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 |   As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
If you're one of those who cannot bear an alternative opinion, please don't burden your mind further. But if you're fine with wading into a fresh perspective that has no pretensions of being the last word, some of you might just find this constructed case below worth your time. It seeks to examine if there has been an international overreaction to Coronavirus, entirely in sync with the polarized world this virus was born into. Let's proceed fact-by-fact. (All stats from the public domain; have aggregated to actually provide a conservative estimate. References in first comment). I've tried to simplify this as much as I can, for easy comprehension. 1) The following are the fatality rates of Coronavirus in different age-groups: 0-9 yrs - 0%; 10-19 yrs - 0.2%; 20-29 yrs - 0.2%; 30-39 yrs - 0.2%; 40-49 yrs - 0.4%; 50-59 yrs - 1.4%; 60-70 yrs - 3.8%; 70-79 yrs - 8%; 80+ yrs - 15%. So, even an infected person of over 80 years has an 85% chance of survival. It is important to understand that Coronavirus affects mostly people with pre-existing conditions, which is why the fatality rate really starts notably increasing from the age-group 50-59. (Also, the rumors about more men dying are true; the proportion is roughly 70:30. Given that this is a respiratory disease, this discrepancy has been linked to smoking by some experts, not to any specific targeting by the virus). 2) The following is the approximate outcome for infected people: 95% infected people need 2 weeks to recover with no medicine, from home. 5% need hospitalization. 2% need ICU. 1% need a ventilator. So, the vast majority of infected people can just recover by staying at home, with no medicine. Even seemingly well-educated people don't seem to grasp this properly. Please hold on to this fact. The big concern for authorities is for a large number of cases to be in that 5% when there are fewer hospital beds available, and especially in that 1% where there is a considerable shortage of ventilators. 3) In warmer countries, for some reason that is still not clear, the fatality rate is considerably lower than other places so far, and the overall fatality rate of about 4.5%. Brazil: 2.7%; Malaysia: 1.2%; Thailand: 0.4%; Saudi Arabia: 0.3%; India: 2.3%. (The two outliers are Indonesia and Philippines with 8.4% and 6.7% but experts have stated these figures have emerged due to very low testing in that part of the world; more testing would lower the fatality rates considerably). Low testing is a big problem in India as well. However, there are no reports of people with symptoms crowding hospitals as there are in many other countries. And it is important to understand that if there are indeed many latent cases as is feared, that would actually bring DOWN the fatality rate. Death tallies can't be faked and it is hard to hide the dead - that is the key number, and that is 20 over ten-odd days. Even with limited testing, the average number of new Indian cases is in the region of 100-120 a day; it has been like that for a week. Which means there is absolutely no evidence of exponential community spread till date in India. And that has so far been the case in all of the warm weather countries. 4) In human history, untreated illnesses and unvaccinated viruses have the following as fatality rates: Rabies - 99%; AIDS 80-90%; EBOLA 87%; Smallpox - 65%; Bubonic/Pneumonic Plague 52%; Tetanus 50%; Cholera 47%; TB 43%; Chickenpox 30%; Typhoid 15%; SARS 11%; Spanish Flu 10%; Zika Virus 8%; Yellow Fever 7.5%; Diphtheria 7.5%; Coronavirus 4.5%; Measles 2.5%; Swine Flu 2.1%. So, Coronavirus has among the lowest fatality rates in history. This is the first virus to travel so far (199 countries) in this new world, polarised more than ever before in human history by social media and mobile technology. A global virus in an intensely globalized world should not be a surprise at all, spreading during peak travel season, both, domestically in China and internationally. The virus itself is more contagious than most other viruses that came before but not by such a great margin. There have been many pandemics in human history, many of them far, far worse than this one (in terms of fatalities). But the reaction worldwide has been fraught with anxiety and panic in the face of the uncertainty of having no cure yet. Incidentally, uncertainty is a condition that people in this new world (mobile social media) deal with far worse than any previous generation in history - this has been well documented and discussed in recent times. Has that had a greater say this time than the pandemic itself? 5) WHO estimates deaths arising from common flu to be between 290,000 to 650,000 people every year, at a fatality rate of roughly 1%. Coronavirus has killed about 27,000 so far in about four months, with very limited testing in many parts of the world (truer testing would lower its 4.5% fatality rate considerably). Also, two recent studies done in Italy comprehensively show that "less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons or persons without pre-existing chronic diseases." This means, in the face of so much focus on Coronavirus, it is not clear in many places "who died FROM the Coronavirus and who died WITH the Coronavirus". Incidentally, between the five winter seasons in Italy between 2013 and 2017, there were 68,000 deaths from common flu. That means an average of about 4,500 deaths a month during the winter season (where February is the peak month). This has very emphatically been a trend in the last decade in Italy anyway - of elderly people dying in droves from flu during the winter months. Does Italy's death toll of approximately 9,000 in three months due to Coronavirus seem high in light of this? Especially when the Italians themselves are not sure in many cases if the patients are dying of Coronavirus or merely with it. The US, who have just overtaken Italy on number of Coronavirus cases, have an even more sordid record when it comes to the common flu. In the 2017/28 flu season, the US registered 61,000 deaths from flu. That's an average of over 10,000 deaths a month! In the 2018/19 flu season, there were 34,200 deaths - that's 5,700 deaths a month. So far, there have been about 1500 deaths from Coronavirus in the US. It is worth repeating this - the Coronavirus has killed about 27,000 in four months, while an average of WHO's tally of common flu deaths every year is about 39,000 deaths PER MONTH and critically, within EXACTLY the same patient base. And recent studies in Italy have found that it is not entirely clear if many of the patients actually died from the Coronavirus. This is a huge point that will no doubt be explored in great depth by the medical fraternity in months to come. But it is worth thinking about this - what would happen if there was intense 24-hour media scrutiny worldwide on the common flu deaths - at the rate of about 39,000 a month worldwide? What would it do to our minds? If we discount the absence of uncertainty (as common flu has prescribed cures, which is why the fatality rate is low) would it not lead to a similar brand of panic that we see now? (This disproportionate panic is apparent in the smallest things; like, despite WHO and the American Surgeon General categorically saying that masks are useless unless a person has definite symptoms, there has been a frenzy for them.) Obviously, this is not at all a case to downplay the Coronavirus pandemic. It has to be combatted, and the key ways are well-known by now - social distancing, regular hand-washing, quarantines, and closing down travel. A lockdown in places where there are signs of community spreading is definitely desirable. Even as a precaution, this is a good option, for a limited period. But here's the kicker. Why is it that the far higher death tallies of flu in recent years, in exactly the same patient group as that of Coronavirus, never got the kind of attention that the Coronavirus tallies have received? Could it have something to do with the largely modest economic and social classes getting affected by the common flu? And the traveling/ jet-setting classes of people who are affected by the Coronavirus? Couple this class consciousness (and the blatant sacrificing of the worker class in some countries, like India) with the fear-mongering that the political class relies on to subjugate the masses, at a time when leadership standards all around the world are at an all-time low than ever before in human history, and we have a lethal combination. Yes, Coronavirus has changed the world but is it because of the pandemic itself or because of how all of us have responded to it? |
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