COVID-19: Messages of hope are better

Ada Zanusso is 104 years old. She is an Italian and the oldest person to survive COVID-19. She also survived the Spanish Flu of between 1918 and 1920 that ate up millions of souls. She revealed that the things that made her survive COVID-19 are courage, strength and faith, the same formula that helped her to survive the Spanish Flu. Her doctors added that she had to be hydrated when she was sick. Now fully recovered, she is all smiles and the centenarian is still full of life.

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Nigeria’s Professor Jesse Otegbola is another survivor of the dreaded disease. He recalled that despite the grim forecasts around his illness, he went into self-isolation and through a strict regimen of personal hygiene, healthy eating, taking measures to boost immunity against the disease, taking medications and having a gigantic faith in God, he overcame the illness.

Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State recovered from the illness and infection within one week. He attributed his full recovery to the use of black seed oil, carrots, honey and vitamin C. But in a reaction to this exceptionally speedy recovery, Chikwe Ihekweazu, director general of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) indirectly refuted the governor’s claim by positing that COVID-19 patients only need support for the body to recover by itself.

It should be clear that courage, strength, faith, personal hygiene, taking the right medication, healthy eating – including eating foods like honey, black seed oil, carrots and vitamin C, supporting the body with ventilators where necessary and self-isolation are a very good route to healing. Unfortunately, this sort of message has been drowned by the messages of fear.

The Spanish flu was much deadlier than what we are faced with today, according to history. Majority of people who got infected with it died within three days. Spitting in public, coughing and sneezing in public became anathema. Schools were closed, lockdowns and social distancing were enforced. The flu also coincided with deaths as a result of the world war of that time. The flu spread from USA to Russia, India and Spain and because only the Spaniards were not at war as such were able to reveal statistics regarding affliction and death, other parts of the world erroneously named the pandemic, the Spanish flu. In the end, the flu disappeared almost as mysteriously as it came. Even at that time, governments and the world of medicine did what they could to bury heaps of the dead in mass graves and prevent transmission.

Borrowing from doomsdayers ‎and preppers’ major propellant: the message of fear has been the most sold one to the entire world by governments, corporates and individuals. Surprisingly managers of information have been in the forefront of the delivery of such messages without asking if fear and flight should be the best tools of social mobilisation in this situation.

Of course, because many of those who speak to the nation on COVID-19 engrave images of victims gasping for air and dying painfully to the public, fear has therefore gripped everyone. However, the narrative should begin to change. Fear may force obedience and unlock the wallets of the rich but a reverberating message of hope is what will mobilise people in the millions to convert the dim light at the end of the tunnel into a raging sun.

The NCDC, presidency, state governors, doctors and nurses should be taught the basics of how to use a message of hope to galvanise people at the individual, national and international level. Fear and doom are faster killers than the coronavirus, and may prepare a solid foundation for the virus to wreak greater havoc due to a wrong reaction to poorly packaged messages. It is commonplace now that many of the poor and downtrodden are already asking whether being alive without food and security is better than death through COVID-19 and some other malaise associated with poverty. Talk about being between a turbulent sea and a shore infested with man eaters!

The communication narrative should change. Hope of a recovery from COVID-19, of a better Nigeria and a better future should be the pivot of all messages. Fear tranquilises the mind, freezes the society and kills creativity.