Martin Williams

Opinion | If many of us are going to catch Covid-19 anyway, we must find ways to live with it

Covid-19 could be a once-in-a-century pandemic disease like Spanish flu. Indeed, social-distancing measures being adopted now are not unlike those taken a century ago. But shouldn’t we find new ways to get on with life?

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Why you can trust SCMP

Martin Williams

Published: 9:30am, 4 Mar 2020Updated: 9:30am, 4 Mar 2020

In 2007, four disease experts at the University of Hong Kong published a paper on Sars, in which they concluded: “The presence of a large reservoir of Sars-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.” Now, that time bomb is going off – and we might be witnessing the onset of a pandemic of a kind not seen for 100 years.

Compared to regular bombs, this may seem slow, even a non-event. Yet consider this: about six weeks have passed since January 22, when the disease caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus and known as Covid-19 hit the global headlines as the Chinese government was about to impose a lockdown on Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak.

At the time, there were 17 reported deaths; that figure has since surged past 3,000 – over 170 times higher – and the coronavirus has spread to 64 countries and territories worldwide.

Although the World Health Organisation seems wary of declaring a pandemic, the P-word is being increasingly used. And not simply as a media scare, or political hoax.

Guan Yi, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at HKU, has extensive experience of researching viruses including bird flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome. Yet after a visit to Wuhan in January, he told Caixin magazine, “I've never felt scared. This time I'm scared.”