Fighting COVID 19, race against time, strict measures only way to control pandemic: Writer

ISLAMABAD, Mar 21 (APP):The Coronavirus (COVID 19) is still spreading and nearly everywhere and more than 152 countries have cases. The world is against the clock.

Within a week, countries around the world have gone from: “This coronavirus thing is not a big deal” to declaring the state of emergency.

Yet many countries are still not doing much, Tomas Pueyo, writes in his web edition article on the “Medium”. The writer is MSc in engineering., Stanford MBA, ex-consultant and a creator of viral applications with 20 million users.
The writer further says every country is asking the same question: How should we respond? The answer is not obvious to them.

Some countries, like France, Spain or Philippines, have since ordered heavy lockdowns. Others, like the US, UK, Switzerland or Netherlands, have dragged their feet, hesitantly venturing into social distancing measures.

Some countries, especially those that haven’t been hit heavily yet by the coronavirus, might be wondering: Is this going to happen to me?
“The answer is: It probably already has. You just haven’t noticed.

When it really hits, your healthcare system will be in even worse shape than in wealthy countries where the healthcare systems are strong. Better safe than sorry, you should consider taking action now,” he insisted.

The writer says on one side, countries can go the mitigation route: create a massive epidemic, overwhelm the healthcare system, drive the death of millions of people, and release new mutations of this virus in the wild.

“On the other, countries can fight. They can lock down for a few weeks to buy us time, create an educated action plan, and control this virus until we have a vaccine,” he adds.

Tomas Pueyo further notes that the governments around the world today, including some such as the US, the UK, Switzerland or Netherlands have so far chosen the mitigation path. That means they’re giving up without a fight. They see other countries having successfully fought this, but they say: “We can’t do that!”

Many governments around the world are doing today. They’re not giving you a chance to fight this. You have to demand it,” he stresses.

The writer with the help of different graphs and very interesting statistics illustrated the pending threats of coronovirus across the globe.

About social distancing, the writer suggests that there are some very cheap ways to do that, like banning events with more than a certain number of people (eg, 50, 500), or asking people to work from home when they can.
Other steps are closing of schools and universities, asking everybody to stay home, or closing bars and restaurants.

Every day after they contract the virus, people have some contagion potential. Together, all these days of contagion add up to 2.5 contagions on average.

It is believed that there are some contagions already happening during the “no symptoms” phase. “For example, early on you have the virus but no symptoms, so you behave as normal.

When you speak with people, you spread the virus. When you touch your nose and then open door knob, the next people to open the door and touch their nose get infected,” he adds.

He further says the more the virus is growing inside you, the more infectious you are. Then, once you start having symptoms, you might slowly stop going to work, stay in bed, wear a mask, or start going to the doctor. The bigger the symptoms, the more you distance yourself socially, reducing the spread of the virus.

“Once you’re hospitalized, even if you are very contagious you don’t tend to spread the virus as much since you’re isolated,” he adds citing measures taken by the most effective countries.

If people are trained to identify their symptoms earlier, they reduce their overall contagiousness and if people are educated about personal distance, mask-wearing, washing hands or disinfecting spaces, they spread less virus throughout the entire period.

He says that they will need to tighten up social distancing measures.
How come South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan have had cases for a long time, in the case of South Korea thousands of them, and yet they’re not locked down home?

The South Korea foreign minister has explained how her country did it. It was pretty simple: efficient testing, efficient tracing, travel bans, efficient isolating and efficient quarantining.

For several weeks, South Korea had the worst epidemic outside of China. Now, it’s largely under control. And they did it without asking people to stay home.

If an outbreak like South Korea’s can be controlled in weeks and without mandated social distancing, Western countries, which are already applying a heavy and strict social distancing measures, can definitely control the outbreak within weeks. It’s a matter of discipline, execution, and how much the population abides by the rules.

“China’s measures were stronger. For example, people were limited to one person per household allowed to leave home every three days to buy food. Also, their enforcement was severe. It is likely that this severity stopped the epidemic faster,” the writer notes.

In Italy, France and Spain, measures were not as drastic, and their implementation is not as tough. People still walk on the streets, many without masks.

“The public is scared. The coronavirus is new. People haven’t learned to stop hand-shaking. They still hug. They don’t open doors with their elbow. They don’t wash their hands after touching a door knob. They don’t disinfect tables before sitting,” he adds.

Once we have enough masks, we can use them outside of the healthcare system too. Right now, it’s better to keep them for healthcare workers.

But if they weren’t scarce, people should wear them in their daily lives, making it less likely that they infect other people when sick, and with proper training also reducing the likelihood that the wearers get infected. (In the meantime, wearing something is better than nothing.)

All of these are pretty cheap ways to reduce the transmission rate. The less this virus propagates, the fewer measures we’ll need in the future to contain it. But we need time to educate people on all these measures and equip them.