The COVID-19 (2019 Coronavirus) outbreak was set loose in Wuhan, China in December of 2019 reportedly in a market where wild life animals (a weird assortment of bats, snakes, monkeys, rats, cockroaches and what not) were sold for the food fetish of the Chinese people. The world has had pay a heavy price for the radical diet choice of an eclectic nation and what we are seeing has no precedent, wielding a heavy toll on both global public health and the economy which has grinded to a halt, taking along with it our hopes for a better and happier 2020.
The number of infections worldwide of Covid-19 is appalling and runs in the 277,000’s while the death toll has risen to nearly 11,500 as of 21st March 2020. Developed and developing nations ranging from Singapore, European member states, UK, USA, India, Iran, Turkey, Brazil have been dealt a heavy blow and have closed all frontiers to passenger entry. Some have been spared the brunt of the epidemic by enforcing quite early on draconian measures to counter the assault of this dangerous virus on its public health system.
Some scientific background is necessary on the Coronavirus in order to understand its context properly. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause illnesses ranging widely in severity. The first known severe illness caused by a coronavirus emerged with the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China. A second outbreak of severe illness began in 2012 in Saudi Arabia with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
Conspiracy theories posit that the COVID-19 was engineered in the lab. However, preliminary scientific evidence shows that the virus is a product of natural evolution. The primary reason justifying this is that the virus doesn’t appear to have been mounted on a backbone of a known virus which was known to cause illness. A scientific paper in the journal Nature Medicine concludes that the virus is a product of natural evolution, and resembled a class of coronaviruses known to breed in a class of bats and pangolins. It is more or less certain that the virus moved from a non-human host to human biology through mutation.
Whether it became pathogenic in the non-human host or in the human population is still unclear but we do know that it has all the elements of a natural virus. Apparently, it exploits a certain weakness in human organisms (a so-called ‘cleavage site’) and a receptor binding domain which causes it to bind very effectively to human host cells. It is also believed that it also binds effectively to receptors in human lung cells, explaining why a respiratory syndrome is such a prominent feature of the infection.
So far potential treatments for the infection revolves around anti-retroviral drugs used to combat HIV and a drug for malaria while the latest news is that a flu drug in Japan (called Avigan) shows promise in treating the viral infection. Patients in Shenzhen who had tested positive for COVID-19 and who were given the drug got a negative virus test back four days later. That was compared with a negative test about 11 days later for patients not on the drug, according to news reports. In that same trial, lung conditions (as shown in X-rays) improved in about 91% of patients taking Avigan, compared with just 62% who weren't taking the antiviral drug. The main difficulty is getting the drugs approved for use amidst clinical trials which are already underway. Very recently, the US President Donald Trump announced that the FDA has approved a drug called Chloroquine as a treatment for the virus, indicating that it has shown a resolute level of efficacy. Meanwhile, a vaccine for the virus has also already started testing and will await FDA approval before being commercialised.
There is a very significant time lag between finding treatment alternatives, developing a vaccine and performing clinical trials to ensure they are safe to use on patients. After all, we do not want serious and potentially lethal side effects to the use of either a drug or a vaccine. This gives the virus a window of opportunity to wreak its damage, further weakening health systems worldwide, which is already sagging under the weight of such existing health dilemmas.
The Singaporean response – a lesson in health systems preparedness
Singapore has shown great resilience and tact in tackling this epidemic. It has employed techniques of containment such as self-isolation, quarantine and aggressive contact-tracing very early on. It has elaborate special standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and had developed extensive preparedness to tackle the problem head-on, armed with its previous experience with H1N1, SARS and MERS. Singapore premier, Lee Hsien Loong, had the strategy of devoting medical resources only to the critically ill and the aged, and hence was able to achieve a zero death rate. The Singaporean government posted detailed accounting for how many people had been tested for the virus, and the locations and natures of those people’s social contacts. It is worth noting that Singapore was one of the first countries to implement travel ban from countries who had become hotspots of transmission, although one of the pillars of its economy is tourism. People in Singapore get information from multiple government websites, frequently updated, as well as from a government WhatsApp account. In this way, people obtain reliable and trustworthy information from a trusted source precluding the dangers of misinformation through fake news. People get their temperatures taken before they can enter most buildings, including businesses, schools, gyms, and government agencies, because fever is one of the main symptoms of Covid-19.
