APRIL 5 — Our Covid-19 pandemic is not out of the woods, yet. There’s still much fear of the unknown, there’s much more to do, much more uncertainty to overcome…
There are still stubborn pockets of people who think this pandemic is a joke and overblown public health overreaction. But the rising number of deaths in the so-called developed world such as Italy, Spain and now USA should extinguish this idiotic conspiracy mindset.
This is a real live ‘contagion’ unravelling in front of our own eyes for billions of us humans, no wargame, no hoax, no fake news! Billions of mankind is now in lockdown mode.
Let’s be prepared for the long haul of challenges still to unfold. Let’s pause for a much needed review and reorientation of our life’s purposes.
This silent Covid-19 war is life-changing. It will mess up with most of our lives, our goals, our livelihood, our minds, our psyche, possibly our health, and wealth too.
It is changing my personal outlook as this Covid-19 continues to unfold, so relentlessly. I’m wizened, I’m still shell-shocked. I’d mistaken this to be a slightly bad version of the flu, at first blush! I was wrong, now I’m scared too like so many of us.
As a doctor, I’m fearful because I know maybe a little bit more, about how potentially lethal this Covid-19 can be, especially for someone of my generation, the baby boomers. Those above 60 years old are likely to fare worse, some 3 per cent could die, if infected. That’s pretty high!
I fear for our frontliners knowing full well that no matter how careful they are, even if they are fully protected (with adequate PPE), some of them would become infected. And some, as has happened to some of my colleagues elsewhere, have died. But when it happens to someone close, you feel this shock in your bones...
Dr Raul Diaz Jara, a good Filipino cardiologst friend (former Philippine Heart Association president) died after treating a previously unknown Covid patient. He was about my age, maybe a few years older. He was in his sixties, fit otherwise...
Heroes, you might call them... But I consider them altruistic, still unacceptable casualties of war, collateral damage, just because it appears so pointless! Yet, that’s what healthcare workers do. We try to alleviate suffering, we try treat those seriously ill, we try mitigate against the dying...
But, we shouldn’t be dying to save someone else! That’s our existential and ethical remit of our healthcare profession. It cannot be worth it, despite anyone saying to the contrary, that it is our calling, our duty, our responsibility... It is not, if we’re not protected. It’s wasteful, it’s unfair, if society expects otherwise.
Here, unfortunately, we’re failing too often, 3 per cent or 10 per cent is just too high a case fatality rate for most acute ailments these days. We’re usually better than this, at curing our patients. But, this is an unprecedented novel virus that penetrates deep into and destroys our lungs, our breathing capacities, and inflame our hearts, too…
We’ve no natural immunity yet by a long shot, in fact our body’s defences appear to be fighting back too hard with self-destruct vengeance, the so-called cytokine storm that causes severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (SARS), one of our most feared complications in medicine! Ultimately, multiple organs in our damaged bodies shut down. We die...
But, I’m seeing glimmers of hope, as the disparate yet dynamic scientific world comes together to forge a new collaboration and coming together of minds and communitarian spirit, that has not happened for the longest time yet.
Our sharing of knowledge and discoveries are unprecedented and mindboggling. We’ve now found that some antimalarials might work. We know that those who had BCG vaccination in childhood before, might have less severe disease.
We have tried new antiviral and immune therapies that may work. We are studying these in earnest, to see how best to use them and when. We’re using plasma (containing presumably antibodies) from ‘cured’ patients as a therapeutic serum.
The whole world is racing to find a cure. We’re in an uncommon unified scientific experimentation mode to spearhead the fastest collaborative research studies to date!
We will beat this coronavirus yet. Unparalleled therapies and the long-awaited vaccine beckon. We wait with bated breaths. We must. We’re on the cusp of historic proportions of containing and finally suppressing this relentless pandemic.
Yes, meanwhile, we will be saddled with huge human lives lost and stricken, and economic costs. And yes, some healthcare workers would be sacrificed too, they would become stricken, some would die. But hopefully, they would not have died in vain.
But, we will not let this pandemic wipe out humanity! We are not at doomsday Apocalypse by a long shot. We’re not at End Times. Revelation has not come yet. We will not be the ‘living dead’.
If you’re Christian then, you will recognise that this is one of our sternest tests, yet, of our human resolve, our human reliance and resilience in the grace of God. Or if you will, we are within reach of the superarching splendour of scientific breakthroughs. We will surely overcome this severe test.
For most of us though, we may be seemingly powerless, impotent, to change or do anything positive. But this is that false sense of oppressive despondency.
Indeed, by staying put, through social distancing, by removing ourselves from possible contact with this viral microbe, wherever that is, in the air, the aerosols, the contact points (fomites), the infected human hosts, we are helping to kill its spread. We’re denying the coronavirus from replicating in human hosts.
So please join this passive but powerful army of everyone (now in our brotherhood of 2-3 billion people globally!) of starving this virus to its natural demise. When this coronavirus can’t find a host, it cannot replicate, it cannot spread, it dies. That’s how viruses thrive. So we must contain and kill it. That is our collective strategy that must work! Everyone of us must play our part, no ifs, no buts!
Stay safe, stay home. Let’s help flatten the curve, and allow our finite and limited healthcare resources to be optimised with fewer casualties and deaths.
But we must be prepared to be more resilient as there will almost certainly be economic fallout, too...
Let’s pray and hope that our leaders can create timely assistance and opportunities and temper the hardships that will surely come...
2020 will be the year that our world STOOD STILL! And humanity takes a breather, a much needed stock take, as Covid-19 pulls the plug from under our runaway trajectory of unremitting exponential GDP growth, as per the long running free market economy and globalization.
We will hit the bottom hard, sooner or later... But, we will rebound as we’ve always done before... most of us will need readjustments, some more than others.
We may yet become better humans and better masters of our earth’s health, and fragile balance.
* Dr David Quek is a cardiologist and past MMA president.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
