Opinion

If many of us are going to catch Covid-19 anyway, we must find ways to live with it

Covid-19 could be a once-in-a-century pandemic disease like Spanish flu. Indeed, social-distancing measures being adopted now are not unlike those taken a century ago. But shouldn’t we find new ways to get on with life?

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Martin Williams is a Hong Kong-based writer specialising in conservation and the environment, with a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge University.

Published: 9:30am, 4 Mar 2020Updated: 9:30am, 4 Mar 2020

In 2007, four disease experts at the University of Hong Kong published a paper on Sars, in which they concluded: “The presence of a large reservoir of Sars-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.” Now, that time bomb is going off – and we might be witnessing the onset of a pandemic of a kind not seen for 100 years.

Compared to regular bombs, this may seem slow, even a non-event. Yet consider this: about six weeks have passed since January 22, when the disease caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus and known as Covid-19 hit the global headlines as the Chinese government was about to impose a lockdown on Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak.

At the time, there were 17 reported deaths; that figure has since surged past 3,000 – over 170 times higher – and the coronavirus has spread to 64 countries and territories worldwide.

Although the World Health Organisation seems wary of declaring a pandemic, the P-word is being increasingly used. And not simply as a media scare, or political hoax.