COVID 19: A reality check

Awareness and education are touted as some of the best ways to help people understand how to prevent themselves from a pandemic. While it's been said over caller tunes and through text messages and advertisements, emphasising on the fact that social distancing, wearing masks and sanitizing regularly are the best ways to keep the pandemic at bay, even the most literate state like Kerala is failing to contain the dangerous situation.

Let's take a look at some numbers:

What do we understand from the above statistics?

It is clear that COVID is here for the longer haul.

My opinion is that COVID is going to affect each one of us and most of us would have or will get it and won't even realise we had COVID until one is curious and gets tested .

Now, let's see what the mortality rate in the most affected countries looks like:

India's mortality rate, which means number of people who are dying due to COVID are almost at the bottom of the table which means our climate, food, culture, lifestyle, alternate systems of treatment,spiritual orientation call it whatever but our immunity is so good compared to the whole world that the death rate is at the bottom of the table.

While that's good news, globally, the pandemic has shown no signs of slowing down. This indicates that whatever we have been doing hasn't been working very well and we certainly need to look at other alternatives if we are looking at taking control of the situation.

Another thing we need to bear in mind is the fact that COVID has striking similarities with several respiratory diseases, except for differences. What is noteworthy is the fact that according to WHO, up to 6,50,000 people die of respiratory diseases linked to seasonal flu each year. In that perspective, the number of people who died in the past one year due to COVID is around 1,50,000.

Where is the worry here ? Like I said it is likely that all of us will get COVID and we will develop antibodies and we will develop what is called herd immunity and will all just be fine .

It is time to shed the fear of COVID and start treating it like most other diseases we have got used to living with and carry on our lives fearlessly and live life to its fullest !

-Dr.Manoj Kuriakose