The New Rhythm of Life in the US
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
It was early morning on a working day in mid-March as my wife and I came out of our house to pick up some groceries at a nearby shop. We saw the main street close to us eerily quiet and deserted, which normally bustles with morning commuters, buses taking children to school and businessmen rushing to catch the Metro to their offices. Instead, the weird scene was reminiscent of a Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday when people usually stay indoor to celebrate with family.
There are other signs of a country under siege. We live in suburban Maryland, a short distance from the nation’s capital. Washington’s world-renowned cherry blossom season, heralding the arrival of spring, just passed its peak. Normally, the festival would draw hordes of visitors, national and international, but visitors are few and the mayor is trying to ban them altogether. The celebrated Smithsonian museums of Washington, cherished destinations for most tourists, are locked down, as well as the world-famous Kennedy Center of Performing Arts. Sections of the city look like a ghost town.
In common with many other states, the Governor has shut down schools, colleges, restaurants, libraries, bars and all places of worship and entertainment. Even grocery shopping is an expedition as panicky shoppers try to cart away whatever they can find, tinned food, paper towels, soaps, and even toilet paper. The courage of the cashiers at the counters is admirable as they are dealing with a variety of customers at close range. The coronavirus is highly contagious and much more lethal than seasonal flu. A person showing no overt symptoms of the disease can still transmit it to others. As of this writing, more than 124,000 cases of corvid-19 have been established in the US, the number surpassing that of China and Italy, and there have been more than 2,000 recorded deaths.
The country suffers from a severe shortage of protective gear, face masks, gloves, surgical gowns, and ventilators. Also, there is critical shortage of hospital beds, even as the overburdened hospitals have cancelled all elective surgeries. Among the most vulnerable to infection are the health-care workers--doctors, nurses, dental hygienist and medical technicians and hospital cleaning staff, who work in close contact with patients. The feeling of appreciation and gratitude to medical personnel for risking their lives has spread worldwide. The people under lockdown, Turkey, Britain, Italy and many other countries, have been coming out in the evenings on their balconies singing and lighting candles to express their admiration.
The pandemic has taken a severe economic toll. A number of states have made it mandatory for people to stay indoors, except in an emergency. Millions of workers employed by shops, restaurants, hotels and bars, are without employment, as are airlines personnel, stewards, pilots and support staff. Many automotive plants, General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler, have laid off workers for lack of demand for their products.
Last week, an unprecedented, 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits. Paradoxically, only a month and half ago, the country was enjoying 3.5 percent unemployment rate, causing a shortage of available workers in business and industry. School closing have put an extra burden on parents who must stay home to take care of children or hire someone to do so. The US Congress has passed a 2.2 trillion-dollar package to help the economy and individual workers affected by the emergency shutdown. There is no certainty that this amount will be enough to achieve this objective and there is already talk of a second stimulation package.
The Trump administration has come under withering attack for its lack of timely preparations to face this crisis. The Washington Post recently reported that the US intelligence agencies had warned the Government as early as last January and February about the disastrous pandemic in China could potentially impact this country. President Trump minimized the peril, describing it as a hoax by the opposition Democrats. This failure of the Government has had a devastating effect on the country’s preparedness.
The impact of the deadly virus is especially devastating in developing countries, because of poor medical facilities. India has officially reported 700 positive cases, but the figures are probably too low as there is no large-scale testing. India has a severe shortage of hospital beds and is estimated to have only 0.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, compared to 3.1 in Italy and 12 in South Korea. Pakistan has an even weaker health care system. It has registered more than 1,500 cases in the past few days, and it is not clear how rigorously their contacts are followed and isolated. More worrying is the relentless chokehold the Mullahs exercise on the Government and would not allow even a temporary suspension of congregational prayers, the hotbed of infection.
What are the measures taken to combat the virus? In the US and other countries, a frantic effort is underway to develop a vaccine; but, even though the genetic architecture of the virus has been elucidated, it will take at least a year to test a vaccine’s efficacy and safety. Another approach is to extract antibodies from the blood of those patients who have recovered from Covid-19 disease and give them to patients in the hope that they will help fight the virus as presumably they did in the recovered patients. Meanwhile, an old antimalarial, h ydroxychloroquine, is being tested in a human clinical trial for its effectiveness against the coronavirus. Other studies have raised hopes that the virus may be sensitive to seasonal changes of weather, heat and humidity and its hold may slacken during the coming summer months in northern hemisphere.
The spread of the coronavirus pandemic globally seems an unprecedented catastrophe, but the deadly battle between humans and pathogens has been ongoing ever since man evolved on this planet. In the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague, also referred to as the black death, raged from 1347 to 1351, costing the lives of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Europe and Asia. There was no cure and no understanding of microbes. Only later, it was established that the plague was caused by a bacterium Yersinia pestis transmitted by flees. A century ago, the world was traumatized by a vicious influenza pandemic that went around the world in 1918 and took some 50 million lives. No one knew about viruses at the time or what had caused the pandemic. One day, hopefully soon, we will find a cure for the new Covid-19 and learn how to stop its spread.
(The writer is a former assistant professor, Harvard Medical School, and a retired health scientist administrator, US National Institutes of Health)
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