COVID-19: challenges, Dilemmas and Initiatives

Dr. Sinha MA Sayeed
Creations, destructions and reformations in various mood and modes have been going on unceasingly in the universes and the Sun being one of the members of such reality needs to be tolerant as usual. Therefore, Sun star may or may not be so disturbed and worried when its Earth planet is upset and convulsed at the guerrilla attacks and blazes of an invisible infectious disease smaller than bacteria titled Coronavirus, also identified as COVID-19 by WHO, which has through its Coronavirus Disease(COVID-19) Dashboard in the interim confirmed worldwide 6 million cases with more than 3, 77000 deaths and 3 million recoveries engulfing 216 countries, areas or territories. First defined in detail in the 1960s, the coronavirus gets its name from a distinctive Latin corona (itself a borrowing from Greek κορώνη korṓnē, "garland, wreath), meaning ‘Crown’ of sugary-proteins, that project from the envelope surrounding the particle.Concerning the advents of Coronavirus, COVID 19, two propositions are imperious here one is Coronavirus is just a kind of recurring punishments from Allah, Creator of universes, visible and invisible, and other being a non-natural biological maneuver made at a laboratory for definite purposes, which might have been leaked due to faulty handling therein.
If the former prevails over the later then we have no choice but to offer prayers to Allah time after time and take fresh vow to overhaul, rectify, sanctify and galvanize ourselves from respective beliefs and standpoints. In that case, human efforts, Himalayan or Oceanic, appear cumbersome since there cannot be a battle opposing Allah.
Coronavirus shall say goodbye to the world only after its assigned targets have been fulfilled. This departure may either be auto or through human devices in the form of medicines and vaccinations and so on provided Allah wish so. Allah's punishment is time-bound as evidenced from the past occurrences, notably contained in the numerous religious texts, scriptures and documents of the earth planet
To be more specific, referring to the arrogant people during the period of Musa(Peace be upon him)‘, Allah say in holy Quran ‘So, We sent on them the flood, the locusts, the lice, the frogs, and the blood (a succession of) manifest signs, yet they remained arrogant, and they were of those people who were Mujrimun (sinner and criminal people)’, verse 133, Surah 7 in Quran, translated into English language by Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud al-Hilali and Dr. Mohammad Mushin Khan, printed by King Fahd Complex, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Spirits of the messages are same under diverse landscapes in various religious books such as Injil(Bible) with 2.2 billion followers, Tura(Judaism) with 15 million followers, Jabur almost extinct, Vedas with 1 billion followers Tripitaka with 376 million followers, Guru Granth Sahib with 23 million followers, Kitáb-i-Aqdas with 7 million followers, Agam Sutras with 4.2 million followers, Kojiki with 4 million followers and Avesta with 2.6 million followers while Quran with 1.7 billion followers..
In case of the later that is alternative proposition, sufferings shall continue sine die, not time-bound, because such device shall be used as weapon against the opponent(s). Atom bombs were used in world war two by US in an attempt to put an end to commanding Japan. Chemical weapons were used in Iraq and Syria in recent past. Here the moot point is supremacy of power over one or few or all. America is proud of ‘American dream’; India feels delighted with ‘India doctrine’ even Bangladesh is desperate to move with ‘Bangladesh dream’, also called “Sonar Bangla’, Japan is still thrilled with Shintoism with a dream of revival of ‘Hegemonistic days’, France is at present perturbed with a dream of sustainability of secularism, Fragmented Russia under Putin is pragmatically emotional enough with a dream of ‘new Russia’ while United Kingdom is verily at a loss as to what to do to in the coming days if she is determined to not face continuous down trends of ‘British dominance’. And China with a dazzling history of 5000 years is also advancing fast with “China dream (Xiantia). Hegel opined that ‘leaderships of the world move from one center to another in the context of time, space and dimension’. It is widely publicized that 21th century belongs to Asia and WB, IMF, ADB are of the views that China shall take the chair in the end by 2050. Such projections conform China dream to get implemented by 2050. On all counts, ball is rolling towards China.
