Dr Gabriel Uguru
By Dr Gabriel Uguru
Back in early 2020 SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease condition, COVID-19, was the new kid on the block. The virus was much respected and feared by everybody, and for good reasons. The virus had an impeccable record of causing high fatality, and non had a foretaste of hell than those it just brushed off lightly.
But like everything else in the world, once something changes from acuteness to endemicity, it loses all respects and is treated as a “has been”. The virus knew this inglorious treatment and tried very hard to reinvent itself by mutating into various variants from Alpha, Beta down to Omega. But it made the mistake of going “a mutation too far” when it mutated to Omicron BA.1. This mutant, though it had high infectivity, was all bark and no bite as its fatality rate was abysmally low. That was when the world lost interest in the virus and it’s respect plummeted to an all-time low.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelThe virus realising this, tried vainly to reinvent itself by mutating to another variant, Omicron BA.2. But by then the magic was gone. The UK just early this month removed all COVID-19 restrictions and even went as far as announcing the end of funding for REACT-1, which stands for Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission. The project randomly tests about 150,000 people across England monthly in order to keep track of how many people are infected with SARS-CoV-2, and then advise the government accordingly. It was one of the “gold standard” infection surveillance projects in the world alongside the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the USA’s Centres for Disease Control (CDC).
It was not only the UK that has downgraded SARS-CoV-2, other countries have also lowered their guards and consigned the virus to something of an inconvenience rather than something to be feared. The final nail in the virus’s coffin was when Russia and Ukraine decided to have a slug match and club each other to death. Suddenly the World attention is now focused on these two combatants. This is not surprising, given the fact that the world has an autistic attention span. Videos and news of bombings and destructions, and propagandas orchestrated by the West (unabashedly pro-Ukraine) and Russia, all added to the mix of entertainments the world desperately needed after the sterile and boring periods of the coronavirus lockdowns.
For all its worth, the world still needs reminding that removing restrictions on coronavirus does not mean that the virus has gone away. The virus is continuing to make a resurgence. Scotland have just reinstated all covid restrictions after a spike in SARS-CoV-2 infections, including the wearing of masks in public places. A study recently published in The Lancet, revealed that the total number of deaths from COVID-19 between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 was close to 18 million! This exceeds by 3 times the official deaths of just 5.9 million. The difference between the official figure and the new figure was due to undercounts in official statistics. Delayed and incomplete reporting as well as dearth of data collection in most countries contributed to this huge difference between the official deaths recorded for the virus and the actual death as determined by the published study.
However, this estimate includes both deaths directly caused by COVID-19 and indirect death as a result of the pandemic, for example, deaths as a result of inadequate medical attention in COVID-19 overwhelmed hospitals, and deaths due to COVID-19 complications and predispositions.
Meanwhile, many genetic factors linked to an increased risk of developing severe COVID-19 have been identified. These genetic variants are all linked to immune signalling, mucus production and blood clotting. According to a recent paper published in the journal, Nature, by Kousathanas and coworkers, there are two ways for severe COVID-19 to occur: (a) Some individuals are predisposed to critical illness when their immune systems fail to check the spread or reproduction of the virus; and (b) Some people have the tendency to develop lung inflammation or blood clotting. This means that they are at greater risk of severe COVID-19 infection even when exposed to relatively low levels of the virus in the body.
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It is not all doom and gloom. Smile a little. A plant-based COVID-19 vaccine has been discovered and already approved by Canada. Nicotiana benthamiana is a close relative of tobacco plants. The new vaccines are virus-like particles that mimic the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, and are grown in the tobacco plant, Nicotiana benthamiana. Given the notoriety of tobacco, it is hard to believe that anything good could be derived from it. And wait for it, the new vaccine called Covifenz was developed by Medicago, a Canadian biopharmaceutical company, which is partly owned by the cigarette-maker Philip Morris International – just goes to show you that Saul, indeed, is among the prophets!
