CORONAVIRUS – THIS IS THE END

The questions about the end of COVID-19 have been abound in media as well as in the front and center of the mind space of the majority of the world’s population for the last many months. The typical questions which cross everyone’s minds time and again:

1. When will the Pandemic end? What month/year?
2. How will the Pandemic end? Will we find a panacea cure or will the virus just disappear?
3. When will we have a vaccine? 2020? 2021? Never?
4. When will life go back to normal?

Different ‘experts’ and media publications have ventured their own guesstimates as answers to the above questions. The answers vary within a spectrum of apocalyptic to optimistic depending on the basic constitution of the speaker in some cases and the political disposition in others.

According to me, the writing is on the wall as regards the end, if you consider the following factors:

1. There was never going to be an abrupt end to this Pandemic. It was not as if one fine day we would wake up to see the virus gone or a miracle cure administered to everyone to eradicate the disease once and for all. This would be wishful thinking to say the least. If we see the empirical evidence of other diseases in the world, we would find that barring some exceptions such as Spanish Flu and SARS, all diseases continue with mankind and become part of our existence. Whether it be Dengue, Malaria, HIV or Cancer, we learn to live with them and treat the patients as they come. Yet these diseases do not populate the front pages of media nor do they disrupt our daily existence.
2. You may say that end is nowhere in sight given the number of cases increasing everyday. In India we have seen the daily increase going up to almost 50,000 cases a day from 18000 a day one month ago, and globally the number of new cases have gone up to 260,000 a day from 170,000 a day a month ago. However, as I have stated in the past, these numbers are misleading as these are a function of tests done and not the actual infections. For all we know we were already at a point one month ago where daily 100,000 people were being infected in India but due to lesser number of daily tests a month ago (200,000) as compared to now (400,000) we were not ‘discovering’ such cases a month ago as we are doing now. As such it is incorrect to say that the Pandemic is ‘peaking’ or we have yet to see the ‘peak’ based purely on the number of new cases.
3. The most striking and underappreciated figure in the Coronavirus tracking is the deaths as a percentage of infections. In India, the number of deaths as a percentage of the discovered cases has gone down from 37% on May 4^th when the lockdown started to be eased off, to 2.31% on July 25^th. This death percentage is in fact much lower when you consider that the real number of infected cases in India would be much higher than the currently reported 13,87,000 cases given that we have tested only about 1% of the population so far. Similarly, on a global level, the mortality rate has dipped from 7% on May 4^th to 4% on 25^th July.
4. If we continue on current basis, the mortality rate of this disease based on ‘discovered cases’ would dip to about 1% in India by 31^st December 2020. While the number of cases at that time may be ginormous and there may not be any flattening of the curve visible, come New Years, we will be in a world which has one more disease in its portfolio with an established mortality rate of 1% or so with a vaccine which may or may not be widely available.
5. The fact that the mortality rate has been dipping is not a stroke of luck. This is contributed by number of factors which will further supress this percentage in the future:
   • The disease took away the vulnerable first;
   • There is immunity developing in the human body to the disease as more and more of us get exposed to it;
   • Doctors are able to better address the symptoms with the help of an increasing portfolio of medicines available; and
   • The health infrastructure is better prepared than it was some months ago.

Now as you progress over the next few months, you will see that the disease is not having a mortality rate of biblical proportions as was falsely represented by ‘responsible expert institutions’ which acted irresponsibly and engaged in unchecked fear mongering. The world will move on to more pressing issues and so will the media. The mind space will shake off the cobwebs of Coronavirus which would have dominated in 2020 and we will learn to live with the disease just as we do with the flu which strikes every year and umpteen other diseases which are perennial, many of which have a much higher mortality rate (Cancer, hypertension and Cirrhosis) and many of which do not have a cure or vaccine till date (Cancer, dengue, and diabetes).

The inevitable and obvious endgame for Coronavirus is here and it is expected to play out over the next 6 months. There will be no abrupt end to the virus, but there will be an end to its dominating our mind space as it ends up becoming yet another deadly disease human beings grapple with on a day to day basis without there being anything ‘Novel’ about it anymore.

Published on www.anshumankhanna.in

© Anshuman Khanna. July 2020