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We are being studied, so expect shocking findings on coronavirus

Friday June 26 2020
By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

We are all crammed into a class where we are being forced to learn a few things about the new coronavirus that hit the world from about the end of last year.

I am using ‘about’ because you and I do not know for sure when this dread happened on us. US President Donald Trump seems cock-sure when he calls it ‘China virus’ but we may soon learn that Wuhan was but a transit point for something that came from another place altogether.

We will also have had time to learn that even our foremost scientists do not know everything there is to be learnt about the disease.

Science means knowledge, and knowledge does not come to you but is discovered by you as you examine phenomena. Right now, phenomena are being presented by the disease and from them we learn our science, and unwittingly we become the guinea-pigs.

This is probably the most disconcerting thing, that we are being studied and may be subjected to so many controlling experiments by people who want to see if this or that theory works.

We have had people in positions of authority stating that the virus is a false alert by people who want to earn some advantage over others, which is pretty credible, because since when did we have any situation where people did not want to gain an upper hand when an opportunity presents itself.

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But there surely is a difference between using a situation to gain advantage and actually creating the situation in the first place.

A number of individuals who joined the naysayers on coronavirus have had to pay dearly, some by being snatched away from the scene, and others by witnessing the horrible devastation in the wake of the advance of the plague.

The story from America is most instructive. The states that had the luck of having lucid leadership have seen the morbidity and mortality numbers drop steadily, while those who were looking for confirmation of the existence of the disease are now getting it. The numbers look like it’s doomsday in certain areas.

Some countries in Africa responded by adopting restrictive measures and some did not, and we are still learning from the two cohorts, although we already know that some of those who did not have reaped a few rotten fruits.

It is a pity that in Africa it is bad manners to apply a ‘told-you-so’ reaction when sad fate strikes hubris.

Until a few days ago, we were told that the disease struck, among others, old people and that the young ones were largely safe although they could be the ones to carry the virus to their older people. Now we learn that even the young ones are getting the disease and in cases it can be fatal.

We still do not know for sure if contracting the corona bug and recovering confers certain immunity, and cases have been known of people getting it twice. In fact, I am now hearing people saying—now that they know the symptoms – that they had the disease a year ago, well ahead of Wuhan.

There is so much we do not know about this thing that we had better keep our ears open to what those who do research tell us. This is so important in those areas where there has been a sense of celebration because people have been shanghaied into believing they have beaten the virus simply because they prayed to a god that loves them more than he loves the rest of humanity.

The difficulty with this stance is that many of those who try to minimise the devastation of such diseases accompany their incredulity with the discouragement of scientific transparency: information is strictly censored.

Their chief spokesman is Trump, who had the transparency to tell medics to slow down on testing—the more you test the more positive people you will find, he said publicly—and then argued with his staff who tried to suggest he had said it in jest.

It may be true that Africa has largely been skirted by the virus, and that we may have to live with it the same way we live with cholera, but we have to remain wary of a deadly illness which, as we have seen in other countries, takes few prisoners, and which is spread by the most natural process of human interaction. We may have primed ourselves for a rude awakening just round the corner.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]

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