lay the crux of the problem. 

Italy was not willing to close its borders. Iran was not willing to open up to the global community. And China was being its inscrutable self and refusing to admit that they had a very large problem on their hands. A problem that they spread to the rest of the world because they were too embarrassed? Secretive? Whatever-it-was to disclose the problem.

End result as of this point in time:

4+Million people affected

300K+ people dead

1+ Million recovered

...And still counting

And the numbers are not accurate because we don’t know how many are really infected until they are tested. And we don’t know how many are dead because some countries won’t talk about real numbers.

But what I see in those numbers is 25% recovery rate. Good or not - that reads hope to me. Considering that the world population is about 7.8 B people, 4 M is just .05%; and 300 K is 7.5% of that 4M. Not a lot. On paper. 

But each of those 300K was a person - someone’s father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, lover, friend, grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, cousin. Each of those persons has a name. Has/had someone who cared about them. Lived a life among people. Walked, talked, ate, slept, loved, worked, played, laughed, cried just like you and me. And possibly, had someone who grieved for them when they passed, all alone in their beds. Sometimes with no one they knew and loved around them.