In Singapore, they were able effectively contain the virus without imposing a national lockdown which would hamper their economy. They preferred the ‘middle way’ so to speak, and so far it’s working. Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea all share the characteristic of using their experiences with prior outbreaks to build a system—and then sustaining it. None of them had to deal with the fear of being a first-mover, of being the first city or country to institute seemingly severe countermeasures. Their countermeasures were already in place, waiting to be reactivated. I believe the world has a lot to learn from the Singaporean effort in fighting this pandemic.
Technology in this fight
From a technological point of view, the world is finding innovative ways of keeping society going. Certain countries like France are instituting e-consultations with their family doctors who assess symptoms and issue prescriptions on a dedicated platform connecting all pharmacies. Patients can then go to pharmacies and buy their medicines without the need to go to hospitals and clinics, which can dedicate and repurpose their resources to fight the epidemic. This in essence may be the accelerator for Telemedicine, a concept that hasn’t taken over as such. Geo-tracking on phones, can also streamline the tedious task of contact-tracing, augmenting manual efforts to trace infected patients’ whereabouts to find as many people with whom they had direct contact and who could have been infected. In South Korea, this strategy helped identify many of the contacts of members of a Seoul church that formed the first major cluster of infections in the country. These types of real-time data can rapidly provide a snapshot of where and how fast the disease might be spreading, to distribute health care workers and equipment where they’re needed most.
Flattening the surge of an infectious disease also requires action, and that’s where the advice gets muddier — but also where Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) can provide clarity. Deep learning (a technique in AI) can analyze the care that every COVID-19 patient receives and AI can generate the best treatment strategies. We are seeing the use of AI to study big repositories of patient data to identify people and communities at highest risk of the virus by using variables that include not just medical history but also lifestyle and socioeconomic factors such as access to income, stable housing and transportation. Real-time data from Hospital Information Systems (HIS) could potentially be used to predict and anticipate future outbreak hotspots in communities and thus redirect containment efforts in a localized fashion expediently. AI is also being used to model the spread of the virus worldwide. One major future application of AI would be to sift through thousands of chemical compounds algorithms that make medical drugs and analyse their effectiveness against the Coronavirus, helping to identify a potential treatment as soon as possible. I suppose if we could develop a 3D visual model of the virus and run it against medical algorithms, we could effectively engineer drugs to fight against it.
An economic meltdown ahead
The UN’s trade and development agency, UNTCAD envisages a slowdown in the global economy to under 2% for 2020 and will cost the world over $ 1 trillion in GDP. Financial markets have been in free-fall mode as concerns over supply-chain interruptions from China and oil price uncertainly continue to worry economists and financial analysts. Supply shortages are expected to affect a number of sectors due to panic buying, increased usage of goods, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to fight the pandemic, and disruption to factories and logistics. Seeing as things are going on right now, in Europe for instance, the latter is almost certain to slip into a recession as even its powerhouse Germany seems fragile in the fight against Covid-19.
Governments worldwide have realised the need to cushion that fall with emergency measures such as stimulus packages, and in effect prevent a depression. The United States has lowered Federal Reserve interest rates to a record low in an attempt to let banking institutions and firms borrow money to replenish the cash flows required to pay their employees and support business operations to the extent possible. Central Banks are lowering repo rates in order to enable banking and financial institutions to remain afloat and to sustain national sectors of the economy which are most at risk in this economic downturn. Businesses are turning to the concept of Teleworking which hinges on technologies such as virtual organisations, cloud based information systems and e-business suites in order to keep businesses going.
A spiritual perspective
During these troubled times, it would be comforting for people of faith to turn themselves to prayer instead of giving in to fear. Engaging in prayer and trusting the timely intervention of a divine power inspires faith, liberates positive emotional feelings and thus increases immunity. The primary reason for this crisis is human consumption of animals which (spiritually) are not meant for human consumption. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, eating bats or pangolins is dangerous because these animals can harbour deadly pathogens which our bodies are not programmed to fight. However, it is essential to approach this from a different perspective: a spiritual perspective. This will enable us to go right to the source of the problem and understand its existential cause.
I am a follower of Vaishnavism which centres around the worship of Lord Vishnu as the Supreme. Its sacred texts comprise the Bhagavad-Gita, the Vedas and the Srimad Bhagavatam (Bhagavata Purana), all of which strongly emphasize that animals are part of God’s creation, His differentiated parts and parcels and are not to be killed for food by man. The main reason the sacred texts advance is that they, just like us, are spiritual souls confined to a material body and that they, also, are undergoing a process of evolution of consciousness. As such killing them deprives of their chance to develop and thrive, and this heinous act rebounds on us, wreaking mass havoc on human society. The equation is life for life. As such, slaughterhouses as well as assorted wild life farming industries around the world represent the nefarious source from where springs the evil that besieges human society.