Question arises, is China behind inventing such coronavirus to be used as ‘invisible weapon’ to reach its goal by 2050. Few states prominently US President Donald Trump stick to this proposition avowedly, even going further he identified the virus as ‘Wuhan virus’, a pejorative term indeed. He also threatened China to face portentous feedbacks. Charging WHO for carrying china’s purposes, Trump meanwhile suspended funding WHO. If truth be told, coronavirus hit US mind-bogglingly causing increasing confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries without a day break. As of 3rd June 2020, there we find 1,798,330 confirmed cases, 105,008 deaths and 300000 recoveries. China vehemently opposed such uncorroborated allegations. Real picture is not clear at all because UK and French scientists recently detected the origins in France. These may be fallacious in the end. Whatever the arguments and counter arguments look like, crude reality tells, world is currently being hunted by pandemic coronavirus.

coronavirus-microscopic

In-between these two diametrically opposing propositions, there we find a third one, which is, in fact, blend of the two propositions implying that, whatever the causes of birth and escalation of COVID-15 seem to be, real approach to face and win the corona must be based on synchronized pragmatic initiatives, strategies, all sorts of medical devices counting non-vaccination and vaccination medications and onward prayers from respective faiths and dogmas to the Creator of Universes, observable and/or non-observable. This third one echoes the voices of most of the peoples and political leaders in the world with both pessimism and optimism. Markedly attention-grabbing are supplications of Indian Prime Minister Modi, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Pierre James Trudeau, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Some illustrations may deserve to be recalled here.
Scott Morrison, Australia’s first evangelical Christian prime minister, prays for Australia and commits nation to God amid coronavirus (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/01/scott-morrison-prays-for-australia-and-commits-nation-to-god-amid-coronavirus-crisis)
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on 26 March 2020 with tears running down his face as stands in front of a microphone voiced “We have lost control,we have killed the epidemic physically and mentally. Can’t understand what more we can do, all solutions are exhausted on ground. Our only hope remains up in the Sky, God rescue your people (https://africacheck.org/fbcheck/we-have-lost-control-photo-not-of-italys-prime-minister-during)
Indian PM Narendra Modi while releasing a video message to the nation on 3 April 2020 asked people to use light to challenge the darkness spread by corona. He said: ‘Friends, in our country the citizenry are considered a manifestation of God itself. Therefore, when the nation is fighting such a huge battle, one should from time to time keep experiencing this collective superpower manifesting itself in the form of the people. This experience boosts our morale, gives us direction and clarity, a common aim as well as the energy to pursue the same.
.Friends, amidst the darkness spread by the Corona pandemic, we must continuously progress towards light and hope. We must continuously strive to take those of us most affected, our poor brothers and sisters, from disappointment to hope. We must end the darkness and uncertainty emanating from the crisis, by progressing towards light and certainty. We must defeat the deep darkness of the crisis, by spreading the glory of light in all four directions.
One must never cross the ‘Lakshman Rekha’ (In modern Indian phraseology, refers to a strict convention or a rule, never to be broken, which is close to the American Bright-line rule. It often denotes to the ethical limits of an action, traversing which may lead to undesirable consequences) of Social Distancing. Social Distancing should not be breached under any circumstances. This is the only panacea to break the chain of Corona viruses (https://www.livemint.com/news/india/pm-modi-s-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-full-text-11585886771546.html). Above and beyond, Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina from the very outbreak of Corona has persistently been advising the people of various faiths and folds to pray to Allah from their respective ends.
COVID-19 is faced with three acute landscapes, namely necessity, reality and dilemma. On the one hand social distancing and physical distancing must move together and if a need arises, lockdown is inevitable since it is the best method so far. If these two or three modes go together, instantly arise the questions of having food and other necessaries simultaneously, which give birth to a kind of ’horns of dilemmas eventually. Such dilemma is so acute that makes the lockdown sooner or later a futile exercise. Developed states have shown excellence mostly but the situation in developing countries are not so promising. Difference is, they are following models strictly whereas in developing countries like Bangladesh model are working not well due to reasons, mostly social, economic and religious in particular. Above all, shortage of PPEs and Test Kits, heart of the WHO’s message ‘test, test, test’ made the overall scenarios most distressing. Landscapes have become graver at the overall closures leading to collapses of economic activities and frames across the world. In such bewildering situations, policy-makers, leaders and statesmen, at the denial of valued experts’ opinions, are desperately experimenting loose-lockdown or no-lockdown, but sad it is that consequences typically end in reappearance of COVID-19. Europe and USA bear glaring examples.
