Coronavirus at the door

Forget about world peace, we don't even have peace in our daily lives anymore. Is it just me, or anyone else sees the world taking another step to be a crazier place, every single day?

Coronavirus is a real threat, underestimated by many. Even though it has a low mortality rate compared to its sibling viruses, it has a high contagiousness rate. And contrary to general belief, its low mortality rate is not making any less threat, if not more. You see, if it had high mortality rate, it would first make the host very ill in a matter of hours and then would kill the host in a few days, limiting its chances to infect others. But having a lower mortality rate (not low, lower) lets its hosts to move around without showing symptoms, allowing it to infect many more people.

In the short term, we'll probably continue to have 2-3% mortality rate, and if we can contain it with some good containment and quarantine measures, we would be able to stop it on its tracks, or at least slow it down to a crawl. It would give us enough time to find a vaccine or any type of treatment that we can mass produce and apply, increasing the immune host count and corner the virus.

But in the long run, it'll never go away, just as SARS and MERS never went away. We'll continue to have coronavirus in our lives and every winter it'll come back to visit us like an unwanted relative. It'll threaten more lives and probably will even take more. Guess what? If the vaccine development is delayed and let's say it takes five years to have a good one, we'll have it spread to most of the world population. And do you know what would that precious lower mortality rate would mean then? 7 billion * 0.02 = 140 million people would be dead.

I'm not saying this to spread fear, but it's a fact and we need to be aware of it. That's what we're facing, and we need to stop thinking it as a common flu. It's not. Yes, even flu kills thousands of people every single year, but this is not flu. It has 15% mortality rate on the elderly, flu doesn't. We need to take our enemy as an adept one and we need to prepare accordingly.

I'm not sure how we'll live under this constant threat, for an extended period of time. Two to four weeks of quarantine is not that bad, but what about two months to four years? I'm not sure if this aspect is considered by the experts, but corona will take its toll on the psychological health of the mass as well as physical. We need online consultants, support groups, to cope with this. We need people to get their worries out of their system, to talk to others. If we don't, this could take more lives than corona in the future. It'll push many nations over the edge of their sanity, and even if we beat the virus easily, we'll have millions of dysfunctional people in our hands to worry about for the next forty years.