‘I have never experienced anything like it in all my life! This is unprecedented!’ So speak commentators in South Africa and around the world on the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. If they refer to the response of governments to the disease, they are right.
I was born in 1948, and lived through the polio and HIV/AIDS epidemics and never saw such a thing as the national ‘lockdown’ that began on Friday. My parents were born in 1912 and 1916, lived through the Russian Revolution, two world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the Great Recession of the 1920s and the threat of a nuclear holocaust of the 1960s, and never saw such a thing.
But if they refer to the disease itself, they are wrong. The Covid-19 disease is not unprecedented; it is usual. It is not abnormal; it is normal. Such diseases, often more severe, have been attacking all multi-celled animals since they evolved, about 550 million years ago. They will continue to do so for the remaining life of our planet. Virologists say this virus is bog standard and well understood, a variety of those that cause the flu and SARS. The key to understanding its danger is the immune system.
Immune system
I was chatting to a friend on her stoep when her cat strolled in from the garden. She asked me what would happen if Covid-19 attacked the cat. I said, ‘Nothing’. The cat’s immune system would swiftly prevent the disease. If some magician could implant cats’ immune system into every human on Earth, the disease would quickly be wiped out. The problem is so would the human race – probably within a day.
Animals are outnumbered trillions to one by bacteria and viruses, a small fraction of which attack them. The immune system evolved to counter this attack. Since the attack is enormously varied and keeps changing, the immune system must be complicated and adaptable to meet it. The system has a difficult task but a simple purpose: to kill any biological material that isn’t the same as its own.
Our immune system can easily detect and kill living things whose chemistry is very different from ours but can be fooled and overcome by chemistry similar to ours. The cat’s immune system would instantly see that Covid-19 was not cat-like and kill it. (In the human body, the cat’s immune system would also kill the humans). For humans, Covid-19 is too like our own biology for the immune system to kill it or nullify it outright. It must first develop anti-bodies, which takes time.
Confused and overcome
Over millions of years, bacteria and viruses have passed from one species to another. If the invaded immune system sees the pathogen as somewhat like itself, it might be confused and overcome. This is what happened over thousands of years with the pathogens of flu, measles, TB and smallpox passing from cattle and pigs in Europe to humans. Gradually the human immune system learnt to deal with them. But when the Europeans went to the Americas and Australia, places that had never seen these animals, their diseases annihilated the locals.
Our immune system cannot cope with HIV, which can only be controlled with anti-retroviral drugs. (HIV probably passed from chimpanzees to humans when the blood of a butchered chimp spilled onto the skin of a human butcher and passed through a cut into his body.) But it can cope with Covid-19 in most cases. (The virus probably comes from bats.) Prince Charles and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, now infected, are likely to make a full recovery. A few people, mainly old and with other ailments, will not recover. How many would die if nothing were done? That is a key question.
Another key question
If politicians don’t act, they will be blamed for Covid-19 deaths. If they act, and cause more people to die (of poverty, hunger and depression), they will not be blamed. So they act. How many people are going to die because of their actions? That is another key question, even more difficult to answer and seldom asked.
I have no medical qualifications, but guess our lockdown will do more harm than good. Recent studies, for example from Oxford University, suggest the death rate from the disease is much lower than the 1% often cited. But the appalling damage from this lockdown to our economy, already in desperate trouble, cannot be exaggerated. Businesses big and small will shut down forever. Our economy will shrink. Our debt will deepen. Unemployment will grow, poverty worsen and crime escalate.
On Thursday, the day before lockdown, I visited the local shopping mall. It was jam packed with people squashed closely together for long periods. There were long queues in supermarkets and even longer queues outside liquor stores. There was a spectacular lack of self-isolation.
In the liquor shop, I was surprised to see that nearly all the dry red wines had sold out, while sweet wines remained on the shelves. ‘Strange’, I thought, as I grabbed the last box of Tassies.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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