As far as the Coronavirus pandemic is concerned, things are still in their very early stages, with the virus only starting to establish a foothold in many different countries.
As the Italian example demonstrates, it takes a matter of days and weeks before a seemingly trivial amount of cases turns into a full blown crisis that affects the entire population.
On February 20, Italy had reported just four cases in the entire country. Fast forward to March 9, when the country announced a full lockdown and the number of cases stood at 9,172.
As of the time of publication on March 20, the number of cases in Italy stood at 41,035 with the trend still ascendant. That’s already more than half of the total number of cases in China where over 71,000 have already recovered, as opposed to Italy’s recovery number of just under 4,500 cases.
It’s a similar story in other countries, with the UK’s 36 cases on March 1 turning into 3,269 by March 20. That’s a hundred times higher in just 20 days.
With no vaccine available for what could be months or even a year, and a mortality rate of one and four percent, on current trends the death toll, which already stands at more than 10,000 could end up ten or hundreds of times as much.
The burden of mitigating the unfolding crisis falls not only on governments but also on individuals.
To this effect, governments across the world have either implemented or are in the process of implementing wide reaching lockdowns of public services.
Schools have been shut down, mass gatherings such as sports events and concerts have been cancelled, and curfews have been enforced with some authorities only allowing people to visit pharmacies and food shops.
But the role governments can play goes only so far and international organisations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) have made clear that everyone has a personal duty in helping to slow down the spread of the Covid-19 virus.
WHO advice
The WHO’s advice is a mixture of what you can do to ensure your personal hygiene and how you can ensure good community hygiene.
Top on the organisation’s list of advice is to ensure regular cleaning of the hands with soap in order to disinfect them from any harmful microbes.
Also included are personal behaviours that can reduce the likelihood of spreading infection, such as coughing and sneezing into the elbow or a tissue.
But also crucial according to the WHO is the idea of social distancing. That means not putting yourself into situations unnecessarily where you will be in close contact with other people.
If you think you may have an infection, or have been in contact with someone who has, it is important to self-isolate and seek medical advice if symptoms develop.
Near term strategies
One of the biggest obstacles in tackling the spread of the virus is the fact that the incubation period for Covid-19 inside a host’s body is on average five days but can be as long as 11.5 days.
What this means is that for several days before symptoms begin to appear, those who have the virus will not know they have it.
An important way to mitigate the threat of spread posed by asymptomatic carriers is therefore to self-isolate and for governments to increase testing so that carriers can be identified and isolated quicker. Asymptomatic carriers complicate the issue further as it can be hard to justify testing for people with no symptoms.
This combination of strategies has helped curb the spread of the disease in South Korea.
The far-eastern nation has tested more than 270,000 people at a rate of 5,200 tests per million people. The highest for any country except for the tiny Gulf kingdom of Bahrain.
By comparison, the US has only tested 74 people for every million of its population, according to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Once the second most infected country, South Korea has since been taken over by six mainly European states.
Another tentative success story is China, where if official numbers are accurate, there were no new domestic infections for the second day running on March 20.
Beijing was able to achieve the feat by locking down entire infected regions and enforcing strict curfews.
The slowdown, however, does not mean the threat is anywhere near to being eradicated in either China or South Korea. Until a vaccine is created and distributed, the same rules on social distancing and testing apply to prevent more waves of infections.
The coronavirus pandemic is here to stay, for the coming months at least. Overcoming it will require responsibility on the part of both governments and people.
