Have we decided to live with this corona thing?

Bernard Tabaire

Juma is a reliable motor vehicle mechanic. He will not always offer an opinion on things that are not cars in need of repair. He will, however, speak up when prompted.

A couple of months ago, Juma brought back my jalopy after banging it back into some shape acceptable to our traffic police. We had to drive in the same car to some place.
Juma, where is your mask?
I left it at the garage.
Okay, have this mask and cover your soft parts on the head. I keep some for crazy people like you. And, here, sanitise as well before you sit with me in the same car. By the way, you don’t seem serious about coronavirus. Who do you think you are?

Naye, boss, we have to live our lives without undue inconvenience. This corona will kill some people, others will survive. It can never kill us all. That is the reality. Is there a disease that has ever finished off all the people of the world? Never. So why take already poor people back to poverty with all these restrictions? Don’t make the people’s misery worse.

I did not engage Juma. His quiet voice suggested a man firm in his thinking on the pandemic.
But was Juma somehow propagating the idea of herd immunity? According to Wikipedia, herd immunity is “a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity”.

The WHO chief scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, put it this way recently: “[Coronavirus] is a highly transmissible virus. We think it needs at least 60 to 70 per cent of the population to have immunity to really break the chain of transmission. If you allow this to happen naturally, it will take a long time, of course, but more importantly, it’s going to do a lot of collateral damage.

So even if one per cent of people who get infected are ultimately going to die, then this can add up to a huge number of people, if we look at the global population. And that is why we believe it’s not a good idea to try to achieve herd immunity by just letting the infection run wild in the population and infect a lot of people and that we should talk about herd immunity in the context of a vaccine.”

Maybe Juma and others like him just gave up, come what may. After all they have “seen enough” in Uganda and they are still standing, and those who died were collateral damage. They have seen war, famine, disease (HIV/Aids), economic collapse, generalised violence. The whole shebang basically.

In South Africa, experts are wondering whether our prevalence of poverty and disease in Africa may be the thing saving us from the coronavirus damage that has unfolded elsewhere. “Viruses spread more effectively in over-crowded neighbourhoods where it is harder for people to self-isolate...,” the BBC said.

It is poor people who live in overcrowded areas, mostly slums and other such informal settlements.
Now, the BBC reported, South African scientists are looking for evidence that people who had been “widely infected by other coronaviruses — those, for instance, responsible for many common colds … might enjoy some degree of immunity to Covid-19”.

Apparently, the “challenges that have so often held back poorer communities might now work in their favour”.
I am thinking of Juma. He works in a crowded area. He lives in a crowded area. He barely gets by. And he has some ideas on Covid-19.

Mr Tabaire is a media trainer and commentator on public affairs based in Kampala. [email protected]
Twitter:@btabaire