One swallow does not a summer make. Nor do four. Nor do five.
We are minded to recall this axiom since, for the five days, the Ministry of Health has been trumpeting the absence of new positive tests for the coronavirus.
Daily, as the Best-dos Santos Public Laboratory casts a not very wide net to catch those who are suspected of carrying COVID-19, it has come up empty-handed. Officials have been breathing a little easier, expressing guarded optimism that possibly, very possibly, we may have rounded a proverbial corner.
But once again, Churchillian homespun wisdom comes to our minds in this strangest of war-times: It is perhaps not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.
The news of COVID-negative tests, encouraging as it may be, gives us pause before jumping for joy.
Indeed, as in scientific tests, a result may sometimes be a false positive or false negative. We do not for a moment suggest that of those who have tested negative, some may be carrying the virus. We are concerned that this net has captured all but one-third of one per cent of the total population of this country.
Public health science so far dictates the widespread testing of people who are both symptomatic and asymptomatic should be the key determinant as to whether it is safe for a country to relax the very measures implemented to prevent community spread of the virus.
We are therefore heartened that the Ministry of Health has ordered up 27,000 tests. But that amounts to one in ten Barbadians.
So we must urge ever-higher caution and vigilance, not only on the part of the health authorities but on behalf of the entire nation to ensure that we are not lulled into a false sense of security.
The small island nation of Iceland, with a comparable population of 300,000, has moved to test almost anyone and everyone for the virus.
We must also bear in mind that our own testing protocol may not have caught everyone who has developed COVID-19.
Those who have either ignored or flagrantly floated the stay-at-home orders and the social distancing guidelines do nothing to ease our concerns. The virus may yet lurk in unknown persons or places, waiting to pounce.
Even as our political leaders seek to revive a moribund tourism industry, hopeful that the coming winter season may yet be filled with North American tourists, we must accept the very real possibility of waves of ‘aerial’ attack by the microbe.
The public health scientists have said this is not a one-time deal. In the absence of a vaccine, other prophylactic drug or even a definitive efficacious treatment for COVID-19, we would do well to approach the eventual end of the public health emergency with extreme caution and much, much more testing.
So far, the protocols established here have dictated testing be carried out for those people who have presented symptoms of disease or revealed themselves through contact tracing to have been in close proximity to an infected person,
But we already know that people can be asymptomatic and yet pass on the disease. This particular phenomenon has dark roots in public health history. Witness the sobering tale of “Typhoid Mary”, a cook in New York who carried typhus from house to house, never coming down with the symptoms of the disease, but leading to the sickening of scores. She ended her days in quarantine three decades later.
So there is precedent for our concern that politics may yet overthrow epidemiology as we dictate our next steps. We are minded to recall the words of the president of the economic society, Simon Naitram, who said – and we paraphrase -. What is the use of reviving an economy? If no one is left to revive it?
We feel justified in calling upon the health authorities to establish, at the earliest opportunity, publicly disclosed guidelines on how testing will be increased in order that we flatten the so-called curve of the epidemic’s raise.
While we appreciate the health minister’s dogged determination, couched in military-style rhetoric of no ‘retreat, no surrender’, we further advise the political directorate and those it governs not to extract from science more than it can deliver at this time.
Five days do not a COVID-free nation make.
