We are survivors

April 29th 2020 - during the Covid-19 pandemic

“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” - Winston Churchill

The news of this global outbreak is not good; as of this writing, there are over 3 million cases, and over 200.000 deaths due to the virus. And these numbers are the “confirmed” ones.

Researchers are saying that the real number of infections is probably a lot higher, but no one knows for sure since we have not tested everyone, and have no capacity to do that, at least not now. We have most likely missed many cases because it seems a lot of the cases are asymptomatic, and many people only suffer a mild version and have not been tested. This means that the number of confirmed cases may be just the tip of the iceberg.

A vaccine will be available sometime in the future, but it will take months to develop, test, manufacture and distribute in the quantities needed globally. And then we have to actually reach and vaccinate enough people to get to herd immunity.

Doctors are getting more experienced every day in treating patients with this virus, but it is a steep learning curve, and they do not know enough about the virus yet. Treatment is getting better and catching up, but the virus seems to be faster and trickier.

The warmer summer weather may make a difference and diminish the number of infections, but that is by no means certain. And in any case, the virus may come back in the autumn at the same time with the seasonal flu, and overwhelm the hospitals again.

The unfortunate fact is that more people will get sick, and more people will die. But, despite all this, there is hope. A vaccine will be available, doctors will find ways to treat the patients, we will reach herd immunity, things will get better; eventually. There will be light at the end of the tunnel, there always is in pandemics, we just need to keep going as best we can. We just need to endure the lockdowns, the social distancing, the sickness, the deaths, the economic fallout; it will all pass one day.

I don’t know if I will survive this pandemic, and I don’t know if you will; I sure hope we both will. But, what I do know is that we will survive this. After all, we are humans, we are resilient and we are the descendants of survivors.

There have been countless pandemics, wars and disasters throughout history, but here we still are. Our ancestors survived among other calamities; the plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, polio, influenza, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods, fires, locust swarms, famines, and if that is not enough, god knows how many genocides and wars.

The obvious fact is; if you can read this, your ancestors survived all that and probably more. How did they? Maybe something in their genes protected them, maybe something in their environment was just right, maybe they were lucky, maybe they were in the right place at the right time, maybe it was something else. Probably a combination of all of the above, and definitely some resilience.

Whatever it was, it enabled them to grow up, live their lives and have children, and maybe pass that something on to the next generation, and eventually to us. We may or may not have something special in our genetic code, but we definitely are the descendants of resilient survivors.

I know I am. I was not exactly a healthy baby, I had infant jaundice, got an exchange blood transfusion, did not breathe properly and had an extra finger; but here I am decades later. There had also been a baby before me, but he had something wrong with his lungs and unfortunately only lived for a day. Then again, if he had lived, I would not have been born. God (or depending on your beliefs Gods) moves in mysterious ways, I guess.

In my parents generation during WWII, my mother lost her twin and her baby sister to tuberculosis, and my father’s sister died of typhoid fever. The war also killed my father’s father and three of his uncles. In the previous generation on my mother’s side, out of eight children four reached adulthood, and only two lived long enough to have children of their own, tuberculosis took the rest. And the picture is not much different in the older generations.

Sounds tragic now, and was tragic then, but this was not that unusual at the time. And what is not unusual is normal. Tragedies like this were probably the normal life experience for most people throughout most of human history. But they did not give up, they kept going as best they could, if they had not, we would not be here.

Medicine has come a long way, thank god. We have vaccines, we can diagnose, cure and treat diseases, and we have even eradicated smallpox, and are on the road to eradicating other diseases as well. Our societies on the whole function better, public health problems can be solved, and information flows infinitely faster than before. So we are in a much better situation than our ancestors were, to deal with pandemics and disease.

But since we humans share this planet with other life, including pathogens, there will certainly be other infectious diseases and other pandemics in the future. When they come, we may or may not be better prepared for them, we humans are really good at forgetting lessons from history. Instead of preparing and planning for future pandemics, we may grow complacent as a society and forget what this Covid-19 pandemic was like. If that happens we just have to hope that we will have some of that same resilience that our ancestors had during their bad times. The good news is, why wouldn’t we have, they were our ancestors after all.

There is no sugarcoating this, Covid-19 is a serious disease, a lot more people will die before this is over, and this is far from over. We will have to live in a new-social-distancing-lockdown-normal for the foreseeable future. The economic fallout will be severe, and some job losses will probably be permanent. But, all pandemics end at some point, and so will this one, we just do not know when that will be. And we do not yet know how much damage, human and economic, this pandemic will leave behind.

But we will get through this. So once in a while, in the midst of this pandemic, take a deep breath and spare a thought for our resilient ancestors who got us this far. They did it without modern medicine and did not know what causes the diseases, but they did it and kept going. And remember, we are more resilient than we think, we are the descendants of survivors, we are survivors, and our descendants will be survivors.