The global is becoming, and to stay on its feet, local wisdom is needed in a global context.
The global is becoming and to remain standing, local wisdom is needed in a global context.
Professor Alan Whiteside is an implemented teacher specializing in progression economics. In particular, he has contributed to the global perception of the spread and involvement of HIV/AIDS. He has dozens of e-books, e-book chapters, and magazine articles to his credit. Professor Whiteside is probably one of the most productive public health policy experts to turn to in understanding the Covid-19 pandemic that is sweeping the planet and crippling economies as it spreads. In this podcast with Alec Hogg, founder and editor-in-chief of BizNews, Whiteside explains how countries manipulate statistics for political gain. He also explains why a lockdown now can help implicate this deadly disease if we take a look at the graphs and statistics. -Jackie Cameron
Yes, in fact, I grew up in Swaziland and had knowledge there. I then went to the UK to avoid military service, as I was not willing to kill for apartheid. I returned to South Africa in 1983 to enroll at the University of Natal. .
A bit of sword crossing in the HIV/AIDS saga here?
Absolutely, it is one of the most demoralizing episodes of our lives as scientists. We thought we were talking sense and it turned out other people weren’t listening to us and had other agendas.
As a scientist, you want to see what’s going on with Covid-19 with a mixture of fascination and horror. Where are we now in the catastrophe?
I think the answer has to be, as with many things, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. If we look at the epidemic around the world, we see that in China, Japan and South Korea there are symptoms. that it is under control and that in some countries it is reaching unacceptably high levels. Surely it is desirable that Japan’s numbers are rising now that we know that they may not hold an Olympic Games, which says a lot about the politics of knowledge. The first group is in Asia, but it turns out that this is under control. The current challenge is in Europe, where it is surely out of control. We see the numbers rise to an incredible level, 74,386 today according to the Johns Hopkins website in Italy. The third largest domain is North America and the U. S. The U. S. now has 70,000 infections and continues to rise at the same rate. What’s attractive is the decrease in infection rates in Africa and South America, which can be a combination of points ranging from weather to air connections. .
I pulled the numbers up to today and the overnight expansion is 48% in the United States. It’s extraordinary. We understand that at the beginning of this pandemic, a rate of around 30%, which is what South Africa is adopting lately, is normal. Why would the U. S. be so far above it right now?
This is a lack of leadership.
People aren’t getting the leadership they want at the national level. We’re saying that’s the federal point they want, which leaves local governments at the state level desperately looking to deal with this crisis. A united government is needed to confront it. That’s something we didn’t have in the UK until recently.
I was talking to David Shapiro whose daughter lives in New York City and what was quite strange is that even though this is the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, they still allow other people to leave the city and go to other parts of the country, which is really strange.
Deborah Bricks, the only girl behind Donald Trump in those briefings, seemed increasingly pressured in recent weeks and, as I understand it, she was also under pressure through the decision. We want to move to a total lockdown, as is the case in the UK. You are allowed outdoors for walking, exercising, or running; otherwise, you must stay at home.
South Africa last night. Do you think this is the solution?
Again, I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. What exists in the UK and rich countries, where other people can get food where they don’t live, aspect by aspect, can be passed on to this. blockade. It’s not an unusual sense. I don’t know how it works in poorer countries. We have a huge social experience. Is it a public fitness solution?Is this a socially viable solution? I don’t know.
You discussed that knowledge is political. Could you explain how knowledge can be political?
The first way to make knowledge political is not to verify, because if it is not verified, cases cannot be reported. Some recommend that the number of checks carried out in China has decreased significantly, so the number of cases has remained fairly constant, at least just under 82,000 people. On the other hand, this might be a smart thing to do because it gives the Chinese a sense that the state is in the situation. The Japanese data is smart because I think they were desperately looking to stay. their numbers are low for the Olympic Games, which they believe they can also continue to organize. African knowledge is more like the lack of control kits and their inability than the absence of an epidemic. Maybe it’s the absence of an outbreak, however, we can’t know because we have no idea what the test kits look like.
That said, there’s something I want to do very soon: what we have lately are test kits that bump into people who are inflamed. In other words, the virus is active in your body. What we don’t have and desperately want are control kits that tell us if someone has contracted the virus, because in theory those other people deserve to be immune. In theory, they don’t want to go through the same processes as other people who haven’t contracted the virus and scientists know that’s the past disease we desperately want to see. Scientists are rushing to get us kits that indicate if you’ve contracted the virus.
Are there any in this area?
Absolutely, I’d say we’ll release them next month, maybe even sooner.
The rational thing to do is that if other people are allowed to go back to work, they will be able to revive the economy.
