Sin Chew Daily

Since the coronavirus lockdown was lifted in Wuhan, for a very long time China's daily new infections have numbered in the single-digit.

But on June 13, the city of Beijing reported as many as 44 new COVID-19 cases, and the country's virus expert Zeng Guang believed they were derived from a European variant based on early genetic tests.

The coronavirus is known for its powerful virulence and unpredictability. As such, it is extremely difficult to wipe out the virus. Global outbreak remains very much at the peak despite having ravaged the world for over half a year now. People living in a dozen of countries like the US, UK, Russia and France are still fighting to stay alive.

The number of daily new infections breached the 50,000-mark on March 26, ad 100,000-mark on May 28. And up till June 14, the numbers of daily new infections have hovered between 100,000 and 150,000, and the total jumped by 2.5 million in a short span of only 18 days. Today, we have more than eight million confirmed cases worldwide with 430,000 deaths.

From the fast rising daily numbers, we can deduce that the coronavirus outbreak is getting increasingly serious, with new variants being detected. Sadly, during such critical moments, countries in the West have announced to lift their lockdowns in the name of reviving their economies.

In the meantime, developing countries such as China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand have effectively put the virus under control mainly because their citizens are a lot more disciplined while the governments have enforced the lockdown laws very strictly to keep the virus at bay.

Of the five most severely affected countries, third-placed Russia is still not giving up the fight while India (4th) is at a disadvantage being a densely populated country.

As for the other three: the US (2.17 million confirmed cases and 120,000 deaths), Brazil (870,000 cases, 43,000 deaths) and UK (300,000 cases, 42,000 deaths), their failures in containing the virus have very much to do with the attitudes of their leaders.

Donald Trump knew as early as in January that the virus was about to spread to the whole planet but announced a state of emergency for the US only on March 13. He even made his daily COVID-19 press briefings an election campaign platform. The New York Times subsequently blasted the president for wasting one whole month in fighting the virus. Trump later downplayed the severity of the situation by lifting the lockdown bans in the name of economy. With this, America has been thrown into the disastrous desperation of "herd immunity".

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro's attitude is even more pathetic. British medical journal The Lancet hit out at Bolsonaro as "the biggest threat to Brazil's COVID-19 response". His attitude towards lockdown and physical distancing measures was one of contempt and indifference. He even personally led anti-lockdown street protests and saw two of his influential ministers leaving. Lockdown measures in most severely affected cities of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro were lifted on June 11, and this shows that Brazil has literally given up the fight.

British prime minister Boris Johnson was the first genius world leader to have conceived the idea of herd immunity. He initially said he would not enforce any lockdown measures but changed his mind after learning that the price to pay for such inaction was indeed too heavy.

By herd immunity it means that if we allow a large portion of the population to get infected, recover and then become immune in an epidemic, the non-immune individuals will receive indirect protection due to the much reduced number of people who will get infected and infect others. However, given the tremendous price to pay, many scientists have rejected this idea.

Even at the peak of the outbreak, countries like the US, Brazil and UK have opted to ease their lockdown policies in a way to declare to the world that they are prepared to adopt the "herd immunity" approach. This is done at a cost of more infections and deaths, and the consequences are going to be calamitous, whether the chain of infections will eventually get broken.

Robert Koch Institute, Germany's infectious disease control center, has estimated that the basic reproduction number of coronavirus is between 2.4 and 3.3, meaning each infected individual can infect two to three other people. This is akin to cellular mitosis in which a single cell is divided into two identical cells, each of which divides further to two new cells, from one to two to four, to eight to sixteen and so forth. Given the coronavirus infection cycle of ten days, an infected individual will infect 1,016 others every 100 days.

As such. Health DG Noor Hisham has repeatedly urged Malaysians not to downplay the infectiousness of the virus. The emergence of new local positive cases in the Chinese capital should serve as a stern warning to all.