Of all epidemics the latest one — Covid-19 — has proved the deadliest, at least in living memory or recorded history. Yet, many are still loath to accept that there’s a thing called coronavirus. Preventive measures are routinely and widely publicised, yet the SOPs are largely ignored. Even the simplest advice of maintaining social distancing, wearing facemasks and washing hands with soap is not followed. Prayer halls in the mosques are routinely filled to capacity. The private buses continue to be overloaded.

Initially, some in-built immunity seemed to have protected the vulnerable. As statistics show a worrisome scenario, ‘smart’ lockdowns had to be upgraded in order to strictly enforce the SOPs in some areas. Early closure of markets, strict monitoring of dine-in places and workplaces created economic difficulties, especially for the wage earners. Even the marriage halls had to be regulated to restrict gatherings. The annual fairs of the patron saints of many cities were cancelled, educational institutions were closed and classes and examinations went online. That they continued to charge exorbitant fees is another story altogether.

Banks made it mandatory for their customers to wear masks, offered sanitisers for your hands and recorded temperatures of the walk-in visitors with a temperature gun. Many large retail stores mandated mask-wearing and even established sanitisation tunnels and advised distancing. But our people are averse to queues and like to jump them. Those waiting obediently in the lines are overtaken by those in a hurry.

How the Indus Valley people died remains unknown to this day. The people of Pompeii were buried under molten lava the with the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AC when their life was frozen suddenly to be excavated some fifteen centuries later, and plaster cast moulds were made out of their fossils. Other people were not fortunate enough to die so suddenly. Plagues, cholera, chicken pox and smallpox, influenzas, polio and other deadly diseases repeatedly took their toll. The various medicine practitioners have strived to find preventive and curative measures. China, which has a continuous recorded history, is reported to have taken measures against deadly diseases from the 1000 BC Shang period to the following Chou and Chin and Han dynasties.

Earliest mentions of variolation emerge from China. The technique’s name is derived from the Latin word vacca for cow (also in Italian).

Smallpox was rare among milkmaids tending the cows; hence, the word ‘vaccination.’ Turkish also claim to have been inspired from the milch cattle. It involved inoculating a person with the virus to induce a mild form of the illness. Health practitioners removed dried scabs from people with smallpox, ground and blew them into the nostrils of the recipients. This therapy is thought to have been adopted around 200 BC.

Writing in 430 BC, Greek historian Thucydides said that people who had survived the plague in Athens did not get it again. Hence, the concept of acquired immunity.

Personal hygiene is one effective way to avoid contracting the malice. Islam lays great stress on preventive measures. The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) advised the people to avoid going to a place where an epidemic had spread, and not leave the place if they were there.

Similarly, cleanliness though vuzu (ablution), bathing, brushing one’s teeth and removing unwanted hair, and wearing clean apparel keep people safe and healthy.

Bubonic plague that spread through mice caused immense havoc. It was called Black Death in Europe and parts of Asia and Africa in mid-14^th Century. The epidemic was the most devastating one in history. People didn’t know how to prevent it while there was no cure for it. The populace died of it almost instantly, and it was thought to have been air-borne so the patients were shut in closed places. It delayed the Renaissance and reduced the population.

With the re-birth of Roman ideals, the Renaissance man took a fresh interest in health and sports, besides music, arts, literature and medicine and the study of diseases.

Spanish were the first to use biological weapons in 1500s as they distributed blankets contaminated with smallpox germs that wiped out the indigenous Americans. In return, the colonising Europeans too got infected with venereal diseases like syphilis.

Though vaccination has saved millions from sure death, opposition to its administration remained persistent in Europe and the Americas. In 1777, George Washington, himself a smallpox survivor, with some scars on the tip of his nose, ordered vaccination of every soldier in the continental army who’d never had smallpox. Pakistan, too, has had recurring eruptions of polio despite the drops administered to most infants. That’s because of the vaccine resistance by some people.

Florence Nightingale, who founded the nursing profession during the Crimean War, noted that more soldiers died from septic infections than from bullet wounds. In the aftermath of the Great War (as the World War I was called then), the Spanish Flu killed more people than the war did. The world had to wait for the antibiotic vaccinations, the first of which was Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming. He famously said, “I did not invent it. It was made by nature; I only discovered it by accident.”

Many deadly diseases have become a thing of the past including the smallpox. In the 1970s, a monetary reward was offered in Pakistan for anybody who reported a smallpox case. The last case of small pox was reported in 1977 when a 23-year-old Somalian, named Ali Maow, contracted it. All Somalians were quarantined and vaccinated. He had been a volunteer vaccinating others while he himself never got a shot. After being cured he became a volunteer to fight the poliovirus. Small pox has thus been successfully eradicated.

The present epidemic of novel coronavirus, which raised its head in China, was effectively contained there and jabs were developed and doled out generously internationally. Simultaneously, other countries also worked day and night to develop vaccines. Beware: it can recur in the survivors.

Additionally, there are reports of new strains of Covid-19 originating from some of the worst affected countries, all of which necessitated travel restrictions and work-from-home. It has also brought economic slump even in the most advanced countries. The US, Brazil, most European countries and India are among the hardest hit.

In Pakistan, as the vaccine vials arrived from donor China, vaccination centres were set up in most cities including Lahore where the one at Expo Centre has proved quite efficient. Currently, senior citizens — 60 years of age and above — can walk in with their original identity cards and get the vaccine shots.

At Expo Centre’s vast parking lot, volunteers from Civil Defence ferry the elderly on wheelchairs or electric vans to the waiting area. Workers complete the data forms over laptops and give you printouts in which the health workers and doctors note down your vitals before the doctors administer the jabs and make you wait a while in the very clean halls lest a reaction should occur. The second jab is given 21 days later, for which you are intimated via a cellphone message.

One is pleasantly surprised at the excellent arrangements and thankful to the volunteers who drop you back in the parking lot.

The most worrying factor is that there is no rush to avail this excellent, free facility.

(This dispatch is dedicated to the most courteous staff at the Lahore Expo Centre)

The writer is a painter, a founding member of Lahore Conservation Society and Punjab Artists Association, and a former director of NCA Art Gallery. He can be reached at ajazart@brain.net.pk