The Coronavirus: are we acting correctly?
The virus is here and it is likely to stay with us forever. It is better to start learning how to live with it than trying to hide from it.
The impact of economic recession on our civilisation will be much more severe than the negative effect of the virus itself.
Taking you car out of a garage exposes you to a much larger risk of dying than the Coronavirus.
Influenza is almost as deadly as COVID-19 but we take it for granted.
The danger is in the air, news are scary and it is very difficult to put all pieces together.
What really is so bad about this particular virus after all? The correct answer is its novelty. Yes, its novelty and not just the fact that it is a potentially deadly virus. Take for example usual flu: is it deadly? Very much so! Why are we not scared of it? Because we have got used to it.
Another example: traffic accidents. As a matter of fact, more than 3000 people die in road crashes every day. This means that taking you car out of a garage exposes you to a much higher risk of dying than the Coronavirus. So why are we driving if it is so deadly? Because this is the risk we agree to take in exchange of the comfort of driving.
Another consideration that emerges recently presents the new virus as a planetary penalty to human kind for its ecological mischiefs. Indeed, the nature might with time invent something like this but just not yet. Every second a child is born on this planet. Each day we are at least 200000 more. No virus can put this to a stop. However, the drastic measures we take to battle it can deliver a real blow to our civilisation in a log run.
It is important to understand that the virus is already here, among us and this fact cannot be undone. Whatever we do it will stay with us forever. We can't kill it. We can only help our immune system fight it. And that's it. Sooner or later this way or another most of us will get infected by this kind of Coronavirus the same way as we get infected by other members of this group of viruses causing in humans common cold. Everybody is getting flu. Most of us more than once. We get infected with flu because with time we will inevitably get exposed to it. We can't change this fact. We can only deal with it.
Can we destroy a virus, make it disappear? No. Why? Just keep reading.
Say, we can make polar bears disappear by destroying the environment they live in. The same is true for thousands other species on this planet. Remove its environment and the species goes with it. But the virus is living in us. Its environment is our body. And we are not going to destroy ourselves in order to kill the virus. In fact, with population growth we only make it more readily available for the new virus strains to move in, mutate, adopt and feel like home.
Coming back to the flu - it is also very dangerous. This is an excerpt from health.com:
Flu season is hitting its stride right now in the US. So far, the CDC has estimated (based on weekly influenza surveillance data) that at least 12,000 people have died from influenza between Oct. 1, 2019 through Feb. 1, 2020, and the number of deaths may be as high as 30,000.
The CDC also estimates that up to 31 million Americans have caught the flu this season, with 210,000 to 370,000 flu sufferers hospitalized because of the virus.
Thousands of people are dying from influenza and we take this quite normally. No quarantine, no travel restrictions, no closed bars and libraries. Why? Well, it seems that the reason is rather psychological. It is not novel. We got used to it. We are not forcing quarantine because of influenza which is almost as deadly as Coronavirus because this makes no sense. Staying at home will not cancel influenza. It can only delay your next infection. So, what are we doing in order to fight influenza? We let our immune system do the job.
Yes, there is vaccination against flu but what actually is a vaccine? I'm sure you know this already but just in case you don't, vaccination does not build a wall around your body that the virus can not penetrate. Instead it just teaches your immune system to fight with it.
In fact, vaccine is the very same virus that is threatening us but just in a weakened or inactive form. And all that the vaccine does is trying to push our immune system into the battle with the virus hoping that with this weak form of the virus it will be 100% efficient. Actually, it really is almost 100% effective and it builds a strong defensive barrier against the real virus which now has less chances to deliver significant damage to our health.
Does this mean that without flu vaccine you destined to die? By all means no! Your immune system can be just fine without it. Here again we have group of risk: children, old and weak. The elders and people with supressed immune system present an easy target or COVID-19. For these groups some extra precautions are of course necessary.
Now with the COVID-19 we are asked to stay at home whenever possible. Shops closed, flights cancelled, no bar no restaurants, no social gathering, no shopping. The question is for how long? Until the vaccine is ready? But it is quite unlikely to be ready before next year. Can we stay at home for a year? This is absurd. Most of the people will lost their jobs and means to pay bills and mortgages.
Instead of pushing forward the quarantine we should better be focusing on building up our immune system. How? Well, the answer might sound crazy but the only way to make the immune system capable of fighting the virus is to introduce it to the virus and let them know each other. In other words, get sick with coronavirus.
Be sure that this opinion will soon dominate the news. This is the only way we have. Waiting for a vaccine is futile. Even if it comes (and it might not), it will be in the far future.
So just to re-cup:
Elders, and people with jeopardised immune system should stay at home and reduce contacts. The rest need to fight the decease and not hide from it.
If you got ill and you are not in the group of risk – stay at home (hospitals won't help anyway) stay calm and try to fight it with your immune system. After you recover which has like 98%+ chances to happen you will become protected from the virus and can come back to your normal life.
Don't treat it as something new. Treat it the same way as influenza or common clod because this is actually what it is.