COVID-19 and all that this Pandemic Entails

Opinion

The struggle between man and infectious diseases dates back to the very beginning of civilization. Throughout history, mankind has suffered the scourge of an infinite number of entities with varied etiological diversity (viral, bacterial, fungal and parasitic), which have spread death and disability among millions of the planet’s inhabitants. The increase of re-emerging and emerging diseases in recent decades has greatly complexified the epidemiological picture at the global level, where the occurrence of several epidemic and pandemic outbreaks has been evident, with marked repercussions on human health and that of the rest of the animals. The current situation that the planet is living, due to the new coronavirus, is one more effect, derived from the bad behavior of anthropogenic activity, accumulated during thousands of years.

The new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified on December 31, 2019 in Wuhan, China, currently officialized as SARS-CoV-2, produces COVID-19. In addition, this virus is the first of its family to be declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020 (WHO, 2020). Global epidemiological studies of coronavirus (CoV) over 15 years have shown that bats in Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Australia are reservoirs of a wide variety of viruses, which harbor and spread these infectious agents quite easily, increasing their transmission capacity.

The truth is that we do not yet know whether the virus will become endemic, recurrent year after year or will Opinion finally be controlled. Nor if it prevents, in addition to the disease, also the infection. The pace of vaccination is slow, with economic interests and irregular distribution, which has given way to the emergence of new waves, and to the appearance of mutations that could hinder the effectiveness of current vaccines.

COVID-19 is a pandemic of paradoxes, as well expressed by Richard Bolton, where such a pandemic had and continues to have such a profound international effect. These paradoxes appear, for example, in (i) the manifestation of the disease in different risk groups; (ii) in its differential way of affecting high, medium and low socioeconomic groups; (iii) in the great scientific capacity available with limited political and social impact; and (iv) in the wasted opportunity of great world powers that, having had everything, lost control of the pandemic.

It is understandable that everyone wants to understand the scope of this pandemic in one way or another. However, daily arithmetic does not help us, because we do not know how many people have had contact with the virus without consequences and how many people have actually become ill. The number of asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers is important for making assumptions about the spread of the pandemic. However, to have usable data, extensive mass testing would have to have been conducted at the beginning of the pandemic. To assess the severity of the pandemic, we would need other data: an accurate and globally recognized definition of the diagnosis “of COVID-19 disease”: a) positive laboratory test + symptoms; b) positive laboratory test + symptoms + corresponding result on lung CT; or c) positive laboratory test, no symptoms, but corresponding findings on lung CT. The number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in the general ward, the number of patients with COVID-19 in the intensive care unit, the number of patients ventilated for COVID-19, the number of patients with COVID-19 on ECMO, the number of deaths from COVID-19, and the number of infected physicians and healthcare personnel. These numbers alone give an idea of the severity of this pandemic and the dangerousness of this virus. The current accumulation of numbers is very inaccurate and has a “sensationalist for the press” feel to it, the last thing we need in this situation.

Is it just “a common flu” that is transmitted every year and we generally do nothing about it, or a dangerous pandemic that requires strict measures? To answer this question, one definitely does not need to ask statisticians, who have never seen a patient. Pure statistical evaluation of this pandemic is immoral anyway. We need to ask the people on the front lines. The claim that “flu” is equally dangerous and costs the same number of victims every year is incorrect. Furthermore, the statement that one does not know who is dying with COVID-19 and who is dying because of COVID-19 is also not correct. According to the current state of knowledge, one generally cannot speak of a “common flu”. And that is why society’s rampant epidemic is not a recipe. A recipe, of course, that Great Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden tried and renounced one after the other.

In principle, there were eight CONCRETE AND CLEAR WARNINGS in 17 YEARS that something like this was coming. AND THEN IT ACTUALLY CAME!. In December 2019, nine months after Peng Zhou’s warning. And the Chinese report to WHO after seeing 27 patients with atypical pneumonia without death. The Taiwan reaction chain begins on December 31, which consisted of a total of 124 measures, all published by March 3, 2020. And no, it was not published in Taiwanese Chinese in an Asian medical journal, but with the collaboration of the University of California in the “Journal of American Medical Association”.

All one had to do: as of December 31, 2019 “bat + coronavirus” in “PubMed”, US National Library of Medicine, enter and all data were available. And all one had to do was to follow the publications until the end of February 2020 to know what we had us 1) what to expect and 2) what to do.

By way of conclusion, one has to be very clear, that politics is one thing, and scientific work is another. By the end of February 2020, so many excellent scientific papers with Chinese and mixed authors had appeared that one could have known what the pandemic was about and what should be done. Reading does not mean that all these authors are right about everything. But it would be of great value to the West, to replace know-it-all, ignorance and arrogance, here and there with facts, understanding and cooperation. The only alternative is to try to eliminate our so-called competitors, who will sooner or later lead us into a ruthless and senseless war. Everyone can decide for himself what to think of this “solution”. In this sense, one can only hope that humanity will better remember that dreaming is always allowed. The challenges are global. And the next pandemic is just around the corner. And perhaps this will be caused by a super virus that will take on a dimension we would rather not imagine.