• The decisions being made as concerns those in mandatory quarantine are certainly painful, but they are in the public interest.
• We must support the government in this endeavour.
Image: DOUGLAS OKIDDY
We have been reading in the press about the outcry from patients who have been forcibly quarantined by the government in several institutions across Nairobi.
I empathise with them and can only hope that their ordeal will end soon.
However, I believe that it is also important for them and for the rest of the country to understand why the government has arrived at this not so pleasant decision because after all the facts are put on the table we may all well agree that this decision was the right one.
Let’s begin where all this started. We are all aware that in late December a new disease was found to be affecting individuals in Wuhan, China.
Its main symptoms were found to be respiratory in nature with the most serious outcome being death from respiratory failure.
This disease has since been determined to be viral in origin and has been named Covid-19.
As we in the medical fraternity have continued to learn about the disease it has become evident that it’s main mode of spread is via respiratory droplets either spread directly from person to person or from contact with these droplets left on surfaces.
We also now know that the disease can be spread by infected persons who are asymptomatic; that is showing no evidence of disease and that it can take up to 14 days for an infected person to show symptoms of the disease.
As of today, more than 1.2 million people have been infected by the virus with more than 70,000 thousand deaths around the world.
Health systems far more advanced than ours have been overwhelmed by patient numbers, unable to cope with the number of patients and being forced to neglect the burden of care for other common diseases so as to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Let me now focus a bit on human behaviour.
Many of us despite warnings from healthcare professionals, government leaders and even despite seeing in the media the terrible death toll Covid-19 is causing in other parts of the world have refused to change our behaviour, we continue to go to work, are not wearing masks, even attend parties and are staying in close proximity to one another.
People we expected to be more responsible including priests and a deputy governor have proved to be sources of community spread.
I would like to add that initially these individuals were requested to self-quarantine in their own homes, which of course would have been much cheaper for them.
We can all attest that many of us viewed this decision at the time with much scepticism.
In fact, even the individuals who are in mandatory quarantine have been reported to be behaving as if they were not likely to be potentially infected with Covid-19.
We have also learnt that several of these individuals have since been diagnosed with the disease.
One carrier, just one, can do a lot of harm. A famous example of this is patient 31 in South Korea, or closer to home our deputy governor from Kilifi who is responsible for most of the coastal disease burden.
The decisions being made as concerns those in mandatory quarantine are certainly painful, but they are in the public interest.
We must support the government in this endeavour.
The government can certainly do more to ease the financial pain of a forced quarantine, but it must not relent in its quest to prevent this disease epidemic from spreading more widely in our country.
Any resistance to these necessary measures must be countered with more education, both to those affected and to the general public.
A saying I heard recently cannot be more appropriate at this difficult time in world history ‘It might be better to apologise later, rather than miss an opportunity to make an important decision’.
Our brothers and sisters in mandatory quarantine need to view this more as a hiccup of travel and accept it.
I would imagine that if they were in a foreign country and war broke out and they could not find a flight home, they would make do as best as they could.
That is exactly the situation we find ourselves in, the world is at war, with an unseen enemy spreading silently through our countries.
We must do what is necessary to win this war. No cost is too heavy.
Dr Nicholas Okumu is a Consultant Orthopedic Surgeon at the Kenyatta National Hospital