Post-coronavirus global landscapes, to be sure, shall not stay the same. Several changes in the form of reforms, reshuffles, restructures and remodels fall upon, compelling or not, the hemispheres of economics, science and technology, politics, administration, industries, trade and commerce, transports and so forth. Social unrests, chaos and disorders may turn violent positioning democracies at peril necessarily. All sorts of predictions, published or being published are mostly revolve around likelihood of inflation to recession to depression, if not going up to stagflation so early. GDPs both statewide and worldwide by this time started falling decidedly. World Health Organization forecast inescapability of famine causing deaths from hungers millions of people in the densely populated areas mostly in developing countries.
World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley told the U.N. Security Council in April ’821 million people go to bed hungry every night all over the world, a further 135 million people are facing “crisis levels of hunger or worse,” and a new World Food Program analysis shows that as a result of COVID-19 an additional 130 million people “could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. He also added, as the world is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, it is also “on the brink of a hunger pandemic” that could lead to “multiple famines of biblical proportions” within a few months if immediate action isn’t taken’. TechNavio. a UK-based research and advisory company that focuses on providing a market research, trends, analysis and reports to various industries, suggests three forecast scenarios optimistic, probable, and pessimistic considering the impact of COVID-19.
In an article cited in Private Military Company (PMC), US National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute within National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, in its chapter ‘Origin and Spread of COVID-19: A Review of Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) it has been focused ‘In December 2019, adults in Wuhan, capital city of Hubei province and a major transportation hub of China started presenting to local hospitals with severe pneumonia of unknown cause. Many of the initial cases had a common exposure to the Huanan wholesale seafood market that also traded live animals. The surveillance system (put into place after the SARS outbreak) was activated and respiratory samples of patients were sent to reference labs for etiologic investigations. On December 31st 2019, China notified the outbreak to the World Health Organization and on 1st January the Huanan sea food market was closed. On 7th January the virus was identified as a coronavirus that had ‘;95% homology with the bat coronavirus and’ 70% similarity with the SARS-CoV. Environmental samples from the Huanan sea food market also tested positive, signifying that the virus originated from there. The number of cases started increasing exponentially, some of which did not have exposure to the live animal market, suggestive of the fact that human-to-human transmission was occurring].The first fatal case was reported on 11th Jan 2020. The massive migration of Chinese during the Chinese New Year fueled the epidemic. Cases in other provinces of China, other countries (Thailand, Japan and South Korea in quick succession) were reported in people who were returning from Wuhan. Transmission to healthcare workers caring for patients was described on 20th Jan, 2020. By 23rd January, the 11 million population of Wuhan was placed under lock down with restrictions of entry and exit from the region. Soon this lock down was extended to other cities of Hubei province. Cases of COVID-19 in countries outside China were reported in those with no history of travel to China suggesting that local human-to-human transmission was occurring in these countries. Airports in different countries including India put in screening mechanisms to detect symptomatic
people returning from China and placed them in isolation and testing them for COVID-19. Soon it was apparent that the infection could be transmitted from asymptomatic people and also before onset of symptoms. Therefore, countries including India who evacuated their citizens from Wuhan through special flights or had travelers returning from China placed all people symptomatic or otherwise in isolation for 14 days and tested them for the virus.
Cases continued to increase exponentially and modelling studies reported an epidemic doubling time of 1.8 d. in fact on the 12th of February, China changed its definition of confirmed cases to include patients with negative/pending molecular tests but with clinical, radiologic and epidemiologic features of COVID-19 leading to an increase in cases by 15,000 in a single day. As of 03 June 2020 there were 6,272,098 cases and 379,044 deaths worldwide and and 1 international conveyance (696, in the cruise ship Diamond Princess parked off the coast of Japan) have been reported. It is important to note that while the number of new cases has reduced in China lately, they have increased exponentially in other countries including USA, Italy, Spain, UK and Iran. India, which had reported only 3 cases till 02 March 2020, has also seen a sudden spurt in cases. By 03 June 2020, there have been 208,404 cases confirmed, 5,833 people have died and 100,411 people have recovered from the virus mostly in Delhi, Jaipur and Agra in Italian tourists and their contacts. In Bangladesh total cases detected are 55,140 deaths 746 while 11,590 have recovered.
