Charles Onunaiju
Despite the surge in the spread of Coronavirus or Covid-19 in Nigeria and the measures already deployed to control and contain it, the disease as deadly as it notoriety worldwide has been, is not a definitive death sentence. According to the report of the WHO-China joint mission on Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) published in February, “most people infected with Covid-19 virus have mild disease and recover. Approximately 80% of laboratory-confirmed patients have mild to moderate disease, which includes non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases.” The report further stated that “individuals at highest risk for severe disease and death include people aged over 60 years and those with underlying conditions such as hyper-tension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and cancer,” and added that “disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild with appropriately 2.4% of the total reported cases amongst individuals aged under 19 years.”
This, however, is no comfort to relax vigilance and preparedness because according to the report, “the Covid-19 virus is a new pathogen that is highly contagious, can spread quickly and must be considered capable of causing enormous health, economic and societal impacts in any setting. The report further urged “the public to recognize that Covid-19 is a new and concerning disease, but that outbreak can be managed with the right response and that vast majority of infected people will recover.”
Against the background of the authoritative report of the World Health Organization/China joint mission, aggressive containment and control measures can be vigorously pursued without instigating the pandemic of fear and panic. Recently, the daily data released by the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) published only the surging spread of the disease but fails to show the percentage of mild to moderate cases, severe and critical cases and even recovery cases. The strategy of omitting these specific cases seemed or appeared deliberately to stoke fear and further accentuate panic. And very soon questions would be raised from rational quarters about who profits and benefits from raising public anxieties, fears, and panics. Even in the Wuhan city of China, where the outbreak first surfaced, while the lockdown was implemented data indicating ranges of infection including mild, moderate, severe, deaths and recoveries were routinely published, which without undermining the severity of the situation, also outlined the extent at which the disease were been subdued. It is therefore imperative the NCDC begins to publish information about recoveries so that citizens don’t get a sense that the Covid-19 as lethal as it might seem to be, is a death sentence. In addition, the authorities should evolve targeted measures to control the spread of the virus as blanket approach cannot realistically address our specific national and social condition.
While social distancing, isolation, quarantine and even lock-down as President Buhari has just announced to be effected in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun are standard measures to curb community transmission, directing these measure to the most vulnerable group, that is those least able to survive the infection of the virus, earlier described by the WHO report can be more helpful in overcoming the disruptions of Covid-19. In the wake of the outbreak of this disease in Nigeria, so many steps, especially by the central bank in setting up a so-called private sector coalition, seem nearly out of question in the particular context.
At the last time, Mr. Aliko Dangote and his private-sector colleagues launched a committee after massive flooding displaced many people, the victims lived in squalid makeshift camps with perennial complaints about food, sanitation, water and it was only after flood receded that the displaced persons went home to restart and rebuild their lives. In the case of the Covid-19 outbreak, it is not so much about money but institutional efficiency and integrity of both key personnel leading the fight. If key officials both government and professionals in the frontline of the fight against the virus see it, in the typical opportunistic lens of the Nigeria corrupt elite as another honey pot to grease their palms, then issues in the days ahead would be more confounded than clarified.
Despite that the outbreak of the Covid-19 is a universal health and social challenge, responses would be essentially local and this is where the Nigerian relevant authorities would have to recognise that to be different is a virtue and not vice, and this is not underestimate the experiences and lessons from other climes that should enrich our specific local response.
The figures of fatalities in Europe and the United States are plainly worrying but the specific nature of their social life, where the elderly are usually put together in common nursing homes make them more vulnerable to mass deaths in the event of infections. Paradoxically, social solidarity comes at a later part of life in the West when the elderly are quarantined in common nursing homes than in the earlier life when social distancing in the broad sense is the norm. In Italy, 85.6% of those who have died were above 70 years according to Italian National Institute of Health. With 23% of Italians over 65 years old, the Mediterranean country has the second oldest population in the world after Japan and observers believe age distribution could also have played a role in raising the fatality rate.
In Spain, the figures released by the Spanish Health Ministry indicated that 86.2% of those who have died have been aged 70 and above, including many elderly who died in dozens in nursing homes abandoned by care-givers. While all measures including the unorthodox ones of social distancing, isolation, quarantine and even lock-down, though, to be graduated and targeted, would feature in the range of options to curb, control and contain the spread of the virus, key questions is now to appreciate that scientific research is the most valuable fundamental to confront this kind of strange outbreak. Soon after the outbreak of the disease in China, scientists in the country went into work and in early January, published the genetic sequencing of the novel virus, providing a peep into the unique structure of that particular strain of the virus that belonged to the larger family of the Coronavirus.
That the Chinese scientific community comes to early grip of the nature of the virus, raised huge optimism about the prospects to curb and contain the spread of the virus. Without putting scientific research to the frontline in the fight against the disease, the extraordinary restrictive measures taken by the Chinese authorities to curb the spread of the virus would have had little effect. As it stands now, Nigeria’s key actors in the frontline of the struggle against the virus are politicians and businessmen, both distracted by the pursuit of power and money to fully concentrate in understanding the nature of this virus, and how to run it out of reckoning.
Onunaiju writes from Abuja