Misinformation in the time of Corona

The last couple of months have dispelled the myth that nothing exciting ever happens in Namibia. One of my followers expressed so eloquently on his Twitter timeline, “In 2020 we were on the verge of a World War, then on the verge of a Civil War, then we lost Kobe, and now we are in the middle of an apocalypse...it’s only March.” Covid-19 also known as Corona or The RONA reads like the intro to a science fiction end of days movie, ‘strange and incurable virus pops up and cripples half the world’. Covid-19 is no longer something that we’re watching from the outside, but a part of our reality, and if you’re going to survive the scariest infectious disease of this decade thus far, you will need information that is just as good as your hand sanitizer. 

There is a lot of misinformation going around about Covid-19, I guess that’s what happens when you get all your ‘NEWS’ from forwarded videos on WhatsApp. Do you really trust Ndapewa your high school classmate to know about Covid-19, when she couldn’t even remember the body parts of a Locust? So, I have trawled and compile research from the two most trustworthy sources on the internet; the World Health Organization (WHO) and Al Jazeera – as we’ve seen from the Fishrot files, Al Jazeera leaves no stone unturned. If God has secrets, Al Jazeera will find them. 

It is a virus

According to WHO; Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV).  Covid-19 is a new strain that was discovered in 2019 and has not been previously identified in humans.

We have survived viruses before, but unlike that OTHER virus that dies almost instantly outside the human body, Covid-19 can survive outside the human body on surfaces for up to 8 hours, luckily it isn’t airborne, at least not yet. All you have to do is avoid becoming infected – which is easier said than done. 

Mask or no mask?

If you go to town right now (half empty), every third person is wearing a dust mask or a surgical mask. Will this protect you from Covid-19? According to WHO, healthy people do not need masks, masks are most necessary for those who are asymptotic (coughing and sneezing) or taking care of someone with Covid-19. My problem with masks is that most people are ignoring the guidelines on how they are to be used. Masks are mostly for single use only, there are not meant to be worn the whole day and used repeatedly. Let me put it to you like this, the gloves you’re wearing are a surface and if you unknowingly touch a surface that someone with Covid-19 has coughed or sneezed on, then your gloves are contaminated. When you adjust your mask, you transfer the virus from your gloves to your mask, the mask is on your face – boom! Even worse is the tendency for most people to eat with their gloves on, sometimes being over precautionary actually makes the situation worse.

Screening versus testing

There are thermal scanners at most points of entry into the country (including HKIA airport), thermal scanners have been used before as the first line of defense against SARS and during the last Ebola outbreak, they detect elevated body temperature. So anyone with flu like symptoms is not making it past the scanner, the problem though is that while the virus is in the incubation period you can actually make it past the scanner or if you’re not showing any symptoms. Scanners don’t test for Covid-19, they’re simply there to easily pick up those who are already sick. Ideally it would be nice to test all travelers coming into the country, but rapid kits are expensive, and clinical tests are more expensive. Hopefully with the donation of 1000 rapid kits from our all-weather friend the People’s republic of China and a 30-day travel ban, our testing capability is at a level that will allows us to contain this first outbreak of Covid-19 in Namibia. 

Suspected versus confirmed

In the information age, verifying before passing something multimedia content on is critical. Videos of people having epileptic attacks are being passed off as evidence of how deadly Covid-19 is. Anything that you share on your social media in relation to Covid-19 should come from a reliable source, especially with regards to the number of confirmed versus suspected cases. Even newspapers are falling victim to this, numerous headlines have read ‘3 more cases of Corona’, only for the SUSPECTED cases to be dismissed when the test results come back negative. Do not share anything that will insight panic, especially if your information cannot be verified. 

Conspiracy theories

An African man cannot die an unexpected death without there being any ties to witchcraft, and equally, a mysterious illness cannot pop up without it being linked to wild theories. Pragmatism would say, trust what the WHO says about the origin of Covid-19, but people aren’t always pragmatic. There are theories that Covid-19 is lab made and it was released by accident (Hollywood theory), another that it was sent by the aliens, the most outlandish I have heard is that it is one of the seven plagues. 

So, will Namibia survive Covid-19? Well, we now trust hand sanitizer more than we trust God, so we should be fine. I mean we have survived worse things; we have survived that OTHER virus.