Following the announcement of the first Colorado cases that tested presumptive positive for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), US Senator Michael Bennet issued a statement yesterday, March 5. Earlier in the day, the US Senate had passed the bipartisan, bicameral emergency supplemental funding bill to respond to COVID-19, which includes “at least $9.3 million” for Colorado.
“The health and safety of every Coloradan remains my top priority and I am grateful to our state’s health officials who have been working diligently to care for and protect our communities. My office is actively monitoring the situation and is working with Governor Polis, state and local officials, and Colorado’s Congressional Delegation to ensure Colorado has the resources it needs to respond to and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“Tonight, our thoughts are with the affected patients and their families. In the face of this public health crisis, I urge all Coloradans to heed the advice from public health officials when it comes to caring for their families and themselves.”
The World Health Organization urged governments around the world to pull out “all the stops” in the fight against the increasingly pervasive and deadly outbreak of the new coronavirus, according to an article updated this morning on CBSNews.com:
“This is not a drill. This is not the time to give up. This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday. “Countries have been planning for scenarios like this for decades,” he said. “Now is the time to act on those plans.”
More than 95,000 people in 86 countries have been infected with the virus and more than 3,200 people have died. There have been 12 deaths in the United States — 11 in Washington state and one in California — and more than 20 states have reported cases of the virus.
California declared a state of emergency after the first death was confirmed there Wednesday. A cruise ship that the victim had traveled on was being held offshore in San Francisco while passengers are tested for the virus. Officials said 35 people on the ship had symptoms of the coronavirus.
To give that number of deaths — 3,200 — some perspective, the disease known as malaria killed an estimated 400,000 people last year. In areas with high transmission, the most vulnerable groups are young children, who have not developed immunity to malaria yet, and pregnant women, whose immunity has been decreased by pregnancy. An online search suggests that a child dies every two minutes from malaria.
For thousands of years, traditional herbal remedies have been used to treat malaria. The first effective modern treatment for malaria came from the bark of cinchona tree, which contains quinine. But the connection between malaria and mosquitoes was not identified scientifically until 1881.
In the 1600s, malaria was rampant in Europe — around the time Europeans began to settle the New World — and numerous medicinal plants were sent from America to Europe. The bark of a tree quina-quina was suitable for treating fevers, but as the demands for quina-quina bark increased on an almost daily basis, some dishonest exporters began to ship the bark of a similar tree, cinchona. Their dishonesty proved to have a positive benefit, however, when cinchona bark turned out to be an effective treatment for malaria. It was later discovered that cinchona bark contained a chemical called quinine that’s effective in treating malaria. Quinine was a favored remedy for malaria from 17th to the 20th century.
After the link to mosquito-borne parasites was identified, mosquito control measures were initiated — including, initially, the widespread use of the insecticide DDT.
Along the way, new therapeutic drugs such as chloroquine and artemisinin were developed, and today, artemisinin is present in almost all industrially-produced malaria remedies. After introducing artemisinin as a cure, administered together with other remedies, the mortality in Africa dropped by a half, according to Wikipedia.
But we might wonder about a statement from the World Health Organization:
“This is not a drill. This is not the time to give up. This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops…”
When nearly half a million children and pregnant women living in tropical and subtropical counties are dying each year from a disease, it might seem — to a reasonable person — like an excellent time to “pull out all the stops”. But the disease caused by COVID-19 is something new and challenging, and perhaps it fits the “scenario” WHO has been planning for, for decades. We all love to roll out big plans, and watch them work. A disease that’s been around for thousands of years… well, it just doesn’t generate a lot of excitement, especially if it’s relatively uncommon in Europe and North America.
Fortunately for people who care about the future, young children appear to be mostly immune to COVID-19. From an article published this week on StatNews.com:
The vast majority of cases in China — 87% — were in people ages 30 to 79, the China Center for Disease Control reported last month based on data from all 72,314 of those diagnosed with Covid-19 as of February 11. That probably reflects something about biology more than lifestyle, such as being in frequent contact with other people. Teens and people in their 20s also encounter many others, at school and work and on public transit, yet they don’t seem to be contracting the disease at significant rates: Only 8.1% of cases were 20-somethings, 1.2% were teens, and 0.9% were 9 or younger.
The World Health Organization mission to China found that 78% of the cases reported as of February 20 were in people ages 30 to 69.
From Worldometer.info, based on reports by various health researchers working in China, where the virus was first identified:
Not only do young children rarely contract the COVID-19 virus — they rarely die from it.
More about identifying a “new” virus, in the next installment…
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.