Spiritually, no other current practice of mankind is blocking our own evolution, our own thriving, our own liberation. The practice of wild life farming as an industry, and by extension, any form of animal farming on an industrial scale ‘a l’outrance’ continuously generates waves of mass karma, in the form of tidal soliton waves. One of the consequences of such mass karma is the 2019 Coronavirus epidemic. The whole material civilization is brought to a halt by one single stroke of Maya (illusion)!
Addressing the real problem: our lack of spiritual vision
Since the dawn of the modern system of education, spiritual knowledge and culture, which represents a much needed form of alternative vision of life itself, has been banished and relegated to the ranks of myth and mirth. The Western colonial armada on spiritual traditions such as the Vedic tradition of India has almost nearly succeeded in exterminating the roots of Indian thought and wisdom. After the British colonial rule, Indians themselves became self-loathing, being downtrodden by the ‘legacy’ of the British system of education. Indians after all were seen as uncivilized. Today, by and large, it can be argued that our civilization, heavily influenced by Western mindsets, has all the tell-tale signs of degradation and animalism. We are actively destroying our single habitat owing to an economic model based on unchecked consumption that endangers our very existence. Our recent efforts to redress the curve is inefficient at best.
Most of what we call science today in fact has definite Vedic roots and I have expounded on these in my recent book published internationally, The Spiritual Science of the Vedas. Out of wisdom, the Vedas didn’t divorce analytical science from religion and philosophy in order to preclude our culture of knowledge from spiritual anaemia, which clouds our intellect and blinds our vision. We are unable to conceive of deeper spiritual truths. The Coronavirus pandemic lays bare our vulnerability to the vagaries of material nature, a ruthless energy which functions under the direction of Lord Vishnu Himself, in order to either nurture or chastise us – in accordance with our actions. We are not the epitome of evolution, we are not the most advanced species, we are merely a cog in the wheel of nature. If we threaten the functioning of the wheel itself, we will have to bow down to being redundant cogs. Humanity is, today, on the brink of extinction. Yet, we go about our everyday lives as if “everything will be alright”!
This brings me to the topic of vegetarianism. Albert Einstein himself, one of our most celebrated scientists and philosophers, opined that nothing will help the world more than the adoption of a vegetarian diet. This will sanitize our food chains, edify our attitudes vis-à-vis our animal brethren and may even save us from the fallout of global warming. You see, the animal farming industry is water-intensive and belches out greenhouse gas emissions in huge proportions such that it is sheer madness to continue to justify this outdated mode of human nutrition. Fruits, vegetables, grains and milk are far more nutritious alternatives and present virtually no health risk. Eating meat presents a public health hazard (swine flu, Avian flu, mad cow disease, SARS, MERS all have animal origins) of the likes of the Coronavirus and is most certainly detrimental to our own health, also exacerbating health hazards such as the incidence and prevalence of cancer.
When will we learn humility? When will we learn to reject the modern dogma that we need ‘animal protein’ to remain healthy – a very successful marketing fad sold to us wholesale by the food industry! China has taken it to a whole new level: chicken, fish and eggs are no more enough: now we need to eat bats, snakes and monkey brains ! If it’s eaten alive, they find it more ‘exciting’! Has the yardstick of humanity fallen so low?!
Nevertheless, the paradigm shift we require is essentially a spiritual one. However, only when our consciousness changes will we be able to realise our folly. This requires a spiritual solution which serves to purify and elevate our consciousness so that we can behave as real humans, full of compassion and wisdom. It behoves us to seek guidance and enlightenment from bona fide sources of spiritual teachings and to practice authoritative spiritual processes such as the chanting of God’s Holy Names, celebrated as the ultimate practice which can petition God’s favour upon us. In all religious traditions, God’s names are celebrated as most holy and irrespective of our religious affiliation, God’s has revealed Himself and His Names equally in every tradition. In this moment of lockdown, let us all remain in solitude, not merely to self-isolate but also to self-realize.
Nithin Prakash Gukhool is an Associate Member of the British Computer Society and works at the Ministry of Health & Wellness in Mauritius. He takes a vivid interest in public health issues and specialises in technology solutions for the health sector. His acclaimed book, The Spiritual Science of the Vedas, can be purchased as an ebook (on Amazon Kindle and other online platforms) and as a paperback (on www.lulu.com) which ships worldwide.
The author page can be viewed at thescienceofkrsna.blogspot.com