Eight seconds – the attention span of an average online reader. Eight seconds, maybe less and that’s how long I get to convince you to keep reading. We’ve all known how all this started so let’s skip to the end. A swift shift back to normalcy with friends and family talking back to the hard old days and how we’ve managed to push through it all.

Family gatherings alit with laughter and the occasional discussions on the booming economy. Or stagnant isolation, depressing news headlines, and fear. The two sound worlds apart, don’t they? At this point in time both of them seem equally plausible and what each one of us chooses to do will impact the end of this story and choose wisely one needs to know.

COVID-19 in Sri Lanka has progressed from a single native case identified on the 11^th of March 2020 to clusters and eventually, abundant community spread today indicating that there is a high chance to detect more than 50% positive cases among a randomly selected group of people.

Although we’ve surfed through the 1^st,2^nd, and 3^rd waves with minimal causalities the 4^th  wave seems to have us in quite some trouble. With cases increasing at a rate of +3000 per day, health services saturated home-based health care has been recommended for uncomplicated COVID patients. So far we’ve had 144 deaths per million, 0.8% of GDP spent on the country’s COVID-19 response, and around 48% of the population at least one dose vaccinated.

Often mimicking symptoms of the common cold at first in many along with the temporary loss of taste and smell, COVID comes with serious complications. What makes the viral disease even more of a threat is what it does once inside a host. The virus particles once entered into a healthy human keeps multiplying and infecting new cells. In this process, the genetic material / the instruction manual of the viruses undergo changes whilst copying and this is what science calls mutations.

Most of the changes that aren’t beneficial to the virus are discontinued whilst the beneficial ones are carried forward. The delta strain causing havoc today is one such mutation. The delta strain contains a change on the spike protein – a protein on the virus that is targeted by vaccines and part of our defense system in fighting the virus. This strain is found to fuse faster and enters cells faster thus it spreads easier than previous variants – studies show that the delta variant is twice as contagious as the previous variants.

In Sri Lanka, due to the rapid spread, 3 new mutations of the original delta variant have been detected so far. The more the virus infects the more chances it gets to mutate, the more it mutates the more the risk for one to be reinfected, and if the virus has its way what scientists fear the most is that it would reach a point where the virus can resist the vaccines and render current vaccines useless and forcing scientists to go back to step one and start developing a whole new vaccine from scratch.

This is where you and I can turn the table around. Despite the mutations, experts have found out that vaccines are still effective in preventing severe infection. A study stated that unvaccinated people remain five times more likely to become infected than people who are vaccinated and 25 times more likely to be hospitalized.

By getting vaccinated we can reduce the spread and thus reduce the likelihood for a new mutation to arise. In addition to this by reducing the likelihood of getting hospitalized we reduce the strain on our overly saturated health sector by making beds available to those who need them. Also, proper adherence to guidelines provided by health professionals, good hygiene, and social distancing play an important role in curbing the spread.

So stay home. Stay safe. Wash your hands and keep your hopes up.

Let’s push through this and see to it that we have the ending we’ve been waiting for.

Written By Rtr. Reema Shakir