Earlier this year, my family and I, fully masked, went on a rare outing, before strict lockdown, briefly visiting the home of a couple who are our friends, for a late lunch.
We met a single stranger, a thick-set pastor in a gleaming white shirt, who asked the few of us to join hands in an impromptu circle, that I thought was perhaps symbolic of how interconnected our existence is. Given the hardships of the pandemic and the perils of previous weeks, the enthusiastic evangelical leader wanted to say thanks for life and offer a short prayer.
Later, in a quick conversation, I heard of his small rural farm and his confident caring for fellow flocks, of varied animals, and committed congregants. In the months that followed, as cases picked up, and the Government enforced tighter measures, any thought of another non-essential trip ceased.
As the initial shipments of limited vaccines, Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Covishield (codenamed AZD1222), arrived from India, my elderly husband with comorbidities was among those prioritised, to our relief, in a multi-phased national programme. The rest of us, facing lower risks, anxiously waited for our turn, but at the time, there was much uncertainty about when and whether there would be enough shots to inoculate a sizeable chunk of Trinidad and Tobago’s (TT) 1.4 million (M) people.
With the borders closed for a year, I could not slip across to my birthplace in Guyana where the vaccination campaign was well underway, and so my smug relatives suggested wryly that I travel back-track, in reverse, due to my vaccine envy, my South American nationality and my newly-expired passport.
I was happy to eventually get my shots, through the COVAX facility, without having to leave the twin-islands illegally, considering it part of a civic duty to be inoculated, and a tribute to the world’s brilliant scientists who have worked hard, fast and daily. In an unprecedented, international effort the best brains from many countries developed a range of cutting-edge treatments for a coronavirus that had been unknown, before the deadly outbreak in a Wuhan market and the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year in January 2020.
Specialists have long warned that latent diseases lurking in stressed creatures such as bats, could jump to humans launching a dangerous pandemic. In June 2012, Patient Zero was a 60-year-old man who came down with a mysterious illness and died days later, in Saudi Arabia. His doctor sent off samples for testing, which revealed a new virus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) that leaped from bats to dromedary camels and is related to the strain first identified in Guangdong, China that prompted the SARS-Cov outbreak, a decade before. SARS-Cov or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome of another novel coronavirus (Cov), moved on from infected civets to over 8,000 people from 29 countries and territories, and resulted in about 800 deaths worldwide.
While SARS and MERS were mainly contained, there are still no vaccines for those diseases. When COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 or the second SARS coronavirus hit us in killer waves in 2020, it seemed a distant dream that we would race to come up with, not one, but many complex vaccines across countries. After all, it took 18 years for scientists to develop a successful shot against polio, a disfiguring disease that paralyzed many children including my youngest maternal uncle. The researchers expect there will be more such zoonotic transmissions and pandemics to come.
By yesterday, as Guyana’s alarming infection and death figures rose, among four CARICOM countries also comprising Antigua-Barbuda, Grenada and Suriname, and against the downward trend in South America, a Reuters’ compilation showed this country was at 98% of peak and climbing, with 186 infections per 100 000 people reported in the last seven days. The average number of new infections reported daily increased by more than 90 over the last three weeks.
“Guyana has administered at least 512,067 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 32.7% of the country’s population,” it added, noting that during the last week, Guyana averaged about 2,755 doses administered each day. At that rate, it will take a further 57 days to administer enough doses for another 10% of the population, the news service calculated.
COVD-19 has slaughtered nearly 4.7M, with over 227M cases recorded. Yet we are now so spoilt for choice and consumed by contorted conspiracies that thousands of vaccines, acquired at great cost and through greater effort, still lie unused in lucky countries like Guyana and T&T. With warnings that these will expire as hesitancy continues to curse our hard-headed nationals, some public and union figures who are themselves vaccinated against the virus, prefer to play politics with their supporters’ lives. Ivermectin, even bleach and certain death are in as Governments prepare to impose wider mandates for the greater good, especially as we are already on the 12th variant of the 24-symbol Greek alphabet, Mu, with Nu and Xi to come.
Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported the origin trail, for now, ends with China’s first confirmed COVID-19 case that likely occurred on 17 November 2019. “He was not a seafood vendor, bat hunter, or lab scientist,” the Post stated, as it wrote of “sparse details” about the Wuhan resident described in a joint World Health Organization (WHO)-China report in March. “He was an accountant surnamed Chen who shopped at a very large supermarket.”
Recently, on our way to the sparsely populated north eastern end of T&T, we stopped in at our friends. They informed us the pastor was in intensive care in hospital, having contracted severe COVID-19. He had not considered taking one of the various vaccines on public offer, instead trusting in and waiting on God to keep and save him. The next day, he was dead.
Even as I stared out to the raging sea, thinking of the fragility of life, the perplexing choices we make, and the praying man I had met for the first and last time, it made me recall an old story.
A hurricane was about to slam into a city, and most people saw the alert and evacuated. One lady, however, decided that if God really loved her, he would save her. So she climbed up into the attic and waited. A rescue helicopter flew past and a man yelled, “We’re going to get you!” She declined. Then a boat came by, but again she refused. Another sped up, and the rescuers warned: “This is your last opportunity! Get on!” The woman turned down the offer. At the gates of heaven, the lady, who had drowned, lamented bitterly to Peter: “I waited for God to save me, but he didn’t. He doesn’t love me.” Peter frowned. “But he sent you two boats and a helicopter, what are you complaining about?”
ID yesterday saw a brief but heartening note that a Guyanese friend in the United States of America had finally taken a COVID-19 vaccine, after months of being more frightened of the shot than the disease and the dying.
