Covid-19 is a global public health emergency. It all started in Wuhan, China. Or did it? There’s the Chinese version which accuses USA for perhaps accidentally releasing the contagious virus from Fort Detrick, where USA’s Interagency Biodefense agency is located, and connecting it with sudden unexplained closure of the US Army germ lab in 2019. [Diana DiGangi; “Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several ‘serious’ protocol violations that year”; https://wjla.com/news/local/cdc-shut-down-army-germ-lab-health-concerns; WJLA; January 23, 2020]. Blame-games apart, worldwide shutdowns/ lockdowns are being imposed across social communities and economic sectors, like never before. Let’s name it the “Corona Effect”, which is the result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the manner in which societies are handling it. Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses which cause disease in mammals and birds. The SARS-CoV-2 virus causes Covid-19, which is highly contagious and spreads very fast, but is not yet proven as a bigger killer than SARS and MERS, which belong to the same group. The Covid-19 pandemic has so far caused about 11,000 deaths worldwide. Without trivializing the severity or seriousness of the pandemic, it is necessary to point out that societies worldwide have done little to minimize or eliminate far bigger killers.
Hunger kills around 9-million (mostly children) every year, and those who don’t die of hunger fall prey to other diseases. Suffice it to say that living to suffer disease is every bit as serious as death. Of the worldwide annual 56.9-million deaths, 54% are due to the ‘top-ten’ which are, in order of magnitude, Ischaemic heart disease, Stroke, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Lower respiratory infections, Alzheimer & other dementias, Cancers, Diabetes, Road injury, Diahorreal diseases and Tuberculosis. And then of course there are war-and-conflict related deaths due to malnutrition, disease and starvation, apart from bullet-and-bomb deaths. It is noteworthy that except for the fourth, ninth and tenth of the ‘top-ten’, the others are essentially “life-style diseases” typical of an era of high consumption (all kinds, but especially fossil fuels and industrial processes & products), high environmental degradation (pollution exceeding the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem), and great economic inequality. All three, viz., consumption, environmental degradation and economic inequality, are due to the paradigm of unending economic growth, which all nations have adopted. To view the full article visit the Citizen.