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We are trusting our medical people and systems to keep us alive for the meantime while they find a vaccine to overthrow Corona.
One of their major challenges is how quickly the virus is transmitted between persons, increasing exponentially, the number of infected persons, in a short while.
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All around the world, country heads are trying to help slow the spread by instituting one form of lockdown or the other.
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China started it on 23 rd January 2020, locking down about 11million people in Wuhan, and extending it gradually to cover close to 57 million people in cities in the Hubei province.
WHO commended the move, and said it was “unprecedented in public health history.” In fact, in a France24 (https://www.france24.com/en/20200331-china-lockdown-may-have-blocked-700-000-virus-cases-researchers) publication on Tuesday, 31st April 2020, researchers estimate that the move might have prevented over 700,000 infections.
As of now, more than 2.8 billion across the globe are under some form of restrictions. Naturally, security personnel are the ones who would enforce these restrictions.
This means that, while they are supposed to ensure that their citizens keep distances away from themselves, they can assemble at their stations and interact with one another before dispersing to their posts. Does that look worrying to you yet?
In Italy, as the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/26/as-if-a-storm-hit-33-italian-health-workers-have-died-since-crisis-began) reported on 26th March 2020, forty-one health workers had died of Covid-19, with over 5000, contracting the virus.
Many of such cases have been recorded in Spain, the US, France and other places hard hit by the virus. One would think that given that PPEs and self-protection techniques are central to their profession, that should not be the case.
Safe to say that in comparison, security personnel are well below par when it comes to these self-protection techniques. If what we see in the videos and pictures from our major news outlets are anything to go by, our Police and Military personnel definitely need more education. Commendable though, that they always seem to be seen in PPEs, what is of concern is how they interact with citizens. They are all too ready and comfortable to hold citizens, touch surfaces and themselves.
If we follow the updates from the Ghana Health Service, then we should know that Covid-19 is in Ghanaian communities already. Our security personnel are supposed to acknowledge this.
I wish it could get through to them, that they may be good at dodging bullets though, but SARS-CoV-2 is a different enemy with different ammunitions.
You are at risk as everybody else. You, who enforce social distancing, must be socially distanced as well. Otherwise, you put yourselves at risk, your colleagues at risk, your families at risk and the nation’s security at risk too.
We appreciate you, and we need you. Civilians must practice social distancing, and so should you.
By: Collins Fiifi Anyimmadu
(The Wand)
Freelance Writer, Entrepreneur