What most people do not understand about coronavirus

Features Correspondent
On Sunday, President Mnangagwa extended the Covid-19 national lockdown by a further two weeks to May 3.

Under the lockdown, all movement and congregating of people is banned except what is specifically permitted.

What most people do not understand is that the lockdown is in place to slow the progression of the disease, not to eradicate it by end of May.

People are missing the point because they naively think the Government will somehow get rid of it and life goes back to normal.

These are people who have ignored the global reality since January.

This is the dangerous delusional thinking that some people have and are applying in their assessment of the situation when advocating that we should stop the lockdown because they are literally only waking up to this thing now, or when we were initially shut down.

So let’s lift the curtain a bit.

1) Flattening the curve means slowing down the disease so that hospitals can cope with the sick. It does not mean eradicating the disease all together.

2) No Government will be able to eradicate the disease this year. It’s here until a cure or a vaccine is found.

3) A vaccine is at least a year away. That’s April 2021. The earliest vaccine trials just started late last month. It takes 18 to 24 months to make, test and assess the efficacy of a vaccine.

4) There is no going back to normal. Your normal will not exist for at least a year. Economies globally will keep bleeding and we are likely to have rolling lockdowns until a vaccine is found.

5) Even when the ban is lifted, tourism and hospitality industry, and many others will not see an increase in business for at least a year. Until a vaccine is found people will continue to self-isolate even when a lock down is lifted.

6) The only reprieve we are going to get is if we have thousands of people who have been infected and recovered and minimum deaths so that we have some level of herd immunity. That is also still a theory that is yet to be proven because some countries think they may be seeing people get re-infected.

Even with that in place, normal is not feasible because fear still reigns and people will remain isolated until safety is guaranteed — cure or vaccine. Refer to point 3.

7) The decisions made in the lockdown like no dog walking or running and no e-commerce are not made with the privileged in mind. They are made with the masses in mind. What you allow in the suburbs you must allow in the townships and those two things look very different in execution.

Now our Government is doing the best it can and they have reacted faster than most developed countries.

Our progress is still better than most and right now we’re riding the dumb hope that somehow BCG gives us some fighting chance (still unproven).

So please, we all need to do whatever we can to help our neighbours, help each other, support our Government and stop having delusional ideas about any level of normalcy at the end of this month.

Adjust your projections and hunker down.

Good luck, stay safe, wash those hands and stay indoors!