What If Covid-19 Is Here To Stay? What Next?

There Is No Mercy In The History of Pathogens. 

If you told people in the 14th century that a mere droplet of moisture contained millions of an entire battalion of disease-causing germs, they would have thrown you into a dungeon or took you for a blasphemous country man.

We’ve lived with diseases for our entire existence on earth. In the old days, causes of disease outbreaks were attributed to the anger of gods and were seen as a punishment for people’s misdeeds and shortcomings in the face of gods.

To mitigate the disease outbreak, they would pray to the gods and ask for forgiveness. Entire populations were decimated for this dangerous ignorance.

As evolution would later unfold, this dangerous ignorance was not about to continue. It took observant people and a speck of serendipity for us to be able to literally look at these invisible enemies for what they really were and not a mere brainchild of the wrath of an imaginary angry god.

After a serendipitous observation of growing molds in his laboratory, Louis Pasteur set out on a revolutionary expedition to develop empirical responses to these invisible enemies.

It is from the onset of such investigative empirical expeditions that our awareness about invisible pathogens has evolved so much that, unlike our ancestors, we are now fully convinced that a mere droplet of nasal water contains an entire army of pathogens causing Corona Virus Disease-2019. (COVID-19).

There is no mercy in the history of pathogens, only adaptation.

How To Welcome A New Invisible Enemy

As irony would have it, entire institutions that contribute huge revenues to government and people employment are built around the lives of dangerous pathogens. We’ve long-existed with Malaria (caused by protozoa), Cholera (caused by bacteria), Typhoid (caused by bacteria), AIDS (caused by a virus) and Flu (caused by influenza virus).

What if the virus for COVID-19 is just another addition to this list of invisible pathogens we are seemingly damned to eternally co-exist with?

Today, in the wake of COVID-19, unlike their ancestors who surrendered to pandemics and waited for the anger of the gods to pass, investors are glued to their smart phones in search of where to invest for the synthesis and manufacture of a vaccine.

Are we contemplating to incorporate this catastrophe into our long-existed economies?

As is with AIDS, perhaps we shall see NGOs mushrooming and developing agendas around the eradication of COVID-19, Pharmaceuticals shall mint billions of dollars under the agenda of creating vaccines, Governments will adjust their budgets to incorporate mass immunizations against COVID-19.

Given the rather radical mechanism of its spread, a whole new style of stigma will spring up calling for psychiatrists and counselors to do greater than they’ve ever done for stigma associated with AIDS.

In such a COVID-laden world, we are likely to live in an eternal frenzy of neurotic and paranoid citizens avoiding each other to avoid catching the disease.