2020 has dinned certain things into us that will not be easily forgotten. One of these is the word ‘quarantine’ with the concept of isolating the infected. The origins of this word and concept lie in one of the many Black Plague outbreaks that swept the world something like 40 times in 300 years between the 14th and 17th centuries, killing all together perhaps half of the world’s population. Nobody knew then what caused this disease, why it got some people and missed others and why it spread the way it did, but they had a vague notion it had something to do with exposure to an already sick person. So during the epidemic that swept through Europe in the 14th century, people infected with the plague were strictly isolated in their homes, and in the Venetian port of Ragusa, sailors who arrived from other countries were isolated on their ships first for 30 days, and later for ‘quarantino’ days, the Italian word for 40 from which English got the word quarantine, and the world the concept of isolation. The word quarantine now applies to isolation to prevent infection, however long that takes. This approach worked. By the 15th century, isolating the sick during a plague had become law in England.
People must be shown, adults as well as children in school, animations about what a virus is, how it attacks and spreads, and films about the absolute necessity of isolation and quarantine. Messages on phones, leaflets and other vague methods are as good as nothing, they will cut no ice. People need to understand exactly why it is dangerous these days to attend weddings and funerals, why it is important to boil their drinking water, and why it is crucial to get the vaccination when it arrives in Pakistan.
Most of the year 2020, with Covid 19 upon us, we have been in much the same position without any weapon against the disease. Only now that vaccines have been found,does there seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel.
It is worth considering how the world survived the previous pandemics, what did people do to fight against the Black Deaths, cholera and the smallpox before vaccination for those diseases appeared?
The only thing that appears to have saved people then was quarantine.
It was only later in the 18th century that smallpox became the first disease to be pushed back by another means, with Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Smallpox was announced to be completely eradicated by 1980.
John Snow identified cholera with contaminated drinking water in the 19th century, bringing about a great reduction in that disease.
Quarantine, vaccinations, sanitation. The efficacy of these three things might have gone a long way towards eradicating certain terrible diseases, but anti-vaxxers and other sceptics remain, people who do not believe in the efficacy of ‘social distancing’, and sanitation, as well as people who believe that God will in some mysterious way rid us of our troubles without us lifting a finger to help ourselves.
To provide a clean and safe water supply is a government’s job. Failure to do so, as in Pakistan, is the failure of that government.
For all these things although sceptics exist very much among the educated as well, the people most likely not to believe in them are the uneducated or the less educated, those whose lives have not led them to accept the existence of what they cannot see (other than God whose concept has been with them all their lives); those whose education, if they possess, some does not teach them to rationalize, conceptualise and understand anything beyond the small box that contains the sum of their worldly experience. This is not by any means their fault. That they were not educated is the fault of those entrusted with doing so, once again the government. That even if they have the rudiments of education if they cannot conceptualise it is the fault of the kind of rote, unimaginative education they receive. That their horizons are so limited is their lot in life, which could change with more education or greater opportunities, neither of which are brought their way.
Once the vaccine comes to Pakistan there will almost definitely be cases like the one that just took place in the USA where a pharmacist deliberately removed more than 500 vaccines from is cooling facility. Experts have said, mercifully, that there will be no adverse effects other than ineffectiveness of the vaccine.
In Pakistan, the same government that cares much more about re-election and spends all its energy wrangling, that cares nothing about its people’s education, or about providing clean water, must take care that this does not happen here. Other than anything else, Pakistan cannot afford such wastage.
People must be shown, adults as well as children in school, animations about what a virus is, how it attacks and spreads, and films about the absolute necessity of isolation and quarantine. Messages on phones, leaflets and other vague methods are as good as nothing, they will cut no ice. People need to understand exactly why it is dangerous these days to attend weddings and funerals, why it is important to boil their drinking water, and why it is crucial to get the vaccination when it arrives in Pakistan.
The stress must be on teaching children who do after learn to believe in an unseen divinity. Why not then an unseen biological reality, which can be seen with a microscope?
People need to know how vaccines work, to see on film (they cannot read most of the time) what smallpox was, how it was eradicated, how the Black Death ended. Actual footage, actual stories, actual pictures. This is as important as mathematics, as crucial as religious studies, as empowering as chemistry, physics and biology.
Teachers need imagination to pass on this knowledge. The government needs the will. Is it within the power of this country to find stores of imagination and will?
