Putting Covid-19 in perspective

Let us go back away and put all this Covid-19 pandemic in perspective, writes the former editor of The National, FRANK SENGE KOLMA

JUST before the turn of the millennium, now exactly two decades past, pandemonium broke out around the world on account of a bug.
The world named it the millennium bug.
This bug would, we were told, reset all the computers to zero and everything computer based would crash.
That meant jet planes falling out of the sky, nuclear warheads shooting off in every direction at will, trains hurtling off rails, ships running aground, traffic lights turning every colour of the rainbow at once and chaos everywhere.
Somebody in Korea started a doomsday religion out of the scare and for a few frightening months it looked as if the world as we know it would end.
Midnight of the last day of the last century arrived – the world held its breath – the clock ticked one second into the first day of this century and the world heaved a huge sigh of relief.
Absolutely nothing happened worth recording.
And that was that.
How much that idiot bug of the imagination cost is anybody’s guess but it would have been significant.
About 13 years before the turn of the century, in 1987, another bug visited our shores and took up permanent residency.
It was termed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Passed through blood and bodily secretions through sexual contact, this virus attacks and destroys the immune system and lays the body open to diseases.
Left without its natural defence, one is vulnerable to attack by every disease known to man.
When that stage is achieved, you arrive at the stage called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and you die a rather piteous long drawn wasting death from even the common cold.
Populations such as our own were to have been decimated, it was predicted, and for a time that too looked most likely to happen.
HIV and AIDS carry on their combined attacks today everywhere and 770,000 people have died from them in 2018 alone.
Some 32 million have succumbed to AIDS assisted illnesses around the world since 1981.
UNAIDS estimated that there were 54,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in PNG.
Deaths are difficult to attribute as they are almost always some other disease assisted by AIDS but figures of more than 1,000 deaths were AIDS assisted recorded in 2001 and 2012.
No known cure was found for them but the population learnt to live with them here as everywhere else and doomsday theories related to these pestilences no longer take religious fervour.
Tuberculosis, which has now formed a lethal combination with HIV, take down literally millions of lives every year.
TB takes someone every 21 seconds and killed 1.5 million around the world in 2018 alone.
It was declared and is a current global pandemic.
And TB mutated into multi-drug resistant strains.
It was long established in PNG and attained epidemic status in Western and Gulf, and despite valiant efforts, is on the march towards the Highlands and the capital, Port Moresby.
World Vision reported around 30,000 new infections each year.
Number of deaths are difficult to quantify as data is notoriously unavailable or unreliable.
Nobody thought to declare TB a national emergency and I do not see face masks around but TB combined with AIDS are a current and present danger, perhaps far more lethal than the Covid-19 to Papua New Guineans.
The common cold remains a close and docile compatriot of humans but it strikes as hard as the rarer occurring ones.
It just has grown too close, become too common, to raise any alarm.
The malaria virus, borne by mosquitos takes million more lives worldwide and although curable will be around as long as an anopheles mosquito flies.
Malaria takes one child every second and 3,000 in a day, Unicef reported.
As for population depletion strategies, look not beyond the human-bug.
World War I took about 30 million lives in the trenches of Europe.
The World War II recorded at the most 85 million dead.
Alexander the Great slaughtered 300,000 in a day’s work on the plains of Arbela in 331 BC.
Unlike bugs which we turn and run from, in wars, men march, chanting their voices hoarse, to their death.
Humans make war as they make love.
Both come naturally.
You wonder why such men will now take the most extreme measures to avoid an invisible enemy.
The Covid-19 has claimed three lives we know of in PNG.
Yet a national state of emergency was declared.
It seems utterly absurd.
The scare induced might take more lives than the coronavirus can ever take.
Humans have grown and can grow natural immunity against viruses.
They have none against economic deprivation and starvation.
Malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and HIV assisted illnesses each take more humans than the Covid-19 and will continue to do so.
Humans will grow resistant to the Covid-19, and I suspect they have already, long before they find a cure or preventive agent in the lab.
Long before medicine, man’s body has been the lab, testing, rejecting, growing resistance and, as often, succumbing to countless naturally recurring pathogens.
That humans have survived to the present is testament to our natural resilience to disease which carries on in each of us as you read this.
And there have been other visitors of the bug variety, off and on, for as long as humans have lived.
Not satisfied with the naturally occurring ones, humans have added some more of the digital variety and cooked up some others in bio-chemical laboratories in the interest of killing off one another in war.
And so we had the Spanish Flu in 1918 which infected 500 million worldwide.
This was the deadliest of flus and killed 50 million.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) broke out in China’s Guangdong province in November 2002 and 8,098 cases were reported worldwide with 774 people dying from it, all over 60 years old.
H1N1 or Swine Flu emerged in June of 2009 in Mexico and raced around the world infecting 60.8 million, killing off 284,000 eventually.
Swine flu targeted the young and 47 per cent of those dead were children.
The common flu or influenza might be common but it is not without muscle.
One billion people catch it annually around the world with between 300,000 to 600,000 dying from it.
Fifty-six thousand in the United States alone die during the influenza season between December and May.
Other bugs of the genre virus, bacteria and fungus and the scares related to them have raced around the world in tsunami fashion.
Despite them, humans thrive.
And are reproducing with gusto.
The earth’s population is expected to be around 9.7 billion by 2050, adding an extra 2 billion people to today’s 7.7 billion according to the UN World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights.
PNG’s population, growing at a sprightly 3 per cent, adding an average 240,000 smiling Papua New Guineans each year might add a further 7 million or so hungry mouths to feed come 2050, bringing our national total nearer to or surpassing 15 million.
Last December, in a little known Chinese city called Wuhan, this virus was discovered to have invaded human hosts.
Within days it was racing around the world as fast as aeroplanes carry humans.
The world went into panic mode.
Not reason, not governments, not history, not military might, not scientific knowledge will stand in the way of humans in scare mode.
Borders were closed, travel cancelled, schools closed and work reduced everywhere.
Organised society was paused.
For how long, it is hard to tell.
At last count ,the global death toll attributed to this bug was over 600,000 deaths and 16 million infected.
It is a serious disease and not to be taken lightly but it is just one more disease, one more bug among so many others in this country.
We must not scare or despair easily.
Take social distancing and other Covid-19 protocols because they help combat other bugs too and know that we are made of far stronger stuff than you can imagine and that alone is our strongest survival skill.

Frank Kolma can be contacted
on [email protected]