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| Covid-19. The "One in a hundred year" virus |
All travel has come to a stop. Even Emirates has stopped flying! 2020 is not going to be a travel year.
The world is in Lock down!
As of 28 March 2020, about one third of the World's population is under lock down. If there was any doubt that the Coronavirus Covid-19 is not the "One in a hundred year" pandemic at the beginning of the year, this has now been completely dis-proven. This is the dreaded pandemic that many microbiologists and epidemiologists have warned about.
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| What can man do? Fire out of control! |
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| Covid-19 is now like the Australian bush fires. |
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| Devastation of Australian wildlife |
Recently, the major massive bush fires in Australia were all over the news. These fires devastated vast tracks of Australian bush lands and killed millions of Australian's unique wildlife and birds. These fires were clearly totally out of control and every effort made by man were pretty pointless. No matter what was done, the fires just kept on burning! The current situation with Covid-19 is very much like the Australian bush fires. It is now burning out of control and will destroy millions of lives. The efforts of man are all pretty pointless at this stage.
In South Africa, certain parts of the population are not taking the order to lock down seriously and many of them appear to think that this is a joke. We will see in the next few weeks as the number of people who are dying start to increase if they still think this is a joke. The mortality rate among this group of the population is likely to be much higher than the mortality rates reported around the world.
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| Lock down style in 1918.The flu virus was not their only problem! |
If you have been reading my blog, you will know that I am very interested in the history of the First World War. This is based to some extent on the fact that my grandfather served during the First World War. Also, as a qualified microbiologist, I have always been fascinated by the 1918 Influenza pandemic. This virus struck in the last year of the first world war. The actual number of people who died from Influenza virus is not very well recorded, for many reasons. On of which was that this outbreak primarily started off in the trenches of the Western Front, where many millions of men had been slaughtered over the last four years. So people dying from a disease did not immediately get the attention needed. In 1918, technology was also different from today, where every case and death is recorded in real time. Estimations of the number of people who die range between 50 millions and 100 million people.
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| "Home" for the soldiers in 1918 |
I would like to post some images of "Lock down" in 1918. For any of us who think this is bad, just remember this is how our grandfathers or great grandfathers had to go through "lock down" during the 1918 pandemic. Yes - I fully understand that conditions of lock down will be different form different people, not only in South Africa but around the world.
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| The 1918 flu epidemic |
This is going to be a major pandemic and I am afraid that many millions of people are likely to die in the next few months. Although this virus is different from the 1918 influenza virus, there are still many similarities. The 1918 flu virus is widely believed to have been a recombination virus which had elements of the pig influenza virus in combination with normal human influenza virus. So also coming from animals. The Covid-19 virus most likely came from bats which were kept in live food markets in Wuhan China.
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| Hospitals and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic |
Both viruses spread easily from person to person and people are infectious before people are showing clinical signs. It has been proposed that the only thing which stopped the 1918 influenza virus was the fact that the virus went round the world three times and the concept of "herb immunity" came into play. Basically what this means is that once a person has been infected and survived, they cannot be infected again (unless the virus undergoes mutations). Each time the virus came around, there were fewer and fewer people to get infected. It has been predicted that around 70% of the world's population will get infected with Covid-19. Based on the current low mortality rates recorded in some countries of around 2%, this will mean that some 168 million people are expected to die. The mortality rate in Italy, USA and Spain are currently much higher then this. The mortality rate in populations with around 25% infection rate with HIV will most likely be in the region of 30%. End of days situation indeed.
So stay at home and do not complain about it!
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