Indra Prashad Acharya
As this pandemics began from the Hubei province of china in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of China's Hubei province, and now it has crossed more than 210 countries . Currently we have the infections of 2.55 million plus and about 0.178 million plus casualties, where the case fatality
rate on average seems to be around 6% .
Bacteria had evolved about 3.5 billion years ago, virus had evolved about 1.5 billion years ago and human beings is estimated to be evolved about only about 0.13 million years ago. So the microbes have the very big history than human beings and yet complete haven’t been understood about microbes or Viruses and their nature. In the past the plague of Justinian (541-750 recurrent outbreaks) and the black death plague (1331-1353 Hubai province of china was believed to be the origin. This recurrent outbreak occur until the mid of 18th century) had very black and black days in human history which killed about 40% of all the infected cases. Actually covid -19 isn’t the Nobel pandemic and human beings have faced many other recent pandemics like Russian flu (1889-90) which had a casualties of about 1 million,the third plague pandemics (1894-22) Which killed about 10 million people only in india,Spanish flu (1918-19) which had the casualties 50 million people deaths, Asian flu (1957-58) and had an casualties of 2-5 million people,Simarly Hongkong flu (1968-69) and had the deaths of 1-4 million and more recently we had swine flu (2009-10) which killed about 0.5 million,and HIV/AIDS is still a pandemic. We also have recently faced MERS ,SARS,Ebola and zika viruses which were too infectious and had serious case fatality rate but currently are in control. Human species humanity has always won the race in all of these pandemics.
Globally , at the moment we have a very huge challenge to fight against the covid-19 due to its difference features than other pandemics we had previously .Usually infectiousness and the severity are inversely correlated and the bad news is ,this has the both of the combination of both. It is not as the classical flu virus,and still much is to be known about this virus. Normally Many of the pandemics lasts for 2-3 years and this pandemics also has the possibility of lasting for 18-24 months . Many researches and clinical trials , field , drug trials are going on throughout the world but this seems to take time at least a year .So this clearly shows the situation of uncertainty throughout the world ,which will result the impact on the socio-economic dimension of human life. At this stage preventive measures are only the options to fight with the virus.
Preventive medicine is a sustainable and it has proved that the preventive approach is be saving the lives of millions of people during this pandemic. Clinical approach is not sufficient to reduce the number of infections in communicable as well as non -communicable disease. Many research have shown that in long run preventive methods have been able to give times more returns as compared to clinical medicine. The Median Return on investments of public health intervention have been seen up to 14.3 times and cost benefit ratio have been found to be 8.3 on average. So this proves the investment in the preventive medicine is the best and the rational way that the world has to focus. The developing countries like Nepal must and must have more investment on the preventive approaches rather than recruiting the doctors and nurses to treat the patients because of
our economic and resource constraints.
The proverb -prevention is better than cure have been more relevant today. So the global health system must focus on the community based preventive approach rather than constructing hospitals and pharmaceutical industries. It means that the clinical medicine, pharmaceutical science and
preventive medicine should work in collaboration, but emphasis must be given to preventive methods. Today hospitals in developed nations haven’t been able to provide service to the public and has created the crisis in humanity and This pandemic has clearly shown the need of restructuring the health system of the world.
