Do you know which is the deadliest animal to the humans? It is neither snake nor lion, but a normal mosquito. It kills around 725,000 to 1 Million people across the globe in a year (sources: CNET, Business Insider and BBC).
We have treatments for mosquito bite borne diseases like malaria, filaria, dengue, chikun gunya and others. But still, the fatality rate is 1 million a year.
Do you know how many get killed by road accidents every year? WHO says it is nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day.
We have traffic rules, safety measures like helmets and seat belts but still the road casualties are 1.25 M a year.
Coming to the cancer deaths, it is a staggering 10 million per year world wide.
“Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer”.
Yes, we know the world is equipped with chemotherapies and many other modern treatments to combat cancers.
WHO says: The first leading cause of death worldwide is the cardiovascular disease amounting to a mammoth number of 18 Million deaths a year, despite having so many lifestyle measures and therapeutical solutions to defeat it.
Despite the above known statistics, the stock markets never collapsed. World has been never under panic. But why only with coronavirus that has taken a toll of 11,000 (death by dog bites amount to around 35,000 per year and snake bite to 100,000) in a span of 5 months? The only reason is corona is communicable. Nobody wants to get it from the victim (well, we have victims of passive smoking too but still dont care much).
Had it been idiopathic, there wouldn’t have been this pandemonium in the world. As per the reports, more than 90% deaths of corona victims are due to other chronic ailments in their body. So, how fatal is corona?
The world suffers a major economic blow with the shutdowns and that results in mass retrenchments in companies. Millions will lose the jobs for sure or will be forced to work at half pay. That may cause a major chaos resulting in mass suicides.
After all, there are more weak minded people in the world, we have witnessed, who jumped out and got into panic buying with mere media speculations. Imagine what they would do if they lose jobs abruptly and no other companies have any openings?
So, instead of looking at corona with our mind’s microscopic, better to treat it on par with a mosquito and take possible care like washing hands, using masks and avoiding shake hands.
May the world leaders look into this and take necessary measures to revive the economy by lifting the shut downs and lockdowns. It is high time to do this to avoid the risk of world suffering an economic death.
Yes, the economic blow is more contagious than the physical one. We can escape the physical infection by hiding at homes under voluntary isolation. But we cannot escape the financial blow.
