‘Prevention is better than cure’

Stephen Mpofu, Pespective
“JOE! Joe! Got it, we’ve got it at last, the needle in the haystack,” cried a scientist excitedly to another in a Western laboratory.

“Wonderful! Just wonderful!” Responded Joe’s colleague from one corner of the laboratory.

“But no, no . . . it’s only a look alike, a make-believe, if you will, not the thing we are after,” said Peter.

“Still, I believe that if it isn’t too brittle, we can use it to sew back together soft lives being torn apart by the deadly virus while the search for the needle in the haystack continues. After all, Rome was not built in a day.”

Beyond many waters back in Africa a conspiracy theorist, apparently one among many on the African continent and beyond, tells thousands if not millions of radio listeners in Zimbabwe a story about a married couple, a man and his wife who are at daggers drawn.

The wife prepares a meal and serves a plateful to the husband who rejects the food, suspecting that the woman poisoned it to kill him.

A court finally allows the couple to go their separate ways, and from her paternal family the woman again prepares a meal for the ex-husband which he again suspects has been poisoned to kill him and he again rejects it.

(We have here reduced to miniatures panoramic views of icy race relations during the colonial and current, respectively.)

Now as the unflinching determination and hopes of finding a cure for Covid-19 which continues to leave in its wake deluge after deluge of tears and broken hearts of those losing their loved ones on the one hand and conspiracy theorists on the other continue in their virtual battle, millions of lives remain threatened with decimation during the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Luckily, the World Health Organisation has come up with guidelines to safeguard lives while the search for the coronavirus cure remains underway and these rules have been replicated by the Zimbabwean Government as by other states elsewhere across the globe to curb further life losses before a panacea for Covid-19 becomes a reality, thus lighting up hope for life on the glum faces of millions of potential victims of that latest scourge after the Aids pandemic which has virtually waned.

In the circumstances, therefore, a Zimbabwean medical officer has warned “people not to lower their guard” but instead adhere to guidelines for their protection and that of others against the coronavirus.

Professor Solwayo Ngwenya, the Chief Executive Officer of Mpilo Central Hospital, repeated this week what he has previously said through these columns that people should wear their masks, social distance, wash their hands and sanitise and not be part of crowds and groups of people where the virus might be transmitted.

Yes, he said this week, our own Government, like governments elsewhere, will acquire vaccines already in place to fight the deadly virus.

However, the professor noted that not every Zimbabwean will be covered, which means that many lives will remain imperilled.

Press reports have suggested that a variant of the Covid-19 virus found in South Africa has resisted treatment by vaccines imported by that country from oversees.

With millions of Zimbabweans living and working in South Africa and commuting between that country and their motherland, not to mention travellers on a daily basis between the two neighbouring countries, transmission of that reported variant to Zimbabwe might be just a matter of time if it has already not crossed the border between the two countries.

Which really means that any intensified campaigns by the police against blatant violators of the lockdown guidelines anywhere in Zimbabwe must be applauded rather than condemned and resisted as the measures are meant to protect the violators themselves and other people against the deadly virus.

The altruism headlining this discourse, that “prevention is better than cure” is no doubt more valid now than at any other time before a final cure for the world pandemic becomes a reality.