Abdus Salam Khan, April 2020.
The pandemic is roaring all over the world yet seems calm in our country. People who have dealt with the brunt of it, have been burnt quite bad, and people who seem to have been spared so far, don’t know if they can start feeling safe. The journey that we are in, is like no journey anyone ever imagined. We are facing it and trying our best to keep ourselves and our patients safe. Some of us are still denying its existence. It is difficult to move forward with this mentality and we keep on thinking why and for how long, we can continue this attitude.
Let us first try to understand the nature of this pandemic. This pandemic started a few months ago very quietly in China. The initial signs of an epidemic was ignored and later on they realized that it is apparently bigger than they have imagined. By the start of the year 2020 it became a reportable case by the WHO as it started popping up in different countries. WHO started raising its status quickly to pandemic. Scientists, epidemiologist, clinicians and all others started creating knowledge base about it as it was something out of blue and we all knew nothing about it. This frenzy is not going away any time soon and everyone has something to say yet the body of knowledge is so rapidly being updated that it becomes hard for people to keep up. New solutions are updated on the daily basis and so are the predictions about the disease course and the future of the disease from a medical standpoint. People are getting information which is hardly authentic and feeds the frenzy. For Pakistan it gets even more complicated for various self-created reasons.
- Broken infrastructure from healthcare standpoint.
- Bad financial circumstances of the country.
- Low literacy rate.
- Irresponsible journalism.
- Lack of personal responsibility culture.
- Superstitious citizenry.
It shows the situation and we get the picture, and it seems we are at odds with logic here. All I know is that we are all fighting with Unknown. No one knows what will happen tomorrow. This logic was true all along the human history but never felt this bad until now.
What we face in Pakistan is that common public seems to think they know more than experts, and experts are changing their stance more often than they are used to. Let us all come back to sanity and logic. We would like to work with safety mind rather than scared mind.
What so far we know about COVID-19 although is scary, yet still gives us some clue regarding our fight against the virus.
- This virus is very tiny and can survive on many surfaces for quite some time.
- It is very infectious, meaning it can spread quickly from person to person.
- It has a low mortality rate which means majority of patients getting the virus will get better without any long-term effects.
- Like other coronaviruses it affects the lungs badly and usually patients die from pneumonia.
- It affects elderly, immunocompromized, and sick individuals more viciously than the healthy individuals.
Does it make sense to practice lock down or social distancing? It is because of the simple reason that the whole community have no immunity against it and everyone can potentially get it and then spread it. The elderly and the sick can acquire it from otherwise healthy and asymptomatic individuals. This will become a nightmare if the number of people getting sick exceeds the number of hospital beds available at any given time. Now add our broken healthcare dynamics to the situation and we have a huge situation for coronavirus in our hands. No coordinated prehospital care, non-standardized emergency care, low number of emergency nurses and doctors, lower number of intensive care beds and lack of attention from policymakers put all citizens at risk which is essentially manageable with better policy-making.
For the common public it is essentially important to stay careful regarding exposure to COVID-19. Social distancing, frequent hand washing and wearing masks could bring the risk to a lesser degree. If any person gets exposed they should get isolated to avoid the spread of viruses to others especially elderly or sick.
Due to the size of our population and the complexity of lock down and lack of understanding regarding human behavior about social distancing, we must act wisely and each individual must play his or her role in delaying the spread of the disease.
We do need to stay united to overcome fears and act responsibly to stop the spread of this virus to our elderly and sick. It seems that the next few weeks will be extremely important and so if we are able to slow the spread till the end of April 2020, we may be able to come to relatively normal style of living otherwise it may turn out to be a disaster in the making.