When denial goes viral

777,593,567. That is the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide before they stopped being reported last year. The total fatalities were 7,089,976 before WHO declared that it was no longer a public health emergency of international concern.

Covid-19 has tapered off, but it could be a sign of even bigger health crises to come. Alas, governments and people suffer from short-term memory loss. 

Remember? The world came to a grinding halt: businesses, banks, schools, travel and tourism, sports, restaurants shut down overnight. Millions of migrant workers were displaced. Hospitals were overwhelmed and there were mass burials. Lockdowns to contain the virus inflicted more suffering. 

Read also: Lockdown+5, Sonia Awale

What worked was the world coming together to develop and distribute vaccines. It significantly reduced the number of deaths worldwide, especially among the elderly, children and people with comorbidities. 

Not only have some governments not learnt their lessons, but they actively refuse to admit that vaccines were our last line of defence. In his second term in office, Donald Trump picked Robert Kennedy Jr, an avid anti-vaxxer, as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The United States has recorded the first measles deaths in 10 years.

Trump caused enough harm in his first term when he repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic, infamously claiming that hydroxychloroquine (and even bleach) cured Covid-19, and blatantly refused to mask up. The United States recorded 103,436,829 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 1,219,038 deaths, one-sixth of all fatalities worldwide.

Vaccine deniers are in the same cult as climate deniers, and scientific evidence will not sway them. Trump has pulled the US out of WHO and funding cuts at USAID threaten to undermine decades of progress in preventing vaccine-preventable infections, maternal and child health, emergency preparedness, and reproductive health in countries like Nepal. 

Many of these grants were also going into research and surveillance which played a big part in combatting the Covid-19 pandemic, and will be crucial as we monitor and control new emerging threats like the H5N1 bird flu, which has now spread in neighbouring India. 

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned on Tuesday that the continued spread of avian influenza across the world was not just a serious threat to public health but also ‘an unprecedented food security risk’ as poultry farms are forced to cull millions of chicken.

The Covid pandemic improved Nepal’s healthcare capacity with diagnostics, laboratory infrastructure, sequencing and pathogen genomics, and emergency care. 

But, wait, what happened to all those ventilators and oxygenators? Where are the HCUs and Hi-ICUs? Plans to decentralise the infectious diseases hospital away from Teku?

Read also: Lessons not learned from the pandemic, Dhurba Basnet

While the priority is human health, the lesson from Covid-19 is that we have to also be mindful of animal health. Infections spread from wildlife to livestock factory farms and cross the species divide because of anthropogenic activities. We must therefore apply a ‘one health approach’ which addresses the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health.

At the same time, Nepal must also buttress its drive towards ensuring universal health care. With greater and faster connectivity, the world is a global village more than ever before. No country is an island. No country, even those with vast resources, can build barriers to stop infections that emerge from the other side of the planet. That is the lesson from the Covid-19 pandemic that we ignore at our own peril. 

Another lesson is that the world has to come together to defeat global crises: whether it is another pandemic, climate breakdown or poverty. The resources that industrialised countries, China and India invested to rapidly develop vaccines against Covid-19, and multilateral mechanisms like GAVI that ensured their just distribution to the poorest and remotest regions worked well. 

At a time when such global action is needed more than ever before, we see unilateralism and isolationist ultra-nationalism taking root in the world’s most powerful nation. 

Here in Nepal, we are now better prepared. We can even regard Covid-19 as a rehearsal for future transboundary health emergencies. It built the capacity of our doctors, nurses and paramedics, and helped upgrade infrastructure outside urban centres. 

The pandemic and lockdowns increased awareness of personal hygiene. Most people are now habituated to wearing masks and hand washing, which in turn has reduced the incidence of other pre-existing infections including those caused by air pollution and contaminated water. 

As we keep track of emerging diseases, we must not lose sight of common infections and risk factors that kill many more across the country every year than Covid-19 ever did. Only then, would we have achieved health for all.

Sonia Awale