When the coronavirus disease suddenly surfaced in Wuhan, China late in 2019 December, not a few people gave it any thought as something capable of shaking humanity the way it has done.

Its grip was not considered hard enough to spread macabre tentacles round the world within so short a time. And all humanity feasted whilst China sank beneath the weight of sickness and death.

Three or four months down the line, with over 100,000 deaths as well as close to two million confirmed cases and both still counting worldwide, we know better than to underestimate the novel strain of the coronavirus disease and, probably, any epidemic that might spring up later in future. But, do humans really learn?

As history has shown, human memory–better suited to hedonistic pursuits–has very limited space for storing experiences of this type or learning from it. If it had that capacity, maybe Covid-19 wouldn’t have caught us napping as it did, and humanity would have saved many of the souls that have gone so far in the current pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, experts warned, scientists cried, political leaders ignored all!

At the very least, we could have learnt a thing or two from the Spanish influenza of 1918, said to be the worst pandemic in recent history. It killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. But even though both pandemics are not the same, some imbibed knowledge from the earlier one could have prepared us somewhat for the doomsday that Covid-19 brought.

As at the time the denial that it could never get to us prevailed, people waved it off as one would an annoying fly, disturbing the peace of an enjoyable evening rest and people went about their normal businesses without the slightest care for prevention or preparation.

President Donald J. Trump dismissed and called it a Chinese virus, African leaders, especially those in Nigeria literally buried their heads in the sand, believing as they were wont in their ill-gotten wealth and its capacity to fly them abroad in case anything happened, while the common people, ignorant as their leaders would rather have them, yet being the class that would be worst hit if anything actually happened, daubed it a disease of the elite. Hence, they couldn’t be bothered!

All around, except in China where the battle then raged, a lethargy of indifference settled on the young and old–an attitude the world was later to pay dearly for with the lives of its elderly.

Armageddon stole in like a thief in the night for all the skeptics, wreaked havoc in nearly all lands, leaving death, tears and anguish in its wake. The permutations of the doubters came out all wrong. The virus really did get to them after all!

Yet, apart from the hateful depopulating tendency of Covid-19, it did, within the period of its terrorizing lifespan, uncover and put into relief certain latent and visible facts about Africa, Asia, Europe and America–disturbing facts about leaders of men and the systems they build.

In Africa, for instance, Covid-19 threw up, and for the umpteenth time, a familiar but usually ignored truth about visionless, clueless and greedy political leaders who would not build adequate healthcare systems for their people, but would rather steal money and invest in foreign lands, where they hope to go and get treated whenever they fall sick.

Unfortunately for those set of leaders, Covid-19 put paid to such expectations. It ensured their desire of getting the best treatments abroad never materialized.

Certainly, the overstretched healthcare facilities of Asia, America and Europe (with the exception of Germany) could not afford the liability of adding corrupt politicians from Africa to their patient roll call.

As such, corrupt African leaders had no choice but to stay home and be treated by the same health workers they had despised and oppressed, in the same mosquito infested hospitals, lacking basic medical equipment where, according to UNICEF data, maternal mortality ratio is 533 per 100,000 live births or 200,000 maternal deaths a year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates a global shortage of nurses, physicians and other health human resources to the tune of 4.3 million globally, which is as a result of years of global underinvestment in health worker education, training, wages, working environment as well as management.

Little wonder healthcare systems in the so-called advanced nations of the world also caved in under the weight of the Covid-19 scourge, revealing their frailties. Only Germany seems to be a little above board with the capacity to still take-in patients from fellow European countries.

The UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, recently said there were around 10,000 ventilators available to the NHS and that it needed 18,000 to be able to deal with rising number of cases.

A few days later, the British Medical Association (BMA), worried over the safety of its members, said frontline medics were at risk over shortages of Personal Protective Equipment, for which it denounced government’s slow response.

And, even though Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, in response to the criticism, reeled out numbers of PPE government had sent out to the NHS, facts on ground continued to contradict the British Government’s position.

Also, according to reports by Associated Press, credited to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the United States has around 200,000 machines, about half of which are old models that may not be optimal for the most severely sick patients.

Going by such reports, the worst may yet lie ahead for the United States, which has the highest number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 per country in the world, peaking for now at over 500,000 and increasing daily, with more than 20,000 deaths and recording the highest number of deaths per diem at a whooping 2,000 persons.

Nowhere in the world is one more bewildered than Nigeria, the so called giant of Africa where, having as background the Covid-19 experience–the spread, death, near ineffectiveness of its lockdown order and the embarrassment of not being able to test up to 2000 persons per day for Covid-19 in an estimated population of 200 million, the government is still going ahead with a slash in its funding to healthcare from 44.49 billion to 26.51 billion naira. How simplistic!

The fact that the virus has not spread beyond what the huge West African country can manage is not due to any brilliant government policy on containment. It is due largely to providence or sheer luck that countries without adequate planning and strong institutions rely on to save them anytime there is trouble. Only lazy people and inept governments depend on luck to take them through the day. Serious ones face up to their problems and plan for eventualities such as the Covid-19 pandemic as more might come!

These indeed are perilous times, one must say, marked by whole changes in the way people live, work and socialize. Economies are now crumbling, households are falling apart, individuals are also finding it difficult to keep body and soul together.

Where in all these, one is prompted to ask, are the visions of our political leaders and the lessons learned from past pandemics?

It seems human beings don’t learn at all or perhaps, political leaders who make policies don’t have the capacity or have simply abdicated their roles. They seem to have sent their senses on dubious errands and are daily deluded by the air of importance their offices gifted them, making them believe they are up to something, when clearly, they are not.

Of course, every four or so years again, we too will go to the polls and recycle them right back!

And we say our leaders don’t learn. Do we?