Covid is a serious mystery that we often do not accept

Covid has devastated the world since first lockdown of March 2020. There are so many things we still find unanswerable about this virus. New questions keep coming up every day. Consider these events in the following months.

1. 1. President Trump, British Prime Minister Johnson, Prime Minister Modi and  President Putin consoled their countries that if we restrain our selves for three weeks, this Covid19 virus will be eliminated. It was March 2020.
   2. India faced hardships in first wave, but the virus slowed down without leaving explanation. Then Delta variant came and cost 4,00,000 lives according to government, but many research institutes including John Hopkins University said losses were ten times higher. It is down to 40,000 new cases per day in July 2021 from peak of 400,000 in April – May 2021. No reasonable explanation are available for this too. Vaccine penetration is still very low and can not contribute to low figures of new cases at end of July.
   3. US cases started falling in January 2021. The decline started before vaccine was widely available. But July 31, 2021 is the day when America saw 75,000 new cases in one day.
   4. April 2021 saw a sharp rise in Canada and the outbreak was expected to hit United States. But it did not.
   5. Large parts of Africa, East Asia, Middle East, have been spared heavy losses. Africa in particular has a poor medical infrastructure.
   6. Delta virus hit Britain in May, and case load was expected to be 200,000 a day. Bit it peaked to 47,000 and now below 30,000 daily new cases on the last day of July 2021.
   7. Israel is giving a booster for Pfizer vaccine for people over 60 years age as to avoid breakthrough infection in people who are already vaccinated.

We can talk about Kumbh Mela, European Soccer Tournament, Farmer’s agitation in Delhi, early opening from lockdown. But these explanations do not answer the question of India’s case load of 400,000 daily for few days in April-May to below 40,000 now.

The cycle of boom and burst is hard to figure on any scientific base. Science has helped us greatly in understanding this virus. Vaccine had been a miracle . But there are so many things that science can not explain.

It is painful when we think of how bodies were piling in huge freezers on trucks across from hospitals in New York city and when the Ganga river was flooded with floating human bodies and Delhi crematoriums were running out of wood and not finding space to put bodies on funeral pyres.

We thought that vaccine had resolved all the cruelty with which this virus has shaken us. But now this Delta variant has turned the world up side down again. The new report on breakthrough COVID-19 cases is a challenge when virus invades the body of people who have already had two full doses  of vaccine shots. American CDC compares the new variant with chicken pox in terms of how easy this virus escapes and multiplies fast in new host body.

These mysteries of the virus make us humble trying to understand the science and we find the course of our future. May be the answer lies beyond and above science.

Michael Osterholm, director of Infection Research Center, University of Minnesota says, “We have ascribed far too much human authority over the virus” telling us to never forget ‘humility’.

Accepting mysterious ways of the nature keeps us sober and humble. Nonetheless practicing social distancing, mask and vaccination are the least we can do and not challenge mysteries of this virus for whatever we have been able to understand about this virus by help from our scientists.