Living alongside Indian settlers are six protected indigenous tribes that for thousands of years have existed apart from the rest of humanity, spearing fish and turtles and shooting wild pigs with bows and arrows. The Andamans and Nicobars are a lost world, 836 islands of mangroves, rainforests, and crescent-moon beaches stretching for 480 miles where the Bay of Bengal meets the Andaman Sea in the warm waters between India, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia. That in itself did not make the island unusual. What Pathak did not say, because Port Blair’s small press corps already knew, was that, aside from Chau, almost no outsider had ever set foot on North Sentinel. John Allen Chau … about her son’s visit to North Sentinel Island and attack by the tribesmen.” Upon receiving the e-mail, “a missing report was immediately registered” and a “detailed enquiry was initiated.” Within hours, Pathak’s detectives reported back that Chau “allegedly got killed at North Sentinel Island during his misplaced adventure in the highly restricted area while trying to interact with the uncontacted people who have a history of vigorous rejection towards outsiders.” The consulate, Pathak said, had been contacted by an American woman, the mother of “one Mr. consulate in Chennai, 850 miles away on the mainland. The North Sentinelese are a very real reminder of how cruelly bankrupt the run-and-hide strategy is as a broad form of virus mitigation.On November 21, 2018, Dependra Pathak, director general of police in the Andamans and Nicobars, an archipelago of paradise islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, issued a press release headed “Death of US National.” Pathak, a short, mustached man with the paunch of 28 years’ service in the Indian police, wrote that his office in the island capital of Port Blair had received an e-mail two days earlier from the U.S. Worse is what the isolation means over the longer term. Isolated people aren’t saved from what threatens their health as much the inevitable infection from the threat is delayed. Lockdowns furthered the rather backwards notion that our health is improved if we’re separated from one another. It’s not just that lockdowns and other forced isolation destroyed so many jobs, so many businesses, and that they drove all sorts of other human tragedies of the alcohol, drug, and suicidal variety as discussed in my new book releasing today, When Politicians Panicked. Historians will marvel at their foolishness. That they are calls loudly for the very human interaction that politicians and experts have tried to outlaw over the past year. That they must kill outsiders who approach them is a reminder that viruses don’t go to sleep, get bored, or run away rather they’re a forever concept. Wholly isolated, the island’s inhabitants have long been separated from the crucial human interaction that fosters immunity.
The North Sentinelese haven’t been so lucky. Immunity is most notably achieved naturally, and it’s achieved much more quickly when people are constantly interacting with other people. The spreading hasn’t weakened the global population, rather it’s strengthened it. With more and more of the world’s inhabitants moving around the globe, so have viruses.
In a health sense, they’ve spread viruses around the world. It’s not just that the division of labor has enabled relentless specialization among the world’s workers, it’s not just that people “bumping into each other” have spread ideas and processes that have driven even greater economic advancement that has easily been the greatest foe of disease and death, globalization has also fostered a great deal of physical, in-person interaction among productive, specialized people increasingly possessing the means to see the globe.Īs a consequence they haven’t just seen the world. Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta, one of the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, has long argued that globalization’s genius has been understated. As the North Sentinelese remind us, isolation weakens the human body precisely because it limits the exposure to the myriad human-spread viruses that paradoxically strengthen the immune system. Hide from a virus? To do so would be for cities, states and countries to set themselves up for something much worse down the line. Though missionaries like Chau came to them in peace, it was as though he arrived with an AK-47.Ĭhau’s murder is yet another gentle reminder of how backwards the lockdowns were. Precisely because the North Sentinelese have been so isolated for so long from the outside world, their immunity is nil.
0 kommentar(er)
