Since my previous article on virus corona’s early pandemic issue on the 15 March 2020, I have noticed and followed closely a lot of international events with this pandemic.

Obviously, the world’s pandemic map has changed dramatically, and from homeland of the virus China, we can see now many new competing hosts for the virus, be it unwilling and unhappy hosts !!.

From China to USA, many world countries lie in between. USA is  the world leader in almost everything, and corona virus infection rate was never an exception to the rule. China is now standing lower in the list of corona virus rate of infections at the 11th. position of world leaders in this area, allowing USA at the top lead followed by Spain, then Italy, then UK, then France to be the top five with confidence. UK has alas risen from level 12 to level 4 on the number of infections, and probably the top in Europe in the number of deaths from corona virus infections.

On today’s figures, more than 3.6 million people in the whole world are now proved infected with covid-19, and obviously many more are not counted in different parts of the world especially those lagging in the tail of world’s economy and welfare. More than quarter of a million are now reported dead because of the virus, and more than a million are now reported as fully recovered. They could be considered immune to be re-infected with the same virus, but even that we are not quite sure. Some, and many cases had re-infection so far, and the dilemma continues.

We know it is an RNA virus, and we have been told that it is not “really” like a flu virus, even though Covid-19 has many things in common with the influenza virus.  Covid-19, or call it SARS-2 has more preference to deep inside the respiratory structure and doesn’t favour that much nasal mucosa, or oral mucosa. Covid-19 loves to live and grow deep inside the alveolar/bronchiolar linings. Hence, may be, it hates to travel far away from their subjects, and this might help many people to protect themselves from getting infected by the new term “social isolations” or call it “social repulsion” versus “social attraction” !!.

Anyway, we still are struggling to learn much more about the beautifully looking  current corona virus. It does look very nicely like a wreath, and we know very well what wreaths are used for !!. We for sure need to learn more, and by the time we learn all about the virus, it might decide to leave us to another planet. I am talking here about knowing how to kill the virus(treatment) or how to protect ourselves against any further assaults by the same virus(vaccination). We are now struggling with what we can use to kill the virus, even though we have tried all what is available in our hands from previous experiences with HIV, seasonal Influenza, SARS, MERS, and even Ebola anti-viral agents, but we are still struggling to stop or even contain the covid-19 infections.  We have also tried anti-malaria agents such as Chloroquine but we are still far away from harming this “clever” virus.

However, on the horizon, in fact much closer to us, I can hear some good news about controlling covid-19 all together and forever. Researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, as well as the Erasmus Medical Centre and the company Harbour BioMed (HBM), have identified a potential method of neutralising COVID-19 . They discovered that an antibody which prevents the SARS virus from infecting human cells could also block the novel coronavirus from infecting human cells too, according to a peer reviewed study published on Monday 4th. May 2020, in the journal Nature Communications. Testing their collection of antibodies on cultured human cells, researchers discovered one which binds to a specific part which is present in both SARS and the virus causing COVID-19. This discovery could offer an initial step towards developing a fully-human antibody to treat or prevent the disease. We will keep watching, and hoping , after we have been – for long – just dreaming !!.

Two drugs seemed to be with a potential therapeutic values in patients with COVID-19 infections. One of them is called Remdesivir is a broad-spectrum antiviral agent which blocks adenosine, is a purine nucleotide base which is essential for RNA and DNA viruses to survive. It has been tried and it has some value in reducing the recovery period or otherwise shorten it. The other one is Tocilizumab, an interleukin-6 inhibitor which is used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, and has also shown some potential therapeutic effects in patients with COVID-19 infections. We need to wait for the outcome of phase three trials.

Naturally, as humans, we have been through hundreds of previous pandemics, including those were much more serious than the current COVID-19 pandemic such as the Spanish Influenza in 1918-1920, which infected nearly half of the world population at that time i.e nearly 500 million and killed nearly 50 million. However, COVID-19 was the one which took far much more attention than any previous similar pandemics. It is for sure, the world we are living in is far different from any previous time with our current advances in everything including of course media, economics, technology, politics, health, education and artificial intelligence. We are panicking because we are now the victims. We have read a lot about previous world disasters and pandemics, but naturally we’ve never been so worried and alarmed like we have done on this occasion.

Aaaand, there is always the question: what life is going to be after this pandemic, and how much we can learn from this experience?. Are we going to learn anything at all?. I don’t know, and I do strongly think that, once the “beautiful” virus decides to leave us, we will just celebrate and enjoy our freedom again… we will celebrate our social gathering again. We may forget all about COVID-19 apart of course from the academics, virologists, microbiologists, politicians, and historians who will follow the traces of the pandemic, and write a lot about its dynasty. We probably see COVID to change into CUPID, and we see more hugging, stronger love, more romantic world, and real affection between humans world wide.

At the end of this quick relection, let me be a bit more serious about COVID-19 pandemic and us humans. Let us forget all about the conspiracy theories, political games, and the real thinking among many of the religious people in the world that, this pandemic is a punishment from God to us because we have never been really nice to each other. I just wanted to say and I am so confident, that, this is NOT His Majesty’s punishment to us human beings. It is in fact the other way around… it is his Mercy to us.

Since the creation of the first human on this planet, people were always and always challenged with natural disasters (Earthquakes, volcanos, floods, typhoons, infections, illnesses, congenital defects, etc). the only reason behind all of those natural disasters is for us to ponder, reflect, think, create, modernise and develop ourselves. We are here at our levels of civilisation and modernity because of those disasters. We were created to look forward, to progress, and to move on. That is why we are where we are now, and that is why we need think and believe that tomorrow is going to be better than today, and the future will be much better and brighter than our time. Life is like a running train with one way long trip. That train can only go forward, and it has for now unknown destination. It will just keep going with a lot of happy expectations and dreaming that the next stop will be happier than the one we just left behind.