Introduction

When the new coronavirus was first announced as a global pandemic in March of last year by WHO, we all thought it was going to be over in a few months. But it dragged on, and global numbers increased from a 100,000 in late March of 2020 and kept on increasing. And not much  later we began to have new variants arriving.

Now, some 10 months later, the global total has reached a staggering 101 million, and is increasing at the alarming rate of one million every two days!  Does this not scare you?

We know we have several vaccines that have been developed by various countries and which are now being implemented. This should be our saving grace. It is still early days to assess their true efficacy. We have been told that some are up to 90% effective, which is great. However we are not sure whether they will work on the new variants, which seem to be arriving now quite rapidly (the latest I heard about was the Kent variant in the UK…). 

So what is going to happen? Will technology (I mean medical technology and not information technology of the social media variety) win over this biological menace to our existence that we all knew could appear some day but did not give a second thought to, or will COVID19 simply overwhelm all our efforts to defeat it? 

The website

We can speculate, but whatever we do, it is always best to start from the facts. And thanks to the internet, this has been available to us all this while at the click on the right link.  One such link is www.worldometers.info

It contains all you ever wanted to know about the current statistics of COVID19. The sooner you visit it, the better you will feel about your state of knowledge of this pandemic.

It presents information about the status of covid19 in ALL countries of the world, arranged according to several headings. The first 7 of these are as follows:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	…
Country	Total cases	(Daily) New cases	Total deaths	(Daily) New deaths	Total recovered	Active cases	…

The COVID19 Facts

I have been keeping a record of the information in some of these columns (1, 2, 7)  to keep me briefed. Here is an excerpt of the figures for Wednesday 27 January 2021:

Country	(2) Total cases	(3) New cases	(7) Active cases
World	101,412,429	590,924	25,912,781
USA	26,166,423	151,879	9,784,075
UK	3,715,054	25,308	1,939,231
Australia	28,785	5	1851
New Zealand	2295	5	69
Fiji	55	0	0

Firstly, a word about the terminology:

Total cases means all the cases that were ever recorded in the country since the start of the pandemic. It is the cumulative total, and does not tell you much about the present total.

New cases are the new cases of COVID19 that occur on the date of interest (here it is 27/01/2021)

Active cases are the total actual cases of COVID19 that exist in the country on the day (here it is on 27/01/2021). So this is the figure we really want to know about!

What happens to a person after s/he has contracted covid19 is that s/he either remains active, or recovers or dies. Therefore we have the equation:

                Total cases = Active cases  + Recovered cases  + Dead cases

I have not shown the total number of deaths or recovery (because of lack of time/space). But we can obtain an overall idea of the death by calculating the death rate. 

Yesterday

• the total global death  was 2,185,981
• The total cases were 101,505,932

Thus the death rate, which is the percentage of the total who died, is 2185981/101505932 = 2.1%

This ratio has stayed more or less constant over the months. So we can always estimate the total number of death given the total number of cases.

To use an example to put all this together, let us look at the situation in Australia.  Last Wednesday

• The total number of cases reported since covid arrived in Australia had reached 28, 785
• The number of people who actually had covid19 on Wednesday was 1851
• Only 5 new cases had been added to the total on the day.

The Trends

So what is happening to COVID19 ten months after it started? Is it looking like it will go away? What is happening in case of the world and to specific nations?

From the information I have gleaned over the months from the above site, it is clear that the situation is as follows:

1. World:  the global total is rising at an alarming rate now of 1 million every 2 days (stop, look, listen, and think of what I just said!). The daily death rate is also rising! However, the daily new cases seems to be showing a decline
2. UK: The situation was going out of control there two weeks ago, with the new UK variant playing havoc.  The PM had no option but to impose a level 4 lockdown (everyone stay home). This brought down the daily new cases from 38,000 to 20,000 in 6 days. However it seems to be on the climb again.
3. Australia: this country has brought its covid under control. Its active cases has been going down (ever so slowly but steadily) over the past months
4. New Zealand: NZ knew what to do right from the start. It has successfully managed to contain new community transmissions. Its active cases has hovered in the 50-70 range for many months now.
5. Fiji:  We are the champions! Only 55 cases, with no new cases or active cases over large stretches of time. Can we keep it that way?

The future

And what of the future?

Obviously, the world authorities (in the form of WHO and individual nations) have strategized for the elimination of this pandemic.  The one important component of this plan is vaccination, and the question everyone is asking is whether they will manage to cure the disease.

But there are complications. We had expected variants to occur. But it is not clear whether the vaccines (which took many months to develop), will be able to take care of all of them. What we must keep in mind is that the longer we let the scourge run its course, the higher the chances become of more (perhaps more potent) variants arising. So we have a fight against time.

Whatever the case, it seems to me that, for a combinations of all these reasons,  it will be several years before we bring this pandemic under control.  What do you think?