C-19 BGO’s Finally Admitted

For those of you who blank out with acronym overload as I do quite often, a BGO is a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious.  Today the director-general of WHO (World Health Organisation) admitted we hadn’t seen the worst of C-19 yet.  There is worse to come.  Wow! he must be good at graphs climbing skywards to notice that in most places cases are still increasing.  What was obvious to me in Jan when the contagion rate was approximately determined as over 3, but the incubation period was long, and even worst there were asymptomatic carriers, there is no “after the covid virus”.   I wrote in a blog in Jan I think, that C-19 was going to be a permanent scourge of mankind.  I have read so many articles talking about “after the virus”, or getting “back to normal” that I feel like shouting there is no “back”, there is no “normal” and there is no end to the virus.

The game changer could be an effective vaccine.  After all there are over 100 teams all over the world working on a vaccine, surely they will have one going before the year is out?  There have been breakthroughs announced already and Trump has assured us it will be in a corner store near you soon.  Actually, it isn’t that easy.  There is a slight problem with the word “effective”.  What Trump and all of us want is a ‘silver bullet’ vaccine to make all 7.5 billion of us humans are immune to the disease so that it recedes to only infecting pangolins or short-tailed asiatic bats (I made that up).  There will be flaws in the vaccine, the virus can easily mutate like flu, and how do you inoculate the entire world?  Don’t put too much hope in an ‘effective’ vaccine.

The re-occurrence of the disease in Australia, China, South Korea etc, shows us how it is like playing ‘whack-a-mole’ where it is laboriously eradicated only to emerge again as clusters leading to widespread community contagion.  The disease is progressing at different rates across all the countries on the globe.  There doesn’t seem to be any cases reported for Greenland, but I guess they are just waiting their turn.  There isn’t going to be any safe way of opening up international travel for this year, next year, and perhaps more years after that.  So for tourist operators there will be no foreign travelers for years.  I expect that will mean doom for some.  Others will have to adapt to domestic traffic only.  Yesterday Qantas laying off more staff was in recognition of this, and there will be no ‘back to normal’, just a steady exploration of what the new normal actually is.  It might mean getting a C-19 test 24 hrs before departure on a flight to get a negative certificate.  It might mean an anti-body test to get an ‘immune’ certificate, but nobody yet knows how long that lasts as immunity tends to wane with time.

It may be that Australia’s quite successful quashing of the initial outbreak might lead to vulnerability down the track as less people have been exposed and a lower rate of ‘herd immunity’ has been gained.  Perhaps Trump and Bolsonaro are right in allowing it to sweep through the country to hasten acquiring some immunity.  If they were right, it was for all the wrong reasons.  Whatever happens, the chance of eradicating the virus is long past and now the problem is managing the least worst options.  Deaths versus economic factors, jobs versus poverty, wealth versus humanity.  It requires equations with non-equatable variables.  Plenty of scope for political opportunism.

For all you out there I hope you are coping with what has been going down during lockdown and job losses.  Not too much different here as if you are the only worker, you don’t fire yourself.  And if you work in 156 acres, you are not cramped or confined.  As we creep out of the bunkers, I hope it is towards a brave new world of caring for neighbours and a low carbon world.