Preparing for the long battle against a vicious virus
The call from the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) sounds magical but it is easier said than done. “Test! Test! Test!”: this is the advice from WHO head Tedros Adhanom and it sounds like a call for a decisive battle against a vicious virus that has declared war on humanity and is winning the battle at least for now. Unfortunately, mass testing is beyond the means of even some of the most developed countries. That is why such a call may sound a bit Quixotic for the simple reason that many countries are far from acquiring the medical tools for testing not millions but even hundreds of people in a given community. The whole world is certainly caught off guards. In Africa, the best weapon of fight against the terrible virus pandemic is hand washing.
As soon as the first case of infection was announced in Ethiopia, long queues were formed in front of drug stores. True or fake news about the availability of face masks or sterilizer were circulating by words of mouth. Many quacks instantly appeared on the streets of the capital Addis Ababa trying to sell fake remedies or offer passersby home-concocted solutions. Lemons, garlic, ginger and other traditional food ingredients disappeared from street corners where they were abundantly available before the pandemic. Some drugstores were apprehended for trying to make extra money from the sale of medical alcohol or face masks that were in great demand by the panicking public.
The virus is even causing some kind of social upheaval when some people started fighting among themselves to get hold of these rare materials and the city authorities reportedly closed down some of the drugstores for charging inflated prices for some of the products. Many pharmacies were forced of business for what the local media said were acts of cruelty and greed. The corona virus is not only infecting people. It is also disturbing social norms and affecting people’s behaviors, bringing out the best as well as the worst in humanity.
Aside from its medical mystery, the ongoing pandemic, has a number of lessons that countries in Africa in particular could learn in order to face the coming weeks and months with greater confidence and less panic. South Korea has benefitted a great deal by trying to learn some of the lessons in containing the spread of the virus and curbed its potentially dangerous spread. The story of South Korean corona virus pandemic started with a big scare and is now following a downward spiral thanks to the combination of modern technology, large scale isolation, tracing and testing. One has to be smarter than the virus itself in order to make such a headway in an apparent battle of wits.
Of course, both China and South Korea are highly developed countries with advanced medical technology and resources. No country in Africa would successfully imitate these countries to successfully contain the spread of the virus. They have to devise their own strategies within the available means or resources. Yet, they can use the lessons from these countries selectively and seriously if they want to boost the tools of containment at their disposal. The first lesson is the high-level of aggressiveness and sustainable, discipline and commitment in attacking the invisible enemy.
Half hearted or late measures, confusion and bad information flow are believed to be behind the overpowering challenges. Italy and other European countries as well as the United States are in bad shape right now because people refused to change their behaviors and lifestyles in the face of the relentless punishment of the virus.
As some of the leaders of these countries somewhat reluctantly admitted, the fight against the virus started relatively late. The time between what happened in China and south Korea and the first infections in the US had given people the opportunity to prepare better for the inevitable and rapid advance of the pandemic. Some of them leaders even downplayed the virus’s potentially devastating effects until it landed on their shores. Now China is said to have managed to curb new infections except those that are imported from abroad and these too are believed to disappear sooner than later. This is quite a remarkable achievement for a country of more than a billion people with the discipline and organization that must become the envy of the countries that are now in the eyes of the storm.
African countries too could have used the window of opportunity between the spread of the virus in Asia and the first infection in their countries to organized and build the defenses against the inevitable arrival of the virus. Instead of organizing the defenses, preparing the available resources for the fight and launching a vigorous public awareness campaigns earlier, they waited until the first infection to mobilize the public against it. It was not too late to react but they could prepare better to avoid the initial panic and acquire the defensive gears against the corona, such as face masks and hand cleaning materials. It was clear that these countries could not start public testing as they could not acquire testing kits that are not available in sufficient numbers even in richer countries.
WHO boss Tedros Adhanom recently advised countries to test, test and test susceptible cases and isolate the people in order to prevent them from transmitting the virus to the general population. However the call for testing, though it is based on scientific assumptions and fruitful results from countries that could apply it, was and still is beyond the reach of African countries. Instead of that, Dr. Tedros’s call for hand washing that went viral on the Internet and was more palatable or more realistic because it is a strategy best suited to the prevailing realities in African countries. Hand washing is simple, affordable, inexpensive and a formidable weapon against the virus if properly used. And that is why it is catching quickly the public’s imagination. There is a silver lining to every dark cloud as they say.
