So, it seems that the out­break is over. We have won the “war”. We have van­quished the virus.

At present, Trinidad and To­ba­go has just one pa­tient hos­pi­talised for Covid-19 in the High De­pen­den­cy Unit at the Cou­va Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal. Four am­bu­la­to­ry cas­es are sta­tioned at the Home of Foot­ball Well­ness Cen­tre, wait­ing to go home. There are an­oth­er 91 peo­ple quar­an­tined at the UWI Debe Cam­pus and NA­PA.

Ex­cel­lent news!

From the 116 con­firmed cas­es of Covid-19, 103 pa­tients have re­cov­ered and have re­turned home. There have been eight deaths. There have been no new cas­es since April 26, ie. for the last 14 days. One more day and that’s it boys and girls, we are home scot-free.

The idea that we were ever in a “war” with a virus, with na­ture it­self, how­ev­er, is of­fen­sive to those peo­ple who live or lived through re­al wars. Our “war” con­sist­ed in stay­ing home sur­round­ed, in the main, by all the com­forts of our time, home en­ter­tain­ment, easy ac­cess to food and lack of per­son­al dan­ger ex­cept that of be­com­ing bored.

It should al­so be clear that our suc­cess as a species liv­ing in a hos­tile world has lit­tle to do with win­ning a war. It has much more to do with our adapt­abil­i­ty as a species, our abil­i­ty to twist and turn and for­mat our body against the rav­ages of na­ture, to con­vert over eons, the bac­te­ria and par­a­sites and virus­es that sur­round us in­to our ser­vants.

There are more bac­te­ria in­side of us than we have body cells so much so that one won­ders whether they are our ser­vants or we theirs? Measles used to cure chil­dren with cer­tain kid­ney dis­eases and peo­ple in West Africa have adapt­ed to the malar­ia par­a­site by evolv­ing the sick­le cell gene which gives them pro­tec­tion against malar­ia.

In the same way cur­ried foods are said to have de­vel­oped when peo­ples in the Ganges delta no­ticed that those who ate hot cur­ries seemed more re­sis­tant to cholera. In the mod­ern era, beer and mar­i­jua­na seems to have the same ef­fect on cholera. All three in­crease stom­ach acid which is one of our de­fences against gas­troin­testi­nal in­fec­tions.

How­ev­er as Calvin told Hobbes, “It of­fends the hu­man ego that na­ture is in­dif­fer­ent to us” so we come up with id­i­ot­ic ex­pres­sions that ex­press our frus­tra­tion yet make good sound bites.

Putting aside all com­ments about how many tests we are do­ing in T&T, just over two thou­sand now, one of the low­est in the world, and that ap­par­ent­ly in­cludes 652 com­mu­ni­ty tests in the past two weeks, all neg­a­tive, al­though no one knows what the cri­te­ria for test­ing peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty are and for­get­ting for the mo­ment the ap­par­ent in­crease in deaths from pneu­mo­nia, MoH says they are too busy to check out the fig­ures and com­pare them to pre­vi­ous years, the ques­tion must be how did we do this?

How did lit­tle T&T elim­i­nate the virus so quick­ly?

There ap­pear to be five or six schools of thought.

First the Gov­ern­ment has re­al­ly done an ex­cep­tion­al job of fol­low­ing CARPHA/PA­HO guide­lines to con­trol the out­break. Ku­dos to them.

Two, since there has been so lit­tle test­ing, there is lit­tle chance of pick­ing up pos­i­tives us­ing a test that has a false neg­a­tive per­cent­age of be­tween 15 to 30 per cent.

Three, God is a Tri­ni. That ap­pears un­like­ly. Venes be­lieve God is a Venezue­lan and there is al­so not much Covid- 19 over there.

This could be an­oth­er rea­son why the Venezue­lan VP vis­it­ed the PM with a cou­ple PDVSA di­rec­tors. To dis­cuss Covid-19? There is al­so the ques­tion of obeah since a for­mer PM’s per­son­al obeah woman, at last count, was said to be liv­ing in Venezuela.

Could the virus have been brought here for Car­ni­val? Young Trinida­di­an mas­quer­aders could have been in­fect­ed, asymp­to­mati­cal­ly or oth­er­wise, and we are pro­tect­ed be­cause we have de­vel­oped herd im­mu­ni­ty? We should find out when an­ti­body test­ing ever be­comes avail­able here.

Fi­nal­ly it could be sun­light. The US De­part­ment of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty re­port­ed last week that half the virus may be killed in as lit­tle as two min­utes if it’s ex­posed to di­rect sun­light.

The thing is. If this sto­ry is true, if we have stopped Covid-19 in its tracks, peo­ple will be com­ing to T&T for the next decade to find out how ex­act­ly how we did this.

In the mean­time, fol­low­ing the best sci­ence of course, KFC is open and so is the cig­a­rette fac­to­ry.