By Olukorede Yishau
Salman Rushdie was keeping me company with his ‘Satanic Verses’. But his hold on me last Saturday was not enough to ‘overthrow’ the bad feeling that comes with the uncertainties associated with a time like this.
My condition became worse when I watched the video of a COVID-19 inspired single by Sulaimon Adio Adekunle aka Malaika. Tears welled up in my eyes and a question agitated my mind: When will we get back our lives?
I also wished I could turn back the hands of time regarding my initial lackadaisical attitude to social distancing. My emotion peaked when I realised that I could have been positive like Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai, or Prince Charles, or any of the other over 600,000 people affected by the unusual virus globally.
Reading Professor Biodun Jeyifo’s offering last Sunday also drove home the message to me, largely because until March 8, I was outside Nigeria. Between February 14 and March 8, I passed through the valley of the shadow of death: I was in Paris; I was in Manchester; I was in Liverpool; I was in Houston; I was in Amsterdam.
And if you are conversant with the COVID-19 tale, you will know that Europe was already crying under the weight of the crazy virus at this time I passed through Charles De Gaulle Airport, Schiphol Airport and the Manchester International Airport. And this fact that it could have been me remains overwhelming.
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If you see me joke about the situation, it is just a defence mechanism! There have been nights I woke up and found it difficult to go back to bed, and the thought of what could have been played on my mind. At a time like this, when the world seems on vacation to enable repair works to be done, we are bound to feel abnormal.
Watch movies, read books, and do all other stuff around the house but, in the end, you will still feel like someone under house arrest. Though you are not in a correctional centre, the absence of a free will is a pain to the heart and it makes one sick.
Just looking at the almost empty roads, the streets literally bereft of human movement, the cinemas under lock and key, and the day and night clubs firmly shut their doors is enough to make emotion run riot. It is worse when you were a socialite pre-Coronavirus. In times of crisis, churches and mosques serve as places where many seek answers, but COVID-19 has shut the worship centres and it is now to your tent o Israel!
At a time like this, you are bound to wonder if the world has ever witnessed any health crisis of this magnitude. Historical records show that the world is no stranger to plagues. In 430 B.C., Athens, Greece, was hit by a smallpox epidemic, which killed more than 30,000 people.
It reduced the city’s population by at least 20 per cent. There were other ones along the line, but there was a scary one between 1331 and 1353, known as Black Death. An estimated 75 million people were said to have been lost worldwide.
There was the Great Plague of London, which took root in China, in 1334. It was helped by trade routes. Towns became history and Florence, Italy, is said to have lost a third of its 90,000 residents in the first six months. Europe, according to records, lost 25 million people.
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I found some of the historical records scary and unbelievable. For instance, in 1519, a smallpox epidemic known as Hernando Cortes was said to have hit Mexico, killing some 25 million people. Two years later, it wiped out another between five and eight million of the native population. Too scary for me to believe!
Wait for more: In 1633, French, English and Dutch settlers were said to have been the source of a smallpox epidemic in Massachusetts in the United States. Historians estimate that about 20 million people died in this epidemic. Another United States’ city, Philadelphia, was said to have lost some 45,000 people to a Yellow Fever epidemic.
What was known as the Modern Plague in the 1860s killed an estimated 12 million people in China, India and Hong Kong. It took the development of a vaccine in the 1890s to stop the spread.
Another scary one was in 1984 when scientists discovered the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) as the cause of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Over 5,500 people in the United States died that year. Records show that over 25 million people have died of AIDS so far.
More recent health scares include the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed 774 people globally. And in 2009, the H1N1 flu pandemic broke out and it is believed to have killed 18,500 people.
Africa battled the Ebola virus in 2014 and, by the time it was overpowered in 2016, more than 11,300 people were dead. This was largely an African epidemic, with limited cases in Europe and the United States.
COVID-19 is global. It has affected hundreds of countries. The global figures have exceeded 600,000 and no less than 30,000 are dead with Italy, China and the United States leading the toll. The victims cut across classes and the world remains dazed about how to get out of this quagmire.
While we are all confused about the best formula to quickly defeat this common enemy, which has crippled the global economy, we are almost agreed that if this does not change our world nothing else will. The world actually has no choice. When this is over, things will never remain the same again.
Nigeria, for instance, should not remain the same, especially our healthcare. The United States, Italy and China have some of the best medical facilities in the world, but COVID-19 has humbled them. If not that the Ebola outbreak helped Lagos to have standard isolation centres, things would have been worse.
My final take: With COVID-19 we are all stuck: the rich and the poor. Before now, the rich would have run to London, New York, Dubai or India. We all now have to face the result of years of poor leadership.
Our annual budget for health has never met the global standard, all because our leaders know they could always jump on the next available flight to seek succour. Now, there is nowhere for the wicked to escape.
If Nigeria remains the same after this pandemic is brought to its knees, I will give up on this giant with clay feet. It will mean that nothing shocks our leaders and they are nothing but sadists.
Things just must change.
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