In December 2019, I had one of my Chinese tenants alert me about a new virus reported in China. My first reaction was there are many viruses in China because I remembered the SARs and some other viruses that had major outbreaks in the East. I went ahead to reassure him and said I believe the Chinese healthcare system is robust enough to handle any outbreaks. In late December, the reportage increased across different news media and outlets from the two sides of the Atlantic. The media clock was on overdrive reporting the virus.
In January 2020, the picture got clearer and measures were taken, the World Health Organisation alerted the world about this virus with the strain of SARS COV, but the damage had been done. The virus had spread and brought death in its wake. It was only a matter of time before Nigeria caught the bug of the virus with the index Italian case. Then the lockdown started the Armageddon of airlifting citizens to their various countries.
Then surge in the death numbers became scary as the cases increased, for sad measure, around the world. It was declared a pandemic and the politicking started. America started blaming China for the problems and China launched its own fight back campaign, lockdowns started and the corrupt politicians started a long round of corruption by hoarding every fund possible and giving their girlfriends supply contracts.
The sad thing, is that people become billionaires from Covid while people died and the world became poorer. Covid only manifested the division in the world that hitherto exist, the fact that the west doesn’t think highly of Africa and the fact that fake news and misinformation spreads like wildfire. Vaccine nationalism and skepticism was rife and the social media became a hotbed for all the battle about vaccines. Till today some believe that the vaccines are bad, it became a fight against good and evil and religious doctrines.
When Covid started I started reading a lot about the 1918 pandemic and I was shocked to see that nothing changed in the reaction to Covid. A lot of misinformation happened then too and a lot of deaths also coupled with the fact that it happened during the war.
The Covid crisis now still shows that the world hasn’t learnt anything and the fact that viruses mutate is still scary and most of these mutations are caused by human activities like the Indian religious festivals that helped with the spike in cases and the Delta variant.
One thing is certain, viruses will always mutate and these mutations will be dependent on human activities. These human activities will continue to lead to loss of lives but the question: are we going to reach a common ground on how to fight Covid? I believe the beginning of the end of Covid will be when global solidarity starts and global solidarity has to be truthful, devoid of politics and racism but Alas! All I clearly can’t see is that all I see is division from every end of the world. It is incumbent on us to understand that the pandemic will end, but are we going to ever learn the lessons? I doubt.
Rufai Oseni, rufaioseni@gmail.com