It would be fantastic, maybe other people will start to get back to normal life. Right now we’re on hold: I’ll get it, I’ll only get it if I have it. And if we take just the global numbers, we now have 472,109 according to Johns Hopkins, of which 114,000 have recovered. Now those other people must make a contribution to society in which we cannot make a contribution because we do not know our status.
Is it very likely that those antibody tests will arrive in South Africa soon?
There will be a deployment to get them out as far away as possible. One thing about South Africa is that we get the evidence. It would be like testing for HIV: you’re positive or negative, you’ve had Covid-19 or you haven’t had the capacity, the infrastructure and the wisdom to deploy them if we can bring them into the country.
Alan, you talked about Johns Hopkins University and the fact that they publish those numbers. I also see it every day. How come they have the world’s source of information?
That’s a very smart question. I think the answer is because they were the first to arrive. Secondly, because they’re a style of simplicity, you open up the dashboard and you can see exactly what’s going on. You can concentrate on the U. S. Let’s go to the U. S. and see what’s going on. through the state. It’s an easy-to-use site, kudos to Johns Hopkins. They did a brilliant job. There are others, but they don’t provide the data I need at a glance.
Where do they get their knowledge from?
This is where we run into one of the disorders with the data, and the other people report on it. This is why China has consistently remained at just under 82,000 cases and why Djibouti has 11, Haiti has 8 and eSwatini has four cases at the moment. It depends on the reports of the public health governments of those countries. If they don’t report, you don’t have the data. Academics like me have to say: no data is reported.
Probably, there are enough for us to make decisions? South Africa opted for a lockdown, first for 21 days. Is that the correct term?
Well, the option is to make this and that bigger for 21 days, which is what Boris Johnson has imposed on the UK. I think that’s probably enough, we’re going to see the curves flatten, although maybe not at the global level, but at the national level. 21 days is a smart start, it will be hard for you, for me and for everyone out there.
You say this might be enough from a scientific point of view, why is this time really destroying the virus?
It’s a little more confusing than that. If we have a 21-day confinement and no one goes back to inflamement, then what we are going through is that the epidemic is going to be prevented because we want to perceive some more epidemiological things. The key is the R-number, which is the number of other people who will become inflamed through an individual case. If I get inflamed and infect two more people, the epidemic will continue, if I infect 4 more people, it will continue faster. If I can decrease it so that it doesn’t infect someone else, the numbers will start to be transmitted temporarily and we think the number of days in question is small.
If we extrapolate the existing scenario and if the Chinese tell us the truth, that is, the political knowledge that you mentioned, we eliminate that factor. How much longer can a country like South Africa be affected by this pandemic?
I’m afraid there’s smart, bad news. On the smart news side, we’ve implemented some really amazing moves with lockdown, which deserve to make a difference as long as other people respect the restrictions. The bad news is that we think it’s conceivable that it’s a winter illness and that as it gets warmer in the north, we have a less favorable environment for the virus to survive. This would mean that, as we see with influenza, it could simply become an epidemic. in the South as autumn and winter approach. That said, of course, it’s best to be forewarned, so maybe we can prevent that from happening. Your question is for how long, the answer to this question has to be I don’t know. .
The mortality rate, we know that in South Korea it has dropped to 0. 6%, in Italy it is something like that. The United States is also beginning to make progress in this area. What is the most productive estimate available for this number?
What you want to perceive is that this is an assumption, not the answer you’re looking for, it’s between 1% and 5%. This will depend on the levels of treatment people receive; It will depend on how they were infected. The Chinese doctor who died so early in the outbreak was a young, healthy man before he started running through the outbreak. I suspect he was exposed multiple times and that’s why his immune formula in the end couldn’t fix it. There’s also the question of where the virus lives in your body. If you are in your upper respiratory tract, you have a sore throat. If you are in the lower respiratory tract, you will have pneumonia. It will depend on the age of the other people. No one is safe from this virus, but you’re more likely to get seriously ill if you’re older, especially if you have comorbidities. This means you’re old and living with other illnesses. So hypertension, diabetes, cancer, etc. And, of course, all smokers avoid smoking.
We have already earned the alerts about coronaviruses with SARS and MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome. Presumably, it possibly won’t be the last, from a clinical point of view, to infect humanity?
It is ok. We live in a world where we are very close to nature, but not in an intelligent way. Whoever cuts down trees with bats and other creatures makes a living and eats those creatures. So I think we’ll see more occasions like this. A zoonotic occasion is when a disease passes from one species to another. Of course, the zoonotic diseases we never report about are those in which humans infect animals, which of course happens.
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