More than 120 days with COVID-19. What now?
We’ve been through a lot and how do we go from here?
There are still a lot of things we don’t know about the biggest pandemic in recent history, but now we know much more than we did 4 months ago. Here is some of it.
SARS CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) or COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus, meaning it is a new strain that has not been previously identified in humans [1]. And with something new, like this, that is also invisible to the eye, that is ongoing and uncertain — natural response is to be scared. We’ve seen that China started with lockdown, following the majority of the countries going to variations of lockdown, hitting a spike of 2.6 billion people under restrictions [2].
All this led to huge media reports and bombarding from different sources. As some studies show — “Not all deaths are equal”[3], it was expected to be the number 1 news in all media.
Nobody is denying how contagious it is, but almost every number, from R0 (basic reproduction number), to number of infected people, deaths and economic crisis is just not accurate.
For example, R0 is supposed to be from 2.2 in first studies to 6.6 in later studies, and that makes a huge difference [4].
We know that if we have “X” detected cases, that there is at least “X + n”, but we don’t know the “n” part. Why? Various reasons. Not all people have access to testing, there is also a confusion matrix problem (false positive, false negative) and we just can’t ramp it up that fast to all people. Yes, we can use some groups of people and then extrapolate data to some region/country/continent. But do we know distribution and how accurate is that? Models, so far, were incorrect by almost every measure.
Not all countries have identical approaches to examining the body and also, again, problems with tests. But there is a significant increase in the number of deaths shown in many countries [5].
We don’t know why some people have better immune systems than others [6]. And we don’t know if we’ll be protected in the second wave [7]. So a plan with herd immunity might not work. It’s not only about protecting older, there is a strange number of people in their 30s and 40s, barely sick with COVID-19, dying from strokes [14].
The same thing can be said to the economy. We know that economics are terrible at predicting recessions [16]. So every prediction about that is potentially misleading. We don’t know how many jobs directly will be lost, but also how many indirectly people will be pulled by this. Also, it’s not the same where you are out of the job [17].
These are just too huge and too complex systems, with no real-time information, for our easy understanding and predicting future.
Where are we now?
Here are some graphs for easier visualisation, but keep in mind that all these stats are not actual numbers. These are only confirmed numbers and the majority of people didn’t have access to testing.
Total number of test per country
Total number of test per 1 000 people in each country
Total confirmed COVID-19 deaths
Total confirmed COVID-19 deaths — progression (logarithmic scale)
OK, but what does that mean?
Now, besides COVID-19 and the economic crisis, we are facing other problems. There are some predictions about global poverty, increasing significantly, about 49 million people total going into extreme poverty. Of that, 23 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and 16 million in South Asia [8]. These are huge numbers and all of us will be affected by this, no matter where you live on planet Earth.
In the past, the world produced more than enough food for everyone. But it’s unequally distributed across the world [9]. While 13% of the people have a problem with obesity [10], 11% of the people don’t have enough calorie intake [11]. Also, this year, the problem could be locust invasion, called “Locust-19” [12].
Lockdown could potentially be more deadly for persons with mental health issues, and close to 800 000 people die every year due to suicide [13]. Alcohol is an even bigger problem [15].
We don’t have a clear picture about what is happening, long term speaking, in our immune systems due to lack of activity, fresh air, sunlight (vitamin D), etc. while staying in lockdown.
No one knows how we are going to be affected by lack of quality education during the past few months, and also in the future.
And there are many more questions that need to be answered.
Conclusion
It’s been tough. For all of us, in various ways. We’ve shown in the last 2–3 months that we can work as a team. We still don’t know lots of things, but we keep learning every day. Some problems, like mental health, alcohol addiction and food distribution are much more familiar, than some others. We should all work toward solving easy and hard problems.
Decisions are made by organizations, and all organizations are run by people. People are not perfect and people make mistakes. Is everything so far done perfectly? Absolutely not. But we’ve tried our best, with the knowledge we had in that giving moment. Today is not the same as it was two or four weeks ago. And situation, at two random locations, can be totally different.
Be careful. Look for each other. If we keep working as a team, we can get through all of this with the least casualties. We did in the past many times. And we can do it again.
Sources
[2] — https://www.businessinsider.com/more-people-under-lockdown-than-alive-during-world-war-ii-2020-3
[3] — https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-deaths-make-a-natural-disaster-newsworthy
[4] — https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1
[5] — https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c
[6] — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-immunity-to-covid-19-really-means/
[7] — https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19
[9] — https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production
[10] — https://ourworldindata.org/obesity
[11] — https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
[12] — https://www.ft.com/content/b93293d4-3d73-42bc-b8b7-2d3e7939490e
[13] — https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/
