This will be a rather short post on Corona Virus you can read more on Wikipedia. My take on corona is from a slightly different perspective, an econmoical one. I’m neither a physician nor an economist, so take everything you read here with a huge grain of salt.

You can help yourself and the community a lot by following public health regulations. Cleaning your hands with soap and self isolation can be very helpful in reducing the number of Corona cases and avoid excessively overwhelming the health system.

total lockdown

In effect, the country as a whole pretty much stops working. Let’s close everything so that people won’t get to meet with each others’ (stop spreading the virus), and we can handle the affected cases.

ONE GOTCHA: it only stops the virus from spreading, and it needs to be done iteratively whenever we have new cases, we lockdown the country again. You can clearly see how devastating that can be for the country.

Herd immunity

You can read more on it on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity, but let’s cite these excerpts from same wikipedia entry:

Individual immunity can be gained by recovering from an infection or through vaccination

Some individuals cannot become immune due to medical reasons and in this group herd immunity is an important method of protection

Because?

The greater the proportion of individuals in a community who are immune, the smaller the probability that those who are not immune will come into contact with an infectious individual.

Herd immunity here means, we need to allow low risk samples (kids and youth mainly) to have Corona, while securing the high risky samples.

After two weeks:

  • a percentage of our community will develop immunity to Corona
  • the risky sample will be kept isolated (quaranteed)
  • we won’t be destroying our health system

GOTCHAS

  • this method is extremely risk and it requires high level of discipline (Sudanese lack this feature)

But, it might be a viable solution, think about this:

  • the majority of population in Sudan are youth and even younger median age in Sudan is 19.7 years
  • locking down the country is really not a solution at all, you will need to lock down the country every two weeks if any new case is recorded! This will halt the country to the ground.
  • the exponential growth of corona cases is inevitable, but try to think again: what are you optimizing for? You cannot stop the growth of corona
  • overwhelming the health system will result in more catastrophic cases than corona itself
  • locking down the country will result in more catastrophic results than corona itself.

In Sudan, we are in a different situation than the world. Our case is really different. Whatever the solution the government will adapt it needs to fit the data we have (Sudan case), using “the rest of the world” solution won’t help.