YES! Covid-19 will end sometime, but not until Covid has exterminated hundreds of millions, maybe one-third to a half of the world's population - short of near-total annihilation of the human race. I hope this will not come to pass. But it could. This figure is borne out by mathematical extrapolation - not by a simple conjectural erudition or a stab into the unknown. It is based on the history of pandemic occurrences on the planet. From the earliest one recorded in 430 BC in Athens, killing a quarter of its inhabitants; through the Black Death in Europe from 1347 to 1453 that claimed one third of the Earth's population, then estimated at somewhere between 443 to 478 million. The 1918 Spanish Flu alone took 50 million lives (3 percent) out of an estimated 1.8 billion souls. Today, the world population is nearing 7.5 billion. Just imagine a 3-percent morbidity rate before the virus disappears - a mind-boggling 208 million people.

Death tolls continue with the appearances of the contagion, from the Asian flu during 1957 to 1958 (2 million), Hong Kong flu during 1968 to 1970 (1 million) to the lesser pandemics, SARS, MERS-CoV and the Ebola virus; and even the ongoing HIV/AIDS that started in 1981, claiming 35 million lives. Outbreaks appear intermittently despite advances in disease prevention technologies. Also, empirical data suggests that they ravage a particular segment of society. The poor, the destitute and the helpless - the dregs of society.

Population growth

Anthropologists debate how long-ago humanoids walked the Earth - somewhere from 6 million to 200,000 years - marking the emergence of homo sapiens, our direct ancestors; from whence human population reached 1 billion for the first time in 1804. Then, it would take only a little over a century to hit 2 billion - in 1927; another half a century to double that to 4 billion in 1974; and just 13 years to reach 5 billion in 1987. We are now approximately 7.8 billion. Earth's population is dangerously exploding by any measure.

The impact of population growth on the Earth's resources could be dramatic. While the former grows exponentially, production of food and resources does so in a linear progression - with population eventually outstripping Earth's carrying capabilities to sustain life. Thomas Malthus, the 18th century philosopher, declared succinctly, "The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must, in some shape or other, visit the human race." By 2050, at current growth rates, the United Nations predicts the world population could reach 9.6 billion. Demographic experts argue 10 billion is Earth's maximum population carrying capacity.

A tangential issue is the stress impacting nature itself. Climate change, energy shortages, pollution of air and water resulting in environmental degradation and the extinction of many species of flora and fauna.

Man vs nature

The deadly family of the Ebola virus may have originated from African fruit bats transmitted to man - and eventually from human to human. Ebola has appeared from time to time in the African continent, particularly Zaire, and has mutated into several forms. Similarly, the Covid-19 virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, reportedly jumped from another species of bat, which was a local delicacy. It is not so much that they add variety to Chinese cuisine, but the issue is even deeper than that. This goes to the core of the loss of habitat - precipitated by man's encroachment into nature's domain. Even the ordinary domesticated animals used for food have wreaked havoc on the human population over time. The intermittent appearances of the contagion, from the Asian and Hong Kong flu to the SARS, MERS-CoV, have been traced to viruses from fowls and four-footed animals - chicken, pigs and cattle.

Vaccines

Man is not totally helpless in the face of the onslaught of virus outbreaks as shown by his ingenuity in centuries past. We have had several types of virus, germs or biological anomalies attacking man, but we always managed to vanquish them. And we survive - but at a deadly cost.

For one, the smallpox virus that reportedly killed 3 out of every 10 people over the millennia from the 3rd century BC was only cured after a breakthrough in vaccine development at the end of the 18th century in England. It will be noted too that inoculations are a relatively old remedy against this virus dating back as early as 1000 BC in China, parts of Africa and Turkey. A breakthrough by pioneering work in vaccination and technological advancements eventually eradicated smallpox within 200 years.

But scientists also submit that these viruses have been mutating faster than man's advancement in new technologies. This was the scientists' conjecture on the Spanish flu. The main cause of death was "bacterial pneumonia secondary to influenza," which could have been alleviated by antibiotics which had not yet been discovered at that time.

Another school of thought proposes that a virus eventually loses its virulence once it has replicated and mutated decimating a substantial portion of its host - a large segment of Earth's population. But it will not totally kill its host. After a time, it remains in our body in a benign state or just lurking around. Outbreaks of the virus derivatives may occur from time to time - nature's way perhaps of warning man of his transgressions and impending doom.


PH situation

To date, we are 110 million Filipinos. We were 1.89 million in 1880. In a hundred years we hit 6.5 million. By the turn of the 20th century, we reached 76.5 million. In 2018, before Covid-19 distorted the figures, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) studies showed 16.7 percent of the population live below the poverty line - a monthly income of less than P10,000, barely enough to meet the basic food and nonfood needs of a family of five. With Covid, the Philippines by any measure is in dire straits. With the continued lockdown, the economy is in tatters, unemployment is soaring, and hunger stalks the land. The pantry feeding programs of the private sector and the government subsidy are just palliatives. Government policies on population growth are distorted by the powerful Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. This may be debatable and a good topic for another column. But in relation to the pandemic and the population impact, I refer to a fictionalized version, very descriptive of what's happening today. In the movie "Inferno," based on a Dan Brown book, Bertrand Zobrist, the fanatic-environmentalist-billionaire, holds a device that will unleash a plague upon the Earth, declared:

"We are destroying the very means by which life is sustained...every single global ill that plagues the Earth can be traced to human overpopulation...We clear-cut. We dump. We consume. We destroy. Half the animal species on Earth have vanished in the last 40 years. But still, we keep attacking our own environment. Does it take a catastrophe to learn our lesson? To get our attention. Nothing changes behavior like pain. Maybe pain can save us."

Now we are undergoing this pain - this pandemic. I find the theme compelling and very descriptive of what could happen next.