Widespread fear-mongering propaganda centering the pandemic PART-1

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According to recent reports, business establishments including shopping malls in Dubai will no longer have to use thermal scanners and conduct temperature checks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Thermal scanner and manual temperature checks are not required anymore,” Dubai Economy said in a Tweet on Wednesday. The update also applies to valet parking protocols. As per the update, the requirement for covering the seats and steering wheel with plastic will stand removed, the Tweet added.

The removal of thermal cameras and temperature checks from malls is being hailed as a confidence building mechanism by the health care community. These scanners and temperature checks were being carried out at all indoor public places for the last several months as a tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Dr Atul Aundhekar, CEO of Avivo Health Care Group explained: “Detecting temperature by thermal scanners or with sensors was not really helping. Thermals scanners were absorbing the thermal energy from people. Temperature can happen due to any kind of illness and people are smart enough to take antipyretic medications. So, this was giving a false sense of security.,” said Dr Aundhekar. He feels the government is acting very rationally and doing the right thing.

Dubai authorities definitely have taken a timely decision by abolishing the practice of using thermal scanners as it only was spreading fear amongst the people, instead of contributing nothing to containing the transmission of coronavirus in the society.

Back in June 2020, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina decided to lift the lockdown and allow the country’s economy to get into normality. While Bangladesh was opening up, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was further tightening the lockdown at the cost of a massive increase in the unemployment rate and economic adversity of the people. According to the latest reports, India’s economic growth has been tremendously affected due to Covid-19 as well as prolonged lockdown and it may take several years for recovering this huge loss.

As the Covid-19 vaccine has started rolling, it is expected gradually the majority of the people in the world will get vaccinated. In my personal opinion, every country now needs to focus on overcoming the economic loss due to the pandemic-fear which has continued for almost the entire part of 2020. Unless it is done, those nations still suffering from pandemic-phobia may find themselves in an acute financial crisis pretty soon.

The global population now needs to come out of the pandemic fear and return to regular activities by maintaining the required precautions.

Difference between Black Death and Covid-19

According to Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Professor of medieval history, University of Rhode Island, like COVID-19, the Black Death was insidious, unpalatable, and invisible, and it came from the East. Of course, the pathogen is totally different today, we are dealing today with a virus versus a bacterium in the past.

Of course, the pathogen is totally different today, we are dealing today with a virus versus a bacterium in the past. There were three forms of yersinia pestis, bubonic (the most common), pneumonic, and septicemic. You could survive the first, you died quickly in the second and third cases. They called the disease the “mortality” in the Latin of the time, mortalitas.

The disease surrounded humans who were at a loss to identify where it came from … somewhat like today. Folks presumed it was God’s wrath, or bad air (miasma) caused by volcanoes, or the conjunction of certain stars. Some others thought that people like beggars, lepers, or Jews had willingly and purposefully poisoned the area.

The idea that it was in the air circulated at a time when the concept of “infection” and “infectious diseases” did not exist. People made masks with good smelling herbs/flowers that they kept under their nose in order to ward off the disease similar to the “masks” of today.

However, unlike today’s COVID-19, those in the Middle Ages did not know that it had moved from animals to humans.

To a large measure, we encounter the same overreaction and scapegoating. Today, it is the “fault of the Chinese” versus the fault of any “others” in the past. The disease spread like wildfire through a society that had already suffered malnutrition due to food shortages and famines of the 1310s and 1320s as a result of climate change. Like COVID-19, the Black Death affected concentrated populations in cities and towns and followed the course of international trade. In 1348 it affected the young, old, and poor.

To be continued …

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