Through the years, mankind has been assailed by different epidemics that have brought leaders and people of several epochs to their knees. Unlike conventional warfare, the attacking forces are an unseen enemy. They have no military stockpiles anywhere, no base stations, no armies, no generals and no known strategy. Each time they torment the world they leave the buildings in place, flora and fauna flourish but millions of children, women and men are pummeled into painful submission and ultimately condemned to death.
Originally known as the Wuhan virus, because of where it first attacked, the Coronavirus, now better known as COVID- 19 has wrought upon the world devastation that ordinary folks hitherto thought was probably only possible through a nuclear war. This ubiquitous virus has humbled superpowers, world leaders and crippled the global economy. It has also kept people across the world divided, separated in isolation just a blistering 4 months from when it was first reported in Wuhan, China. Meanwhile, it has only just begun.
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It follows a familiar pattern in which novel viruses and bacteria have launched ubiquitous attacks over the centuries. According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ‘The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.
Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic. While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.’
These interventions of quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings are once again being widely used in attempts to contain the COVID-19 virus. It is important to note that according to records, 500, 000 Nigerians out of a population of 18 million at that time were killed by the H1N1 virus of 1918!
The so-called Asian flu pandemic of 1957-58 killed an estimated 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the U.S. The Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-69 caused an estimated 1 million deaths worldwide and about 100,000 in the U.S. While the infection rate of Covid 19 has crossed the millionth mark, the death rate has varied from country to country with Italy being the hardest hit as it moves creepily from tens to hundreds of thousands. We hope it does not hit a million deaths before it spread is curtailed.
As reported in the ‘US News’, Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, recently looked up the top pandemics in world history, and what he found should remind us that humans and viruses have been at war for a very long time. According to him, “The worst was the Black Death in 1346-1353.”
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Murphy says, ‘Also known as the Great Plague and the Pestilence, this horrific disease, most likely caused by a bacterium carried by rats, killed more than 20 million people in Europe in the Middle Ages, almost one-third of the continent’s entire human population at that time. That would translate to about 250 million people today – just in Europe. And imagine the scale worldwide if advanced international travel would have around back then.
An earlier plague caused by the same pathogen, killed an estimated 30 million to 50 million people from 541-750 A.D. in the Eastern Roman Empire. Known as the Plague of Justinian, this pestilence wiped out perhaps half of the world’s population. In total, that one microscopic pest caused a total of 50 million to 70 million deaths.
Back home in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa, malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, about 3,000 children every day. Over one million people die from malaria each year, mostly children under five years of age, with 90 percent of malaria cases occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 300-600 million people suffer from malaria each year.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) ‘during the winter months, seasonal influenza can infect up to 20% of the population, depending on which viruses are circulating, and can cause substantial mortality. A recent study found that worldwide, up to 650,000 people die of respiratory diseases linked to seasonal influenza each year, and up to 72,000 of these deaths occur in the WHO European Region.
While it is generally recognized that influenza has a significant economic impact in the form of health-care costs and lost working hours, it is often challenging for countries to estimate the full economic impact of morbidity and mortality from influenza. Furthermore, the burden of influenza will vary year to year, depending upon which viruses are circulating and which people are affected.’
The truth is that man’s greatest enemy is not the other ideology, nor is it the other religion, the other race, the other bloc, the other continent. It is not the other country, not the other social class. Nuclear weapons, state-of-the-art weapons, great armies, artificial intelligence, may give us an induced sense of safety and accomplishment but if mankind does not get together and pool its financial, scientific and human resources together, we would continue to be ambushed, tormented and decimated by the unseen microscopic enemies who visit and travel across the world to prove that no man or woman is too big or too small, too important or unimportant, too rich or too poor for it to penetrate, subdue and annihilate.
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Virus and bacteria-causing epidemics and pandemics will continue to visit; it is our duty to make them very unwelcome. In the instant case of Covid-19, let us keep the virus at bay by doing what the experts have told us. Wash our hands regularly especially after touching objects and surfaces, maintain good environmental and personal hygiene, practice social distancing by staying at home and go out only when it is essential.
You can protect yourself and help prevent spreading the virus to others if you:
- Wash your hands regularly for 20 seconds, with soap and water or alcohol-based hand rub
- Cover your nose and mouth with a disposable tissue or flexed elbow when you cough or sneeze
- Avoid close contact (1 meter or 3 feet) with people who are unwell
- Stay home and self-isolate from others in the household if you feel unwell
- Don’t Touch your eyes, nose, or mouth if your hands are not clean
We are expected to also call the relevant toll-free numbers when we arrive from a Covid-19 prone location. Besides building the so-called herd-immunity which comes at great cost in human lives, the best way to stop the virus is to stop its spread while a vaccine is being developed.
This too shall surely pass away but we do not have to make it pass with too many lost lives and cause it to hang around for too long. Let’s give Covid-19 and other viral and bacterial enemies the fight of our lives. Together, we can do it!
