What COVID-19 did
On 12 March, 2020, the New Straits Times Malaysia published the following:
“KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia confirmed its first sporadic case of Covid-19 yesterday, signalling the first time the coronavirus was detected in an isolated and random manner in the community”.
The events that followed are all too familiar to a pandemic-weary nation. In the third Sir John Monash Lecture series, the luminous Professor Dato’ Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman, Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Universiti Malaya, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Yale University delivered a searing and thought-provoking lecture, simply titled “What COVID-19 did.”
Professor Adeeba began with likening these times to wartime, stating that “we are just starting to emerge from the trenches”. It is with this sense of impending hope that we can begin to reflect on what happened in the last 18-19 months. Professor Adeeba compared the speed with which the virus spread to that of the SARS outbreak, and noted how after the COVID-19 genome was identified, many countries, including Malaysia, could quickly conduct diagnostic testing and close their borders. Despite the world’s best efforts, the pandemic has taken the lives of approximately 4.8 million people around the globe, with the pandemic’s true death toll being estimated to be at least 3.3 times more than that.
In addressing the situation in Malaysia and how we went from successful containment to the alarming increase of COVID-19 cases in the fourth quarter of 2020, Professor Adeeba explained that we “lost control” due to the sheer number of cases and the emergence of the DELTA strain, and were “unable to successfully test, trace, and isolate, which is the cornerstone of pandemic containment.” By the time the vaccines were rolled out, the nation was simply unable to sufficiently protect itself in time. Professor Adeeba continued to recount how public health systems around the world were overwhelmed because of, among other reasons, the lack of readiness in terms of ICU, limited availability of PPE, and the overall weakness of the existing primary healthcare. Interestingly, although many countries were financially unprepared for the onslaught of the pandemic, Professor Adeeba candidly pointed out that many of the world’s wealthier nations also suffered, if not more. The question that arises is thus: what went wrong?
What COVID-19 did was expose an unprepared health system with chronic underinvestment, reveal a serious collision of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) with an infectious disease epidemic, and highlight the gross inequalities in our society involving the urban poor, migrants and refugees, and prisoners. To prepare for future pandemics, Professor Adeeba surmised that “we need to look back on what we did well and what we didn’t do well, not just from a biomedical lens, but that we tackle those difficult questions of migrant workers, urban poor…those are difficult debates to have, difficult policies to reform, but reform we must.”
In an emotional closing, Professor Adeeba stated that what is missing from our collective response to this pandemic is kindness, and that before we invest in our health care system, national revival must start with being kinder.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the frontliners and everyday heroes who have served the nation and are still fighting the good fight. We are truly in your debt.