Covid-19 is relentless. It intends to win the prize as the most wicked pandemic in modern history. No let-up in its chilling spread of death. It has killed more people than any other pandemic in recent times. It still carries on, defying all attempts made by modern medical scientists to contain it and make it go the way of other pandemics in ancient and modern history. Mankind is in trouble, big time, obviously.
This wicked pandemic mutates into a new strain or variant each time the hands of medical sciences are about to wring its scrawny neck. Each new strain is more deadly than the previous one and thus kills more people; each strain throws up new challenges to modern medical sciences. We have had three variants so far since the virus was first detected at Wuhan in China late 2019.
The new strain of Covid-19 is a South African export called Omicron. It throws a pall on Christmas. It has turned the season of goodwill into a season of anguish, uncertainty and death. World leaders are in panic mode over it, as indeed they should be. The travel bands and restrictions are back, taking away from individuals the freedom to roam the world in good health as they please. Travellers are subjected to harrowing experiences at disembarkation points just to make sure none has arrived in another country bearing the mark of death in his contaminated blood. Each nation must fight this killer virus in its own way. No national leader would dare to forget that he must bear full moral and ethical responsibilities for what the virus does to his own people.
Omicron has arrived on our shores but the government response to it seems rather casual. No panic measures have been taken to impress on the people the dangers they face from this and the existing strains of the virus. Given the low level of testing, we still do not know how many people have been tested and how many are at risk. Covid-19 is not about to go away. It still has no cure.
We are obliged to protect ourselves from the virus by taking simple precautionary measures in keeping with the prescribed protocols ordered since last year by the World Health Organisations – wash our hands regularly, use sanitizers, wear a face mask and get vaccinated. These simple measures have frequently run against a granite wall of the army of the ignorant and the sceptics who, like the science-hating and fact-denying former president Donald Trump, dismiss the killer virus as nothing more than scare-mongering. They either refuse to wear the face mask in public or demonstrate their cynicism by hanging the face masks below their jaws in righteous fulfilment of the government order. They must not be allowed to infect the equally ignorant with their scepticism and ignorance. Those who see evil and deny evil are not brave souls. They are foolish people.
The sceptics and the ignorant constitute obvious dangers to the rest of the population. They may be carriers and spreaders and thus qualify as messengers of the killer virus. Let us allow them the freedom to do as they wish with their miserable lives but we must not allow them to endanger the rest of us. Yes, admittedly wearing the face mask is inconvenient but it is the least we can do to protect ourselves from contracting the disease. It is a small price to pay for us to stay alive. Look on the good side. The face mask has somewhat moderated our national predilection to noise-making and conversations carried on between two persons at the highest decibel. More face masks, less noise.
It is time for the federal and state governments to seriously enforce whatever protocols the scientists may impose on people in the mighty global struggle to save mankind. Observing these protocols is not a personal choice; it is a national response to the obvious danger and threat to all of us.
Last week, President Buhari ordered that federal civil servants who are not vaccinated should not be allowed into their offices any more. The order did not scare the sceptics and the ignorant. According to media reports they still defied the presidential order and sneaked into their offices. One or two state governments have taken a similar action to keep the vaccinated sheep from the unvaccinated goats. Those states did not achieve any measure of compliance with their order either.
The governments have the capacity to make vaccination compulsory for all adults and enforce it throughout the country. It must not be restricted to federal and state civil servants. If they are all right, the rest of the country are not necessarily all right. The private sector must stand should to shoulder with the federal and state governments in enforcing the protocol order on their employees. Market women and traders have unions; those unions must be tasked with ensuring their members fully comply with the Covid-19 protocols.
Like the rest of Africa, we are still under-vaccinated. We do not have the time and the luxury of rising up to this global challenge. The time to act and act seriously is now. For all we know, Covid-19 may be at the petri-dish working on its new killer variant and may once again surprise the world as a new export from another part of the world.
The challenges are as critical in the cities as they are in the rural areas. Our luck has so far held in that, to borrow a reporter’s favourite phrase, there is no harvest of death in the rural areas from Covid-19. But that is not to say that the virus has elected to wreck its havoc in our cities to the exclusion of the rural areas. We put our trust as a nation in luck and prayers at our peril.
The virus is no respecter of persons. Of course, the poor are the most vulnerable to it but while the infection of the important is big news, the death of the poor is not news. They should be the major concern of federal and state governments. No country can contain the Covid-19 spread but every country can enact and enforce simple protocols to slow the spread and protect its citizens against it. The federal and state governments need not be reminded about this. Whatever measures are taken would inconvenience the important people. But the country is in a battle for the survival of its citizens. Such inconvenience should be the least of our worries. Covid-19 will eventually go the way of other pandemics in world history but it is a long trek to the post Covid-19 world. This is not pessimism. It is the horrendous truth.
