By Nyainda Manaseh
As of today, the United States of America’s death toll and infection rate stands at 45,000 and 826,000 respectively. Closely in tow are Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.
Ironically, the 2019 Global Health Security Index lists the United States and the United Kingdom as the globe’s most prepared countries to handle a pandemic. Effectively, as David Ndii puts it in his article on the Elephant, the organization is on a path to opprobrium.
The skewed healthcare system, perpetrated under the auspices of systematic racial ascendancy, is responsible for the unprecedented mass deaths witnessed in the USA. As statistics brought to the fore, a black American is three times likely to die from Covid-19 as compared to a native.
This is attributed to poor healthcare systems in specific states densely populated by blacks and a yawning economic gap that systemically places blacks on the lower-cadre jobs, making it literally impossible for them to work from home.
For a country that invests in excess of 90 billion US dollars – loosely translating to 90 trillion Kenyan shillings – in robust military defense systems and sparks senseless direct and proxy wars on foreign lands, Covid-19 has recalibrated its priorities.
Our future is in the past. The next frontier for human survival is in nature and comprehensive and quality public healthcare systems. Unfortunately, all that the United States has had overtime was a hammer, but the situation never presented itself in the form of a nail.
The military might of the yore showcased in fighter jets, drone attacks, sophisticated assaut rifles, and state-of-the-art global surveillance equipment has no place in nature’s wrath.
But one thing that this pandemic has exposed is our collective penchant for being on a constant path of collision with Mother Nature. Our preoccupation with capital-intensive development at the expense of the ecology is reigning terror on us.
Most pandemics in the recent past are diseases that previously existed in wild animals but spilling over to human beings. The excess pressure exerted on the environment through rapid construction and mining is driving wild animals from their ecological niche into human spaces.
And Kenya has not been left behind.
Due to our government’s subservience to the Chinese Government, we forced a railway through the Nairobi National Park, ostensibly to complete the Tano Tena promises. As we speak, there is a push and pull over a hotel is to built on a chunk of land hived from the same park.
What happens next is the free roaming of wild animals within human spaces, causing irreversible damage to human life. In China, wild creatures are turning into delicacies with wild markets thriving in most parts of the country. As they eat penguins and bats, they are locking the whole world down.
But we can now see how much health practitioners, social scientists, artists, teachers, journalists et cetera are critical to our survival.
The world has finally closed in on those bureaucrats who found solace in their offshore accounts to travel overseas for treatment and leave behind poor public health systems for professionals to grapple with, and the poor man to die trapped in there.
Shit is, no one is getting out of this thing alive