Covid-19: How we can break the chain

Covid-19 has taken the world by a storm during a time where the world was bracing for artificial intelligence to take a leap in the digital era.

Do not panic is the mantra at the moment everywhere, but that doesn’t mean you ignore the risks. There is a fine line between don’t panic and sit back and relax, versus don’t panic but let us ensure we have reduced our future risks. We need to stay calm yes, yet be prepared to play our part.

The concept behind the containment of spread of the virus is basically breaking the chain, practically all measures encouraged by the relevant authorities comes down to these basic principles:

1. Do not touch your face: Let us assume someone got the Covid-19 virus on their hands from a local grocery store during an evening of shopping routine. If he doesn’t touch his face and uses recommended alcohol based sanitizer before moving out, he has successfully broken the chain. In sense, he will no longer transmit to others in the immediate community. In the course of time, the virus on the surface at the store will also subside and the chain has been indefinitely broken.

2. Encouraging people to work from home: If companies have provided flexibility for some of the staff to work from home, that on the national level will have a few people on the roads, ensuring our public facilities are not jam-packed with a lot of people. This will reduce the risk of someone catching the virus on facilities such as public transport and breaking the chain of that virus moving forward.

In addition to that, if the chain does move ahead, our health team can track and catch a few branches of the chain and break it, rather than when the there are too many branches in the chain.

3. Coughing and sneezing under the sleeves: If a sick person has developed a persistant cough at work and if he coughs and sneezes in open air or cover with his hands, he may perpetuate the chain further using his hands. Once he uses his sleeve to cover it, his hands have not been exposed to the virus, reducing the chances the virus moves forward and thus breaking the chain. He will be advised to stay home then and ensure he is not infected and is clear to return to a normal routine.

4. Social distancing: This is an important aspect to break the chain. This includes non-essential gatherings at a party, religious events, pubs, gyms and the like.

5. Checking all incoming people at the Airport: This is to ensure a chain is broken before it spreads further.

Breaking the chain is so important in the fight to contain the Covid-19. Once the chain gets longer and starts to have several branches, there are two main reasons where it could possibly pose a challenge.

Firstly, track and test cannot be the protocol due to widespread of the virus and may have to resort to some blanket protocols to contain the virus, which may be slightly more aggressive and may pose other unprecedented challenges.

Secondly, we have to help the efforts of our health team by helping reduce the burden of patients that they may face.

Experience from some other countries facing the same crisis have noted that the healthcare team and resources may be overwhelmed leading the some of the patients to miss critical care and lead to death.

For example: A hospital has 20 beds and all 20 beds have patients that may stay over two weeks, and in the meantime, any new patients may have to wait it out. The health team stays in the hospital to help us, we need to do our part to help them. It is a combined effort that shall prevail at the end. I urge all of you to, especially the employers, to take necessary steps to ensure that amount of people we have on their public facilities are reduced to shorten the chain (slowing down the spread) and also to not overwhelm our health facilities in the coming few crucial weeks.

Educate our immediate communities and those around us, be it neighbours or relatives. We need to act together to celebrate together!

The author is a pharmacist based in Dar es Salaam.