Jun P. Espina 2 min read
Updated on June 22nd, 2022
Global Health Crisis and COVID-19
Before COVID-19, noncommunicable diseases preoccupied our health concerns. Heart disease, cancer, kidney problems, diabetes, etc. have always topped our list of health issues. But when the pandemic came in 2020, the noncommunicable diseases suffered primarily by the aging population have caught new complexities. It turned into a global health crisis of communicable and noninfectious diseases. Wrote Dr. Jalal Baig: “Almost one year into the pandemic, many of the fears harbored by oncologists like me have been fully realized in clinical practice. Apart from felling scores of cancer patients, the virus has upended cancer diagnosis, treatment and research. Covid-19 attacks the lungs, of course, but it also disrupts other organs and really, entire health systems. By now, Covid has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, low blood cell counts and psychiatric conditions.”1
COVID-19 Killed Our Grandparents
COVID-19 targets the older generation by adding new layers of complication to their noninfectious diseases caused by aging. Exposure to a COVID-positive person is fatal for the grandparents, but not for the grandchildren given their strong immunity. The closure of schools and the lockdowns are questioned by medical experts somehow as nonscientific. Conservative groups in the U.S. criticized their government’s mask-wearing and other COVID-19-related policies as a game plan to control the citizens. It is not for public health and welfare from a scientific viewpoint. Lockdowns are viewed as counter-productive and devastated further the global economy.
“One of the lingering questions of the pandemic,” wrote Erin Garcia de Jesús, “is why COVID-19 symptoms tend to be milder in children and young adults than in older people. A new study suggests that the immune systems of people younger than 24 deal the coronavirus a strong first punch. Those early immune defenses, which set off alarm bells for the body to go on the attack no matter what the invader, may be weaker in older adults.”2
Alarming Global Health Crisis
The phrase Global Health Crisis coined by health authorities bears a very alarming reality since we are threatened by a global health crisis that is foreign in the history of human experience for the past thousands of years. Hundreds of millions of people don’t reach a good old age because of such degenerative diseases as heart problems, hypertension, kidney disorder, cancer, diabetes; you name it. COVID-19 has made the situation even worse. Its spread is now affecting the whole wide world, the poorer and richer nations alike. Hence, a global health crisis. The main culprit is the Wuhan virus plus our more sedentary lifestyle and the wrong food that we eat. Observe the picture which I posted here below, for we invert–by habit, culture, and our modern-man lifestyle–the so-called food pyramid of the ideal amount of food we need to consume daily.
