How many of the people who get infected require medical attention?
Anyway, we shouldn’t under-rate the crisis.
I think the first step would be to carry out truly random tests, to find out how many people are infected. So you take a representative sample (random people from the street) and test them for covid-19. Don’t use that thing of first screening people for fever: that is how you start losing it. Just test random people, whether they have a fever or not. If you discover that the virus is already spreading freely in our population, then there would be no point in using lockdowns, curfews etc: but instead focus on building healthcare capacity. You also need to look at the epidemiological data – on our population, not on Italy’s or China’s or USA’s population, but our own Kenyan population, to see how the infection pans out in this population in order to understand whether our response is alright or we are over-reacting or under-reacting…
Even the US didn’t have the time nor resources to randomly test people. Initially they were choosing whom to test. Tell me about Kenya. And you have seen how rapidly the disease takes over a city…Wuhan, Milan, Barcelona, etc. Now is not the time to test hypothesis but rather to react, or counteract. Anything we do today is already late. But the depth of lateness coincides with the effect on the population. Action is needed yesterday. The only known fix, if we trust the Chinese, is absolute quarantine.
1% mortality. If it hits 10 million, that’s 100,000 gone in 3 months. Those are genocide numbers.
We stand to lose more from a poor economy and social unrest from a lockdown.
uhuru could have locked down the country if the govt could afford it. saa hii taxes are down and the countrys loans are due to be paid. uhuru is just praying and hoping for tthe best
Do you know that some 49 million people die globally per year on average (given a global population of 7 million and a global crude death rate of 7 per thousand per year)? I don’t want to sound callous, I am just after the right perspective. I am also for disease control measures that actually work. As opposed to agenda-ized measures: like where some people just want to see others ruined financially, so that they can buy them off.
If we make it out alive.
With a ruined economy, where will anyone get money to buy off others. They will be in the same hole.
No, as we venture into this, some people have good savings, which they can use to buy off others. The people calling for lockdown fall into 3 categories.
- Those who are well intentioned, and believe that a lockdown can control the disease.
- Those who have just heard others calling for lockdown, and joined the chorus without really knowing what it entail.
- Those who know the real secret deal: to ruin the economy, then buy off those who will have been ruined for a song.
Realistically how many have the ability to buy off others?
Kicharo sounds like a fairly well trained epidemiologist. I wish more in the decision making process were listening to arguments such as his.
@Kicharo two questions.
You have insinuated that there are people who are advocating for lockdown for their own benefit. Who are these people and what do they stand to gain?
Two why don’t you foresee a situation where we will be like Italy in a few weeks? Remember in even the European countries downplayed this thing and it’s exploding now.
Yes, I was expecting him to have started food drops at Thika Makongeni using his chopper!
I am answering your second question: You see, there is strong evidence to suggest that the virus is not behaving in the same way in all places. This is the hypothesis that needs to be investigated with clean hands. The only way we can get conclusive evidence that the disease is not/will not wreak havoc on our population is through truly random testing. Like where you stop a random man on the street and request to test him for covid-19, whether or not he has the symptoms. You only need to test a representative sample of 200 to get insights on this. Only then would we know how widespread it is in our general population. If it is very well spread in our general population [like if millions of people already have it, yet we are not seeing the devastation witnessed in places like Italy], then we can conclude that for whatever reason, our people are immune to the virus, which would then mean that we have no business imposing draconian disease control measures.
But listening to the lockdown chorus, you have reason to suspect that there is more than meets the eye. A lockdown is a war-like situation, especially in a nation like ours. We should only institute it if it is truly the only way… Even the curfew is uncalled for.