Covid-19 may kill ‘millions’ of us, or just ‘thousands’. Right now it’s still anyone’s guess

Since the start of this dreadful global pandemic I have found myself uncharacteristically silent. In all honesty, I’ve been at a bit of a loss for words for months now.

It started when I read an analysis in January of just how virulent and contagious the new coronavirus seemed to be. Back then, we saw all the stories from China and the videos of them building hospitals in 10 days and whole cities being locked in against what their president was calling the “devil”.

I realised this little satan was probably coming our way and I was trying not to be overwhelmed by dread.

I failed. And I had no clever ideas.

Between then and now – like you, I imagine – I went through a few phases of thinking I might have come across a few brilliant notions about this disease and some clever thoughts about defeating it, or at least not letting it defeat us. But each of those appeared to disintegrate in the hard light of day.

It’s hard to argue with the evidence that we currently appear to have no immunity whatsoever against Covid-19 because it is so utterly new, and so easy to catch.

Depending on how old or unhealthy your population is, it will evidently kill between 1% and 10% of all the people it infects – but frustratingly that figure itself may be exaggerated because there is some new evidence that the majority of people who catch this virus never show any symptoms at all.

One study from the US that still needs to be reviewed found that as many as 50 to 85 times more people than we thought have been catching this virus, and have therefore, possibly, been gaining immunity without ever becoming sick or ever even knowing they had the coronavirus in the first place.

Now, yes, if that sounds unlikely to you, you’re not alone. It sounds hopelessly optimistic to me too (as well as on another level completely terrifying since there are more people spreading this disease than we ever bargained for) – but then again I am a hopeless optimist.

If that, or other similar theories, prove to be true, it may well be that the actual death rate could be far lower.

We may come to realise we’ve been dealing with something that was less like Satan incarnate and more like a mischievous poltergeist that caused us all to stay in bed under the covers trembling at the thought of the primordial Cthulhu egg hatching under the bed, instead of a mogwai that got a bit wet.

Because we remember what happened to the mogwai when it got wet, right? Picture: Warner Bros. / via youtube.com

The prevailing wisdom remains that the coronavirus is orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu. The official stats tell us that in Italy it has killed more than 10% of its victims, mainly the aged. In the US, that sits at above 5% right now.

In a country like the US, with hundreds of millions of people, if that kind of death rate is sustained, you could be looking at millions of deaths, even though most experts don’t seem to think it will come to that.

Somehow, even one of our own state experts seems to think “only” about 45,000 people may die in South Africa from Covid-19 over the next three years.

We are a country that sees more people than that dying from murder over any three-year period – and very few people have ever chosen to stay indoors and away from work because of the strong statistical probability that they might fall victim to a violent crime or a car crash.

Like I said, I’m not the one with the clever ideas on this thing. Surely no one right now can say with any great certainty that with all our HIV, TB, obesity, diabetes and other long-standing health issues, we can hope for a good outcome. Surely, probably, millions will die. Or maybe not.

The only thing that can reliably stop the spread is for people to stop coming anywhere near each other. But that is a near-farcical goal, a myth of South African behaviour that this “nice-try-but-not-quite” lockdown has only proven we can’t achieve.

We knew it was always going to be practically impossible to do in a country like South Africa. The only thing even our best experts appear willing to say is that we managed (and go us!) to slow the “inevitable” epidemic down and move the peak period of cases out by a few weeks. I’m sure that buying such valuable time will be important later.

Trying to solve this problem long term, unless we get really lucky, though, seems nearly impossible.

There are people now saying we should never have attempted a hard lockdown in the first place if we were simply deferring our difficult payment to The Inevitable.

Why not just face it head-on, and get the unavoidable pain and suffering over with?

Maybe, but if vast numbers of people suddenly fell ill, our economy would have been just as screwed anyway. The Covid can still make large numbers of people sick for weeks, even if it doesn’t kill them.

Most of us with such choices available to us had already stopped going to restaurants, bars, live events and offices before we were told it was illegal to do so. We did that out of simple self-preservation.

We were scared, whether we were told to be scared by the government or not. And if we have any sense left at all after being stuck to bursting point in the prisons of our own homes for a month, we should still be at least more than a little scared. We should still be as careful as we can be.

Because there are no easy answers right now.

So what do we have? Basically, hope.

Hope that this virus is not as dangerous as we’re told … hope that something as unexpected as the BCG vaccine might prove to be a bit of defence for us … hope that SARS CoV-2 will mutate and become less dangerous, or just burn itself out the way the first SARS outbreak did.

Or, yes, hope that those guys from Stanford are right and this thing will pass much faster than we thought, leaving us merely singed and not burnt to a crisp.

And, indeed, if that happens, we will be left very surprised in the remains of our so recently proud, globalised, capitalist planet – by both the overwhelming power of nature when it gets to work, as well as its mystery, regardless of how clever we have been trying to tell ourselves we are.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers

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