Observe SOPs, COVID-19 is real

The question that has come up often these past several months, usually asked with varying undertones of suspicion, has been whether or not COVID is real.

"Wama is COVID real?" some do ask. In my tribe, a question preceded by "wama" is nearly always a social call to arms, put forward with a decided plea for a negative answer. And those that ask do so with the assumption that they have long earned your loyalty and to answer in the affirmative would be traitorous.

In the beginning, people were largely convinced there was no COVID at all, then after the first COVID-related deaths this opinion was revised to contention over actual COVID case numbers as reported by the Government, most believing it all to be "politics", a conspiracy to disrupt the forthcoming election process.

Then there was the occasional panic and the disbelieving smirk when reports emerged that even doctors were "merely gambling" when it came to the medications. Was it azithromycin? Chloroquine sounded even more suspect. Was it vitamin C? Ordinary vitamin C?

It should be noted that when the Spanish flu first broke out in 1918, physicians then "gambled" on any form of random treatments from aspirin to epsom salts to bloodletting to castor oil — yes, castor oil — without hope of a virus-based vaccine, surely far worse circumstances than ours.

More so then than now, many must have wondered if wama the flu was real, so much so that in a coming together of like-minded sceptics, a short-lived Anti-Mask League of San Francisco was formed. The flu span a period of two years, infecting a third of the world's population and killing anywhere from 17 to 50 million people, depending on the source.

As I write this, Mulago National Referral Hospital has a reported 155 confirmed COVID-19 patients on oxygen support and several more in the general COVID-19 ward. Others are in ICU or HDU and many continue to die because they cannot afford said medical upgrades. National totals have quickly become overwhelming, mortalities are better believed and speculations are now laced with reluctant acceptance.

Still, history will note that to the very end, there are those who harboured the notion that there was never any COVID-19 to begin with. Tyrion Lannister (a character in the television series Game of Thrones) once told a slave owner (in the same series) that death is a rather abstract idea when it is not your own.

It seems so far-fetched when you aren't fishing out sh3m a day for ICU, or failing to do so and ultimately losing your mother, father, brother or sister. Or worse, falling in the statistic that every COVID-19 patient that has required intubation has ultimately succumbed. Do not wait to die. Do not wait for death to be made ever so real with the loss of a loved one.

There's wisdom in the tale that if you don't believe there's a heaven, do good anyway as there's nothing to lose and if on doomsday it turns out the faithful were right all along, you might still safely be on the heavenward side of business.

There's nothing to lose in the SOPs. Wear a mask, wash hands, sanitise and implement social distancing.

The writer is a medical professional