Editorial
2020 has been a year both of woe and pride for Macau.
Owing to the dreadful impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the outgoing year has been the hardest for our city since the establishment of the Macau Special Administrative Region in 1999. Our inadequately diversified economy has been severely afflicted by the global health crisis, its tourism, retail and gaming sectors in particular, although virtually every local business segment has been hard hit since early this year.
That’s why 2020 has been a year of distress, despondency, misery, desolation, despair – you name it! – for Macau people in general, especially for private-sector employers and employees as well as the self-employed. Particularly in times of crisis public servants have the advantage of benefiting from their fabled iron rice bowl.
However, many of Macau’s over 32,000 public servants have shown that they deserve their virtual “job for life” status by working hard to fight the novel coronavirus menace, such as those from the public health, social welfare, government information and public security sectors. You all deserve our respect.
Thanks to the efficacy of our government headed by Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng, as well as the central government’s unremitting support, Macau has become an oasis in the world’s novel coronavirus desert.
But Macau’s inhabitants – about 680,000 crowded together on just around 33 square kilometres – have also shown their mettle in helping fight COVID-19, such as by wearing facemasks when out and about. I was shocked when watching a BBC report early this week about Britain’s latest lockdown measures in response to the frighteningly transmissible variant of the novel coronavirus – many pedestrians in London still did not wear face coverings. I found the footage absolutely petrifying.
The crux of the problem is that many people in the West still do not understand the lethal peril that the novel coronavirus poses to all of them, not just the elderly (I watched in horror a middle-aged man telling a TV reporter in the UK this week that the Johnson government doesn’t have all its marbles because it is imposing COVID-19 curbs just on account of some oldies in their nineties dying of the disease).
Intergenerational solidarity seems to have gone out of the window in the UK…
Are viruses alive?
A captivating article entitled “Are Viruses Alive?” by US virologist Luis P. Villarreal, published in 2008 by Scientific American* starts by citing a scene from the 1950s television comedy The Honeymooners where a bus driver tells his wife, “You know that I know how easy you get the virus.”
Villarreal, professor emeritus of the University of California, points out that already half a century ago regular folks had some knowledge of viruses – “as microscopic bringers of disease. Yet is it almost certain that they did not know exactly what a virus was. They were, and are, not alone.”
Absolutely!
Villarreal underlines that for about a century “the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a grey area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behaviour of their hosts profoundly.”
Exactly!
“From single-celled organisms to human populations, viruses affect all life on Earth, often determining what will survive. But viruses themselves also evolve,” Villarreal explains, and “viruses matter to life. They are the constantly changing boundary between the worlds of biology and biochemistry.”
Villarreal concludes his article by saying that “regardless of whether or not we consider viruses to be alive, it is time to acknowledge and study them in their natural context—within the web of life.”
Yes, indeed!
As one of the world’s science superpowers nowadays, one can expect China to be at the forefront of virus research. Virology will be increasingly important “at a time of great need and great jeopardy”, an editorial in mbio**, a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Society for Microbiology in association with the American Academy of Microbiology, warned back in 2015.
As one of the world’s most densely populated territories (some 20,600 inhabitants per square kilometre) receiving tens of thousands of visitors every day (before and quite probably again after COVID-19), our Health Bureau (SSM) needs to pay close attention to the newest developments on the virus front. Ultimately, it’s a matter of life and death – and economic survival.
As far as Macau is concerned, there’s a lot more to do, but so far, so good. We can all take great pride in being able to live in an “oasis” that has been well-shielded from the novel coronavirus, but all of us, government and citizenry, must keep our guard up – and keep well informed about the latest wiles of the novel coronavirus.
– Harald Brüning
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4453524/
** The Importance of Virology at a Time of Great Need and Great Jeopardy (nih.gov)