These numbers are possibly an underestimate of the infected and dead due to limitations of surveillance and testing. Though the SARS-CoV-2 originated from bats, the intermediary animal through which it crossed over to humans is uncertain. Pangolins and snakes are the current suspects (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7090728/) International Labour Organization, ILO, in its COVID-19 and the world of work ‘Global impact and policy recommendations on 18 May 2020 noted as follows:
Background
In June 2019, the ILO’s 187 member States adopted the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work, calling on the Organization to pursue “with unrelenting vigor its constitutional mandate for social justice by further developing its human centered approach to the future of work, which puts workers’ rights and the needs, aspirations and rights of all people at the heart of economic, social and environmental policies”.
The ILO’s policy framework to respond to the COVID-19 crisis
The present crisis is quite different from previous ones. The impact of the lockdowns adopted to mitigate the pandemic has vastly surpassed that of the initial trade shocks and of the travel restrictions introduced soon after the outbreak (these restrictions had significant but mainly sector specific impacts).
Pillar 1 Stimulating the economy and employment
The COVID-19 crisis impacts on both the demand and the supply sides of the labour market, and it has major implications for the goal of ensuring full employment and decent work. In particular, the crisis is pushing many families into poverty and increasing existing inequalities.
Pillar 2 Supporting enterprises, jobs and incomes
Efforts to contain the spread of the virus have disrupted production flows, caused demand for non-essential goods and services to plummet, and forced enterprises around the world to suspend or scale down operations.
Pillar 3 Protecting workers in the workplace
While many people have lost their jobs and income, many others continue to work. Making sure that work can be performed safely is a shared priority.
Pillar 4 Relying on social dialogue for solutions
The lessons from previous global crises have shown that governments alone cannot address the challenges stemming from strong shocks.
Conclusion
COVID-19 continues to spread across the world with a trajectory difficult to predict. The health, humanitarian and socio-economic policies we implement will determine how quickly and strongly we recover (https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/coronavirus/impacts-and-responses/lang–en/index.htm)’
Curiously enough, the global distraction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in several sways on the environment and the climate. The Spartan travel has caused many regions to experience a drop in air pollution. In China, lockdowns and other trials resulted in a 25 per cent reduction in carbon emissions and 50 per cent reduction in nitrogen oxides emissions, which one Earth systems scientist estimated may have saved at least 77,000 lives over two months. Nevertheless, the eruption has also provided cover for illegal activities such as deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and poaching in Africa, hindered environmental diplomacy efforts and generated economic fallout that some forecast will dawdle investment in green energy technologies.
COVID-19 should atmospheres of Locke and Roseau’s state of nature with onward march of democracies, welfare economics, religions, fundamentals of ethos, moralities and values, sciences and technologies. From practical standpoints, challenges, dilemmas and initiatives must have to be put in a single box so that fusions get meaning fruitfully. To tackle all these meaningfully and demonstratively, leaderships and managements and, to say more aggressively statesmanship are conditions precedent. And so, it is time to discontinue blame blame/conspiracy theories at the same time to stop beating the drums of war encompassing sea, land and air. Both USA and China have to come closer and work together to survive, sustain and continue formidably in chorus, confronting and defeating manifold challenges at the same time digging opportunities created by Pandemic COVID-19 and, thus pass messages of rejuvenated life in national, regional and global perspectives. Nothing to be worried at all, they will have enough time to combat coupled with matching approaches and strategies for supremacy over each other and the world at large being not oblivious of the saying ‘Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights’ (Friedrich Hegel). Hope and believe medical scientists shall be in a position to produce medicines and vaccines shortly. May Allah bless us, save us, protect us, and defend us under the circumstances, decisive or not.
(Dr. Sinha MA Sayeed (titled ‘Global voice’ for the book O United Nations), writer, columnist, public speaker and Chairman of Leadership Studies foundation, LSP, at sinha_sayeed@yahoo.com)