It is like the world is in the middle of an Avengers movie now. We are all united against a common enemy – Thanos/Corona. The main difference here is that the superheroes are nowhere to been seen. The enemy is also invisible too.
Instead of a united front to fight the enemy and to co-ordinate similar action plans, all countries are left to their own to decide what is best for themselves. In order to starve the virus and flatten the curve, the economy has to come to a standstill. More than one-third of the world population is now in some sort of lockdown and told to stay at home till at least end Apr or into May.
Trump/MAGA continues to sprout chaos with flip flops and lies, leaving American states to fend for themselves. It makes for interesting but sickening youtube videos, to see examples like the recent mass protesting idiots fighting for their “freedom” in Michigan in the midst of an epidemic while American cases and death numbers continue to rise. Instead of leading the world to fight the enemy, America is imploding into a self inflicted infighting orgy…
WHO has come out with a 6 pointers plan on how and when the world can slowly reopen again:
1. Expand, train and deploy your public health force.
2. Implement a system to find every suspected case.
3. Ramp up testing capacity and availability.
4. Identify and adapt key facilities you will use to treat and isolate patients.
5. Develop a clear plan to quarantine contacts.
6. Refocus the whole of government on suppression and containing COVID-19.
Absent of a vaccine for now, it means that every country needs to aggressively ramp up testing amongst its population to get a handle on who is infected and to quarantine those that are.
America is still only testing 100k/day and is way behind with a 300 million population and only 1% tested. Hence death rates are relatively high compared to known cases. They now have the highest number of cases in the world. And they want to talk about opening up soon, looking like a premature foot in the mouth action plan… More Twitter nonsense from the orange one to support “uprising” in the 3 states he won in the last election…
S’pore is having an unusual problem at the moment. It dropped the ball on monitoring FW (Foreign Workers). We have more than 300,000 FWs living in professionally run dormitories that house 5 to 25 k persons. These close living quarters were ripe for the creation of new multiple virus clusters. The army is now also activated to handle this human logistical nightmare as we hit new daily highs in cases uncovered.
The worry now is of asymptomatic carriers of the virus who display no signs (fever, cough). They may be lurking amongst us. Even if a country has successfully contained the situation, it only takes someone from overseas to restart the whole problem again. The virus is so contagious. China freaked out this week at its border with Russia when some visitors from Russia tested positive. Even Putin is rumoured to be worried now as they were late into the containment process.
We are into week 2 of the Circuit Breaker Lockdown in S’pore. Movements have been restricted further as the FW cases caused numbers to jump to a new daily high. We now have to wear masks whenever we are outside. It used to be just only some supermarkets the previous week. The only exception is that if we are doing strenuous exercises like running, jogging, cycling, drills for warm-ups and brisk walking.
My wife, older son and I have settled into a daily routine while the younger one is back in the army camp for NS and books out for the weekend. I have resorted to doing a quick run in the early morning by 7 am, then back home for a shower and breakfast before sitting in front of the PC for the whole day. Trying to read more, 4 books at the same time – borrowed 3 ebooks from NLB and one physical book. Doing one of my 2020 new year resolutions list items – to edit home videos. Watching too much youtube videos and signing up for some free Harvard MOOC online courses.
We are halfway through the one-month lockdown soon. But early signs point to an extension into May as some countries have already indicated so. The world needs to coordinate closely in order to defeat this enemy decisively. We are pretty much into the unknown now. No one has ever experienced this in their lifetimes before and yet we have no idea how long this will last.
By trying to flatten the curve, we have stopped the economy and starved the individual of everything like food and social interaction. Many are clamouring for an end to the lockdown and to restart the economy again. I fear that like in S’pore’s case, a resurgence of the ugly virus may happen again very quickly. Having a vaccine is the ultimate solution but that may be at least 12 months away.
What do we do now? Live a day at a time? Never had something like this affected every living soul on planet earth before. Each country in the world is at different stages of the curve in a never-ending fight against it. Meanwhile, aggressive testing seems to be the only game plan now. We can still do contact tracing but is this a winnable war against an invisible enemy?
Superheroes, where are you when we need you?
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