By Francis Ogwo
In what appears to signal the kickoff of a second wave of the Wuhan coronavirus known technically as COVID-19, reports coming out of China of a fresh spike in infections due to the sending back of the pathogens from regions to which the COVID-19 pathogen had earlier in the year been exported to by China.
The region most affected by this resurgence is the city of Horbin, a bustling metropolis of 10 million souls, which has had to be placed under lockdown, at a time when the world has just begun to take some comfort from the feeling that China has come out victorious in the fight against COVID-19, a beacon of hope for regions swamped by the fast spreading malaise.
History, however, suggests that what is now being witnessed in China is the sending back of the COVID-19 from overseas to China where it had originally been sent out is an epidemiological inevitability due to the life cycle of a virus.
In Virology, every outbreak of a global demographic impact should be expected to have three peaks and be spread in there waves back and forth in opposite migratory flows of the disease vector.
In the Spanish Flu of 1918 – 1920, the second wave was more virulent, deadlier and more widespread. The second wave is usually marked by a ‘back-to-sender’ effect such as is being observed in Chinese cities at present.
The third wave is a second generation export flowing in the direction of the initial spread.
What China does in being more aggressive in containment of the disease is aggressive in deepening its hold in the second wave will determine the length and depth of the second wave and hence the velocity and virulence of the inevitable third wave.
Reports say more than 70 people were discovered to have contacted the virus in Horbin with another 4,000 being tested of coronavirus, believed to have been brought into the town by a student from New York.
Part of the measures adopted by officials include banning of gatherings and instructing communities to be on the lookout for non-local visitors and vehicles in the city, setting up of checkpoints at the train stations for the screening of arriving visitors, amongst other measures.
The government also directed that there must be total restriction of visitors coming in and surveillance of residents.
Another measure enforced was that before people are allowed entry into a public place and residences, they must use a government-approved health application which shows their status and convinces the officials they are Covid-19 free while their temperatures are taken and nose masks compulsorily worn.
There was also total ban on funerals, weddings, conferences, along with total compliance to the social distancing rules.
The outbreak in Harbin, according to reports, is coming at a time when China which was the world’s epicentre is celebrating a successful war against the pandemic with only two patients down with the virus in Wuhan.
The Harbin outbreak currently stands as the highest case of the pandemic in China.
Horbin, a city of around 10 million people is the provincial capital and the biggest in north-eastern China’s Heilongjiang province which shares border with Russia.
