At the end of last year, a new virus emerged in Wuhan, China, which in a few months evolved into a true pandemic of unknown proportions. The virus was new, so unknown. Scientists are largely convinced that the origin is found in bats and would come from a meat market.
Now, a virus doesn’t just come into existence or spread from animal to human. It usually goes from different mutations to when it was strong enough to infect people. And once it was in humans, it could easily go from man to man.
East Asia was already dealing with earlier pandemics, so they knew pretty much what to do. There it has already become common practice to put on mouth masks when you have a cold. But this virus was new. China was caught in speed by it. At first, people wanted to deny it, and when they couldn’t, they switched to lockdown. But by then it was too late.
Why was it too late?
The answer is quite simple. One day you can travel the world. Given the contagion of the virus, and linked to the fact that one is already contagious before one shows symptoms, it makes it extremely difficult to stop it. So if it was discovered that the virus was already in Europe at the end of december, the measures taken by both China and the rest of the world at the outbreak were far too late. I’m not saying they’re bad measures. Far from it. They were good measures taken by China, such as Spain and Italy, which had been very badly affected.
With a new virus that is highly contagious, can be fatal to people who already have underlying health problems, and healthy people can make life difficult months after healing, you sometimes have to take extreme measures to prevent further spread.
The theory of Group immunity is beautiful in theory, but not for such a thing. The biggest risk in a pandemic and in trying out a group immunity among the population is that you must not only protect your population, but also your health workers.
Health care in Belgium is good, very good itself. Only there’s a ghost wandering around, the spirit of savings. Nurses are not replaced, few materials, etc.. When the health crisis broke out, the doctors and nurses did what they were trained to do: help people. People saw this and appreciated it greatly. in the evening at 8:00 they were applauded. Something they didn’t ask for, and actually wanted it to stop. Why? It didn’t pay for them. If people didn’t adjust their behavior, all that applause was useless.
At this time we had not reached the point where the capacity of the hospital beds was full. By doing the lockdown from March 13th, we’ve been able to avoid that.
Is it unique?
No, unfortunately, a pandemic is not unique. The Last largest, really worldwide, was Spanish Flu of 1918. Ironically, people notice that in America they have learned absolutely nothing and are doing the same thing as they did then. Throughout history there have been several:SARS, swine flu, the plague, … now, Covid19
What is different is that people now know and can do much more than they did then. It is only to be noted that people have become more selfish and think only of themselves. You have people now who are like, ” if I have it, what does it matter?” They do not see or want to see that if they become infected, they also infect other people when they have it, haven’t shown any symptoms yet. With a few exceptions,most symptoms arise between 4 and 14 days.
Aidonian's blog 
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