As a local general practitioner, I wish to support the sentiment expressed by Sue Saw in last week’s letter section (“Question all levels of government on pandemic,” Pique, March 11).
For the past 12 months I too have been profoundly disturbed by the media’s role in creating and maintaining a constant state of hypervigilance regarding COVID-19.
Measured in terms of threat to quality human life years, coronavirus would not make the top 10 on my personal list of preventable or modifiable risks to human health and longevity. In fact, I have yet to lose a single patient to the disease.
But I do worry about how many clients I may ultimately lose due to this irrational overreaction to the disease, akin to an auto-immune response, bordering on anaphylaxis.
The media has done a brilliant job of documenting the daily death toll related to COVID-19, but the vast collateral damage of the drastic measures imposed to limit its spread will likely never be tabulated.
For most members of the population, conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, coronary artery disease and cancer are all greater threats than is the current virus in circulation. Yet panic over the possibility of contracting infection has led to serious delays in diagnosing and managing these conditions for many individuals.
In the elderly, social integration has long been recognized as vital to maintaining mental and physical health, and yet they have been denied this basic right for over a year.
At any demographic level, anywhere in the world, the economic downturn due to political responses to the pandemic is causing and aggravating poverty, another factor intimately linked to poor health and premature death.
Fear of the virus has also discouraged ridership on public transport, even though it is 100 times safer than personal motor transportation, in terms of risk of accidental injury or death. I would guess that the average age of the pandemic’s collateral victims is well under that of the average age of those who have succumbed to the infection, magnifying the ultimate tally of unnecessary life-years lost.
Like all other living things, human beings have always been dying of infectious disease. History is a litany of waves of epidemics and pandemics, most far more deadly than the current one. I find it extraordinary and hypocritical that we suddenly have become so risk-adverse to a virus while we continue to blissfully play Russian roulette with so many fundamental life-sustaining elements of our biosphere, including climate stability.
Depending on the evolution of coronavirus strains, herd immunity and vaccination programs may ultimately provide at least temporary reprieve from propagation of the disease itself, but what I would really like to see is development of a vaccine versus paranoia and mass hysteria, to help us achieve herd immunity to brainwashing by fear-mongering politicians and members of the media.
Thomas DeMarco MD // Whistler