Of late, the WHO is insisting and warning on the possibility of an eventual explosion of infection in the second stage after the appearance of the virus before it assumes an exponential growth trajectory. All countries started by reporting a few cases of infected patients and then the numbers exploded into hundreds and thousands. This is the behavior or the pattern of the corona’s journey into the population. That is why many people
At this stage, Horn countries are likely to take a strategy of economic survival and damage limitation. However this can be tried if and when the pandemic will start to show signs of abetting. The African Union is best-placed to assess or come to the rescue as far as COVID-19’s disastrous economic and social effects are concerned. What the AU can do to avert a disaster is something that has to be yet explored via video conferences as conventional large gatherings are prohibited in almost all countries. An extraordinary AU conference will be called sooner or later in order to assess the damages and chart a joint strategy for economic recovery on the continent. At this stage, saving millions of lives endangered by the COVID-19 comes before any prospect of economic recovery. For now And China seems to give a glimmer of hope to the world both in stopping the virus and a possible engineering of a global economic are now feeling some kind of inner disquiet or unease when they listen about the unchanging numbers of infections that are officially reported and keep wondering about the unreported cases. Maybe the relatively slow march of the deadly virus may be behind the growth of all kinds of unscientific assumptions and even myth and claims of a cure by all kinds of quacks touting their “discoveries” on the social media.
What is disturbing is not the appearance of such myths and claims of potential cures but the reluctance on the part of the health authorities to disprove such claims and protect the public from all kinds of home-brewed solutions to this global problem. The other myth that needs demystifying is the claim that the hot weather in Ethiopia might have contributed for the slow appearance and slower spread of the virus but this was disproved as another nonsense as it has no proven scientific basis. By the way, these myths are not unique to Africa. Similar myths have also appeared in Europe but they are exposed and rejected faster than here in Africa.
According to reliable sources, all weather conditions are favorable for the spread of the virus unless vigorous measures are taken to curb its spread. The public is largely ill-informed about the causes and consequences of the pandemic but the health authorities could at least create a website in local languages where the public could get information coming from reliable sources such as the WHO. Culture may rather play a role in the spread of the virus. In some countries like Japan where people do not shake hands to greet one another and bow their heads instead, the spread of the virus is proving to be relatively less severe.
Fake news in the ongoing fight against the corona is more devastating than fake news in politics where only individuals might be affected. But in the case of the corona virus, hundreds if not thousands of people are affected immediately and fake news is most deadly here. Some social media sites are circulating misleading news about the spread of the virus. They range from conspiracy theories to fake remedies. In the United Kingdom for instance, efforts are being made to uncover the fake news and disprove some of them
Information is a real power in the battle against the corona virus. Health officials in African countries should focus on spreading the truth about the pandemic. Young people can be involved in the task of spreading the right message to the right people. They can translate the latest information on the pandemic in the local languages so that people in remote and inaccessible villages can receive them through the radio. That is the only way to combat misleading information on the virus and its devastating effects. We should not wait until the death toll rises to three digits in order to act fast and seriously work on informing the public. We should not wait until we reach a critical surge of infection to declare a massive lockdown of towns and regions, which in African context of poor economies would mean total disaster. The lessons from California in the US and Argentina where lockdowns are effected could be instructional in the African context. Even under the best economic and social conditions lockdowns cause tremendous pressure on people’s mental and physical health. In Africa where most people live from hand to mouth, lockdowns may be simply unthinkable.
As the WHO says repeatedly the virus spreads unnoticed and when it appears it is a real explosion. Testing is thus believe to detect the virus before it causes many devastations. South Africa, on its part is warning an explosion of infection that will come sooner than later. The viciousness of the virus is that it is spreading invisibly and underground and comes to the surface after it has affected thousands of patients.
The corona virus is not something that should be taken lightly. It is deadly and it is not a joke although some people in the local media make a laughing stock of it. There are encouraging and positive initiatives here and there in Addis Ababa thanks to young volunteers who are working hard to promote a campaign of hand washing in a country where all the other protective gears are not readily available. The challenge is to make the public involvement sustainable and create a strong and enduring solidarity movement against the spread of the virus.
Taking the message to the countryside is also something that should not be delayed. Many decades ago, the HIV wrecked havocs in the rural area because of lack of awareness among the population and the low level of media penetration that prevailed at that time. There is now a golden opportunity for awareness creation and education thanks to the proliferation of broadcast media that could be real game changers in fight against the new disaster in the making.
Meanwhile, it would be essential to secure the necessary resources such as money and test kits that are indispensable in the ongoing struggle. International solidarity is also crucial as encouraging signs have started to emerge to beat this unprecedented existential threat. What corporations like Alibaba and Microsoft are doing in this area will certainly inspire others to rise to the occasion for the simple reason that since the corona virus threat is global, the solution could only be global. recovery in the long run.
The Ethiopian Herald March 29/2020
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
