Men only: Worry more about your kids than parents?

We have a neighbour, a spinster in her late 40s without children, who is always sending alarmist forwards (as well as fake news) about COVID-19, ever since that s*** hit the fan a few weeks back.

‘Everyone should learn to SELF ISOLATE,’ she posts, with a tone of glee in her texts. What really irks me is her Corona campaign against the children playing downstairs, inside the big parking lot of the apartment block.

‘It looks like you people don’t care if your children get corona,’ she will text.

‘KEEP YOUR KIDS SAFE IN THE HOUSE,’ she will text. ‘Do NOT allow them to go and play outside. COVID-19 is REAL …’

‘If they go to hospital with corona,’ she said on our WhatsApp group, ‘they’ll be sick and frightened and ALL ALONE, and you will NOT BE ALLOWED to see THEM!!!’ (the CAPS are hers).

Her propaganda is now working on our WhatsApp Group – last weekend, at least six kids were transferred from Nairobi to go stay with their grandparents in the countryside, ‘at least until COVID-19 is over.’

Yet we have all heard, including from Top Cops and CS Kagwe, that our older parents are the ones at real risk of getting sick, and even dying, from this new novel virus called COVID-19.

My regular readers will know me as a man who seeks knowledge from experts only. In a country called Kenya where one person can turn, in two months, from a historian (during Moi’s burial) to BBI political scientist, to a Sino-Chinese expert on geo-economics to a virologist by end of March, talking of the ‘epidermology of COVID-19’ on social media, better to get your information from an authority.

So I took a stroll to Nairobi West Hospital to speak to their resident head of ‘Infectious Diseases Dept’ Dr Peter Shikuku Kibet about COVID-19, our children, and their grandparents.

Listen up, gentlemen and women.

In simple terms, children have a developing immunity, and so great resistance, to flu-like pathologies like coronavirus. Only one in 5,000 kids exposed to COVID-19 will ever get infected, and of those super few, the chances of it becoming severe, let alone fatal, is close to ZERO. That is why you’ve hardly heard of cases of minors getting infected.

‘But starting from people of 60, and going up all the way up to the 90s,’ Dr Kibet says, ‘the risk of everything – from infection to severe illness to mortality – gets higher and higher.’

He explains that like with all things in nature, the older a body, the more wear and tear it bears.

‘So now you have an 85-year-old grandparent in the village, with all sorts of pathologies like diabetes, blood pressure, maybe a cancer in remission, decreased auto-immunity, and you bring them corona. This is why in Italy, elder folks are dying of COVID-19 like flies.’

Dr Kibet discourages packing your children into long-distance PSVs to take them to the countryside to be ‘safe with their grandparents’ as many of us are doing during this strange new urban-rural migration, especially on Saturdays; then you return home to self-isolate.

I concur with the ‘doktari.’

Imagine trying to ‘save’ your child (from a disease that can hardly harm them), being the bearer of corona to your own mother in the village? You may recover after a fortnight, being younger, but you learn your mother did not!

In other words, she brought you into this world (maybe accidentally, as you were an unplanned for pregnancy), and equally accidentally, you took her out of the equation of existence by your unfounded recklessness.

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