Countrymen and Countrywomen,
Greetings to you all.
Today, I have come to address you on the issue of the Corona virus, abbreviated as Covid19. They call it corona because, under the micro-scope, it looks like a crown (ekiruunga, engure). This is a new virus but it belongs to the family of the common-cold (Senyinga, Rubyamira) group of viruses. It makes some people very sick because, being a new virus, all of us do not have immunity against it because we had never been exposed to it.
Fortunately, after listening carefully to our scientists and after watching commentators in the countries where it is already active, it seems to have two characteristics that will help us to survive it and defeat it. Characteristic number one, is that it does not kill many of the people it infects. Out of the approximately 150,000 people that have been infected world-wide, only about 5,000 have died, which works out at 3%. With Ebola in Uganda, the percentage of the people dying was 67%. Secondly, this virus enters the body only through the soft parts of the body: the nose, the eyes and the mouth.
It cannot go through an intact skin like some of the diseases used to: yaws, leprosy, etc.
This, therefore, means that even when you get near a person with the virus in his/her body, he/she can only infect you if he/she sneezes (Okwetsyamura) or coughs (Okukororra) near you so that the tiny and invisible bimira (mucous from the nose) or spittle (machwaante) enter your nostrils or those infected materials from the body land on a surface (a table, a chair, a door handle, a hand kerchief, etc.) where the virus can stay alive for 3 hours and you, then, touch it and, then, touch your soft parts of the body (the eyes, the mouth and the nose). It is this characteristic that makes it very infective.
We couldn’t publish all of it……..
