Marek Ziebart

Everyone tells you – wash your hands! Keep them off your face! Why? The virus cannot self-replicate. To survive it must get inside a human body. Through your eyes, through your nose, through your mouth. The virus invades your cells and re-purposes them as virus factories. The replicated virus then tries to jump to another human through your mucus and your saliva. It cannot survive for long outside a human body – maybe a few to forty-eight hours. When you wash your hands, and when you avoid human contact you are not only protecting yourself. You are protecting everyone. You are denying COVID-19 a human host within which to replicate. You are killing the virus. History shows these things will either kill us, or we kill them. It’s as simple as that. 

Some people appear rather complacent, and draw comparisons with the flu, saying that kills more people every year, so why worry? Here’s why…. First of all, the WHO is taking this very seriously – should we question their understanding of an infectious disease? They are professionals, and often highly qualified academics as well. If someone with a PhD in epidemiology says a disease  is dangerous then I think that means, it’s dangerous. That or read the Daily Mail. It’s up to you. A healthy human being can catch the flu, and it won’t kill them. Not in and of itself (OK - so in a very small number of cases it can kill by itself, but that is rare). So why do people die? Well, the flu lowers the strength of your immune system, then you catch some secondary infection – such as bacterial pneumonia – and that then kills you. However, COVID-19 is somewhat different. If you contract it, it is much more dangerous for some people. In 1-2% of cases, the disease leads to death. Admittedly m