Okay, I accept that NCOVID-19 is a new "novel" virus in the Human herd. Given that it's a new virus that hasn't been in humans before and the fact that we know absolutely nothing about how it works in the human population I find that the World Health Organisation and Governmental responses around the World to be woefully inadequate.
This is a new virus and the full effects are not know. What we are learning about the virus we are learning while it infects people around the world. This is not a good place to be observing the effects of the virus, mainly from the point we do not know if we can control it, what the long-term effects are and on top of that the more people it infects, the more chance it has to mutate and become more deadly. It could also become less deadly, but we always assume and plan for the worst case scenario: if it has a chance of getting more deadly, then plan and act for that.
So, first of all, what DO we know about NCOVID-19?
1. It is highly infectious. Unlike other serious viruses that are transmitted by contact and therefore limited in their ability to spread, NCOVID-19 is transmitted through the air by droplets. So by sneezing and coughing, the same as a cold or flu. It can also be transmitted by surface contact, so if you touch a surface touched, sneezed on or coughed on by an NCOVID-19 carrier.
2. Like a cold, it is re-infectious. If you get it once, you do not build up an immunity. Instead you can catch it again. And again. A lady in Japan that was infected and then tested as negative then ended up with a second infection. It's not understood how she was re-infected or if the tests were false negatives, but that case alone presents serious questions about the virus.
If the lady was in quarantine, how was she re-infected?
If she went home was she re-infected from a contaminated surface?
If so, how long does the virus last on a surface?
If she tested negative, was the test adequate or accurate?
Does the virus stay dormant in the body and allow false negative tests?
If it does stay dormant, for how long?
3. It tends to have a quite flat mortality rate. It will kill anyone at any age. The only predispositions to the effective mortality is an underlying medical condition. Heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, that sort of thing. The diabetes is a surprise given that it's not a disease of the heart and lungs. The mechanism for that might take a while to understand.
And that's about it.
What we don't know about the disease is a lot bigger.
1. What is the true incubation period? Experts are sticking to 14 days, but there is anecdotal evidence that incubation can stretch to 24 days. If that's the case then current quarantine periods are inadequate. Especially if the virus can go dormant and re-emerge.
2. How easily can it be transmitted? The government is saying "wash your hands" which is fine for contact-spread viruses, but not an airborne virus.
3. If washing hands is recommended, how long does the virus survive outside the body? Experts are making guesses, but no one has come out with a definitive figure. I assume if China are burning bodies rather than burying them, the virus stays infectious for a while. If the UK government is saying wash your hands it would appear at face value the virus can last a while outside a host.
4. What affects are there from being infected? Rumours are that patients end up with cardio-vascular or pulmonary issues which then increase the mortality of the second infection. Details are very scant at best, which seems to point to a pretty bad outcome.
5. How does a person test positive, then negative, then positive again? Does the virus lie dormant? If it does, what triggers re-emergence? Can it lay dormant for a while without symptoms and emerge weeks later?
If I was the government, I'd have put those exposed to NCOVID-19 in quarantine and kept them there until we had more information about the virus. Separated into small groups the chance of cross-infection would be minimised, but really they need to be kept away from the population at large until we are sure it's safe.
The government need to be more forthright and pro-active on this. They need to be supporting sufferers financially.
The current policy seems to be akin to crossing ones fingers and hoping for the best. It is not a pro-active policy aimed at reducing the risk to the population at large. When dealing with something that is so infectious and so new, the "suck-it-and-see" policy just won't wash. This virus is less than three months old but it has already infected hundreds of thousands and killed many thousands. This is not a trivial thing.
Watching the spread of the disease, learning about it while it infects thousands of people across the globe is certainly not the way to do things like this.
Viruses have the ability to spontaneously mutate. They pick up attributes from other viruses in the hosts. The more people get infected with NCOVID-19 the more chance there is of a mutation picked up by the virus that makes it more deadly, harder to stop or impossible to vaccinate against.
What starts out as a mainly benign virus can be something else entirely by the time it's spread around the world. There is absolutely no guarantee that something as new as this will stay the same once it's infected the whole of humanity.
I'm watching the progress of the virus intently.
The government's response is to tell people to wash their hands and wait to see how deadly the thing becomes. After all they have bunkers to retreat to (as long as they don't take an unsuspectingly infected individual along with them).
Well, humanity will be okay if we all die off. Once there are no more hosts to infect and they and the virus die out, the descendants of the population of North Sentinel Island will have a whole planet to inherit.
It's happened before; humanity has weathered catastrophies before. Scientists are now coming to agree that there was a great catastrophe 11-12,000 years ago that wiped out a significant portion of the population. Male DNA has a big reduction in diversity around that time a significant proportion of the male population died off. The females, safe in their caves were able to survive with less trauma to the ancestral record.
The what, why and where of the catastrophic reduction in world population is still being hotly debated. The theories that there was at least one advanced civilisation around at that time are currently fringe. But so were the theories about the catastrophe that wiped out a huge chunk of the world population. before we could read the DNA data in our bodies.
As a race, humanity will survive, it always has. Whether you or I survive is something entirely different.
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