- This virus hitches rides on droplets. We need to mask. We need to physically distance. We need to keep our hands clean. Any shortcut, and we miss out on the benefits from any sacrifice.
The number builds. We have lost more people than we thought we would lose. Just when we have begun to fix our focus on getting back to some kind of normal, this disease seems to further deepen its trenches along the frontline. The virus is freely jumping across all the defenses we have sacrificed to put up. And seems to pick whom it pleases. It crosses class, tribal, political lines. No one is safe.
This is a disease of mistakes. It is an infection that can only be reined in with rules and adherence to procedure. There is a certain level of social accountability that is needed to keep this disease from crossing the frontline and overwhelming us. Leadership must be strategic, instructions must be clear, observance must be monitored closely and default punished. There is a chain of actions that ensures success. Any breach, bodes disaster, and it does not matter how independently pristine the components of the chain are.
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We could not plan strategically enough to control the spread in the beginning. We struggled to equip frontline staff early enough. We excelled with rolling out rafts of measures that kept the initial viral rampage at bay. We caught the eye of international press. We got some plaudits. We got numbers going up, but we had an explanation. We could not continue a lock down, so we bit the bullet for 3 weeks, and opted out. And now we have 11,000 cases and more, and the fire rages… this virus is definitely not done yet.
The promise to ourselves, when we abruptly ended our lockdown for economic reasons, was that we would keep an eye on hotspots, and shut them down. We haven’t. We have allowed them to fester. We have allowed the healthcare staff to wander into the realms of multiplying viruses exposed. We have allowed big funerals to go on without policing. We have allowed people to die in numbers that seem acceptable, just because other countries fared worse.
This virus hitches rides on droplets. We need to mask. We need to physically distance. We need to keep our hands clean. Any shortcut, and we miss out on the benefits from any sacrifice. And man, we have taken a lot of short cuts. Our number builds up because we have not insisted on the measures that should prevent the disease from taking hold in the depths of our communities. Instead of testing more, we have tested less. So we have not been able to keep ahead of the disease, and isolate the infected from the uninfected. If this continues, increased mortality is inevitable, because the more infections we have, the more severe the presentation will be.
We still have a little room to maneuver. We have a lot of good things going for us. Theoretically, the humidity and warmth that we are blessed with, means that water molecules in the air limit the distance across which infectious droplets can travel. Infective droplets are weighed down so much by the water molecules that the disease is just not as infectious here as it would be in a wintry Europe. The youth of our population, also means that our vulnerability as a society is not as pronounced as the much older populations elsewhere.
However, all these advantages can be cancelled out by a lack of social distancing, hand hygiene and masking. We all know how more than 500 fit workers in a factory, got infected by contact with a single colleague worker super spreader. We are not protected without the measures. And because our cases are asymptomatic, we are likely to breed more super spreaders, than in other populations. In other words, our R0 is likely to be way above the average, in some areas.
The way forward: our last stand, is the hospital. As a country we must beat an organized retreat to the actual frontline and shore up the defenses. We must equip staff, empower personnel and deploy and motivate more contact tracers to keep infected asymptomatic patients from coming to the hospital. We have been blessed with a lot of time to plan, but the honeymoon is over.
The battle has begun.
