SARS, A Crawling Virus, What Have We Prepared For It?

Last week I wrote about virus SARS in an article titles “Each Era has its plague” presenting a simple definition to the virus, I’ve also stumbled upon the wisdom behind the spread of such disease and in our days in specific, I have also expressed by belief that it is connected to corruption through people, and that it is only the beginning of greater things, and have supported with different references.

Till this day 5663 cases were registered and 372 of them were reported dead, this disease is crawling from country to another day by day, and I do not rule out the possibility for it to reach us, as all it needs is 10 days of incubation before any side effects appear, which is a long enough period for the virus to be transported from one end of this earth to the other without the knowledge of the carrier, and where the world is now similar to a small accessible village.

And where no cure has been presented for this virus, and the only way to contain it is through rising up the level of health awareness by pitting accurate plans to block it and prevent its spreading, it is necessary for us to have a clear and detailed plan, otherwise, viruses like this can rampant in our communities and countries like wildfires.

And I would like through this article to raise many questions, maybe I would be able to awaken the sense of responsibility and risk of dangers we’re against by starting to become responsible as communities and individuals in raising questions that needs to be raised and answer what we can from them and plan and work by doing and not by only saying and preaching.

• And where there is no cure to this virus as explained there are ways of prevention and rising up public health awareness, and putting tight plans to contain this disease, so where are the plans? Where are public health awareness programs?

• What are the conditions of insulation? What are the conditions of quarantine? And do doctors and workers in the medical sector know what the difference between both when dealing with the virus? Did we put boards identifying who gets insulated? How? And how many days? And when does the insulation of patients end? In American, the order was given by President Bush on the 4^th of April 2003 in identifying the area of quarantine.

• Did public and private hospitals obtain the required blood tests to check the suspicious infection from not (Antibody to SARS- Cov)?

• Were trained and authorized medical health team formed to clean, decontaminate and sterilize the suspected infected areas with the virus in case in shows near the parameters of a school or a hospital or a factory or a company, and are the protective clothes available and ready to be used while enough training has been given to use them, including all necessary protocols and procedures for this mission, studied and written by those teams? Are types of cleaning and sterilization materials available?

• Were there a systematic distribution in hospitals on the ways of sterilizing patient’s rooms after they leave and the submission of other patients after? And who is appointed to monitor this mission and making sure of the hospitals strict instructions are applied? What about the ways of sterilization to each of the hospitals equipments and tools?

• What about the schools? What about the students that are infected with coughing and high temperature symptoms? How are they deal with? How are they diagnosed in their schools, and how are decisions taken to send them home? What about their colleagues mingling with them and did not show any symptoms until 3 to 10 days after? Is the role of parents at home clear in the case of their children being infected with coughing? To they keep their children at home? When do they send them to school? Do we follow instructions of the control center of the diseases from sending them to their school after 72 hours of coughing symptoms without evolving to other symptoms? Was all this information circulated in schools?

• Did these instructions reach to each house through schools? Who do we report with infected cases? Are there public phone numbers from different media entities?

• Did different kinds of institutes, governmental or private, hire people with daily follow up in making sure of safety for their workers and that there are no people developing symptoms related to the disease and act fast in protection towards other individuals?

• What are the instructions to people suspecting the infection of the virus before being submitted to a medical clinic or a hospital to make sure if they are infected or not? How is the medical examiner or hospital notified before the arrival of patients to proceed with necessary steps in avoiding the spread of the virus in the hospital or the clinic while the patient is waiting? And where are all those instructions located? And where are the translations of full recommendations that was initiated by the control center on CDC diseases which was translated to many other languages, but have not found one in Arabic, those are detailed recommendations that include full and accurate information that is supposed to be translated, summarized and published in Arabic media streams to raise health awareness in our communities?

• Why doesn’t the community warn against the implications of continuing bad habits such has sharing a smoke of Arabic Shisha between 10’s of mouths, where with no doubt if one of them is infected, all will be infected as well in one session, what about the other habits such as cheek kissing on every occasion, and hand washing many times during the day, especially after going out considering it’s the main source of transportation of infections.

It might be thought by who has no luck in prevention knowledge, which doing such media campaigns for public health awareness, is a way to spread fear and confusion in the community, but it is even thought by some as a way of being pessimist, and the truth is that this is a misconception of reality, where not doing such campaigns and waiting for the virus to come and getting infections in the community, only then to do the campaign, is the exact reasons of failure and a call of chaos, fear and confusion, and where I compare it with an Airline company that took a decision in cancelling safety measures that are known before the departure of the flight and where they explain how to use Oxygen in the case of suffocation and how to react in the case of an engine failure in the flight and emergency landing, this Airline took the policy of not disturbing their passengers or scaring them with such information, and waited until a disaster has happened instead presenting all this information during the actual emergency.