Review
Konstantin S. Sharov,
PhD, Senior Lecturer, Moscow State University,
Senior Researcher, Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Address: 26 Vavilova st, Moscow 119334, Russia
E-mail: const.sharov@mail.ru
Article ID: 011040018
Published online: 4 June 2020
HANDLE: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12656/thebeacon.3.011040018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55269/thebeacon.3.011040018
Quoting (Chicago style): Sharov, Konstantin. 2020. “Covid-19 Pandemic: A Survival Challenge to Humanity Unseen Thus Far or Déjà Vu Experience?” Beacon J Stud Ideol Ment Dimens 3, 011040018. https://doi.org/10.55269/thebeacon.3.011040018
Language: English
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Despite SARS-CoV-2 being a closest genetic relation of SARS-CoV that caused SARS 2002-2004 pandemic, its spread was not managed to contain at the very beginning in China, as it was done with SARS-CoV. Worldwide dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 ensued and gave rise to the current media and political infodemic. The virus is mainly thought of as a something novel, unseen thus far by humanity. Our brief note reveals the real situation and debunks this myth. A concise comparative ecological and epidemiological analysis is performed, where COVID-19 pandemic is opposed to eleven major pandemics the humanity survived, with the major epide-miological characteristics are taken into account. SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrated to be one of the least dangerous viruses in terms of fatality and contagiousness. A hypothesis is proposed that rapid spread of the virus around the world and high percentage of the infected persons, are mainly accounted for by purely social and demographic factors, not by epidemiological nor ecological ones. Key words: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus pandemic, media myths, Internet, infodemic, fake news, false news, informational panic, globalisation
Since the fourteenth century, humanity survived the times of truly catastrophic pandemics that are incomparable with the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in many aspects. We provide a concise analysis of this situation in our mini-review. Comparing SARS-CoV-2 with aetiological agents of great pandemics of the past, COVID-19 is in no way a new epidemiologic threat that humanity supposedly never faced. SARS-CoV-2 is by no means a “terrible” virus that “kills everything breathing in an instant.” This consideration almost puts an end to speculations about a possible biological weapon.
Exceptional COVID-19 death toll rates determined for Italy, Spain and New York state (as of the beginning of April 2020), should not draw our attention away from the fact that plague (both bubonic and pneumonic) remains a pandemic that eradicated the largest number of human beings from the planet thus far. During the Black Death of the 14th century, European civilisation may have vanished from the Earth completely: little villages got empty, and such large cities as London counted 1 human of 10 after the end of the pandemic. The fatality rate of pneumonic plague (50-70%) may seem 1-1.2 orders higher than the world average mortality rate of COVID-19 (5%) even at the first glance. Moreover, Far East plague outbreak of 1910-1911 is unique in its fatality rate being 100 per cent. That means no infected person survived during that pandemic, and no other epidemic in the world ever had such lethality. Spanish influenza H1N1 was so disastrous, even fatal, for the humanity already devastated by the World War I atrocities, that some regions of the Earth counted losses of one third of their total population.
Contagiousness measured as r0 (zero-patient potential) provided by almost all health organisations including Health Department of Moscow, is a very indistinct and ambiguous indicator for any diseases with additional transmission paths to the direct contact / droplet route. For H5N1 and Yellow fever, that metric loses its sense at all. Such diseases as SARS, COVID-19, H1N1 (both Spanish influenza and swine flu) include also the surface transmission (through touches). But surfaces move, change, remain inconstant, and r0 value distribution becomes comparable with the r0 value itself (2.5-5 range for SARS and COVID-19 is equal to the lower limit 2.5). Statistically, it means that the numbers provided by many health organisations on SARS-CoV-2 contagiousness, are mainly unreliable.
A comprehensive systems approach would have combined international capacities to develop a vaccine and to produce in sufficient quantities, instead of focussing on “financial cooperation“ in order to dampen the economic consequences of uncoordinated lockdowns. The history of the political and economic reactions to COVID-19 just demonstrates how utopian the idea of an “organised humanity“ is.
Whatever quarantine or self-isolation public measures might be in different countries and legal systems, they will not contain the virus transmitted by droplets from human to human – it is theoretically and practically impossible. The virus was not isolated at the very beginning, as SARS-CoV was in 2004. Therefore, the only solution is time. The reasonability of the healthcare prevention and containment measures consists in the fact that, for some time, COVID-19 disease will generate a definite number of patients with serious atypical pneumonia symptomatic picture, and they will need ventilator hospital treatment. The healthcare system of any country should be quickly reorganised in such a way to possess additional capacity to accommodate all such patients.
© 2020 Konstantin S. Sharov. Licensee The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
