PANDEMIC ECONOMICS

COVID 19 is a pandemic like no other; unprecedented and unpredictable, very devastating yet yielding enormous opportunities for disruptive innovational thinking. The opportunities created for the SSA arise from the fact that despite its poor health emergency preparedness, and challenges of poverty and food insecurity, the SSA surprisingly has had among the highest COVID-recovery rates compared to the advanced countries’ regions. Albeit the reasons for Africa’s immunity or resilience to the COVID 19 virus have not been determined, but a cursory review points to two stylized facts. Firstly, traditional Africans consume foods that are rich in vegetables, herbs, spices, and fruits that are commonly rich in micronutrients. Foods that are rich in micronutrients can help boost immunity for flu and other ailments. Secondly, the SSA population commonly suffers malaria and typhoid fever attacks that they treat regularly with the so-called Dr. Didier’s dual therapy, which was used successfully to treat COVID-19 in several countries. It can be argued that the long-term use of the dual therapy may have also supported the relative immunity of SSA people to COVID 19.

But since as evidenced, the dual therapy was successfully administered to persons hospitalized for COVID-19, then the contagion causing COVID-19 can barely be a virus in the strictest sense; it is perhaps an emerged hybrid germ with viral, bacterial, and parasitic microbial elements. And a combination of dietary supplements, mental conditioning, and sundry immune-boosting therapies are required to keep one optimally healthy and able to ward off the unavoidable attacks from sundry contagions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to fore possible health preparedness and socioeconomic risks. The health emergency management preparedness risks relate to information availability, competencies, and motivation of the health workers, availability of health facilities and supplies, the possible neglect of other important healthcare needs and challenges, and the knowledge of and willingness to adopt sound health-seeking behaviors.

The socioeconomic risks relate to the loss of jobs and livelihoods due to enforcement of the restrictive mandates, undue use of force to implement the restrictive mandates, poor accountability, and transparency in the use of COVID prevention/containment funds, and effective collaboration of key stakeholders from the level of households, communities, countries, regions and the world.

The individual level risks (both health and socioeconomic) will be minimized significantly if majority of persons, especially women and youths, have internet-connected and powered smartphones or other virtual communication devices to help them voice their grievances and concerns to the appropriate quarters, and at the same time know how to use the same devices as gateway to accessing materials for lifelong learning, and update their knowledge of how to create or take advantage of available opportunities to improve their living conditions and live well.

More importantly, SSA countries can take advantage of the opportunities created for herbal remedies to modernize ATM practices and create health tourism niches around it. This is apt as it is evident that vaccines alone can’t prevent or cure COVID-19. Hence WHO should make effort to unbiasedly investigate the reported successes of ATM remedies for the treatment of COVID-19 and other ailments, and the ATM therapies that are useful should be incorporated into the healthcare management mix to render it more inclusive, realistic, and effective. Despite the associated devastations of COVID 19, it still offers opportunities for the SSA countries to do more disruptive innovative thinking around building wellness/health tourism niches around herbal products, traditional fruits, and other ATM remedies/therapies.