BAGHDAD – In the sophisticated shisha lounge of one of Baghdad’s new restaurants, guests smoking a fruit-scented tobacco sit at golden-rimmed tables flanked by a giant video screen and views of the Tigris River. It’s a weekday night, but the Sky Lounge at the Dawa restaurant is packed with people partying like it’s 2019: no masks, no distance, no problem.
“I live the lifestyle of 2019 before the coronavirus,” said Ali al-Khateeb, 37, a businessman, as he sat in a green velvet chair pulling smoke from a glass hookah with gold relief. “As Iraqis, we are not afraid of death. It is a psychological factor that can strengthen the immunity of a human being. “
His friend, Rami Riadh, 34, also a businessman, said he threw the mask off at the airport when he returned from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, a week ago. “It looks like we live in another world here,” he said.
As coronavirus rates have plummeted, Iraqis are flouting the recommended anti-virus precautions en masse, many subscribing to the dubious belief in their own immunity. This belief, ridiculed by scientists, has been publicly endorsed by regional and local health officials and some religious leaders.
“We achieved a kind of collective immunity,” wrote one of Baghdad’s top health officials, Dr. Jasib al-Hijami, in a Facebook post in December. Contacted by phone this week, he said he still maintains those comments.
These misunderstandings and the widespread disregard for the security of the virus they have engendered, even as new, more contagious variants of the virus are occurring around the globe, are laying the groundwork for a major new outbreak, public health experts fear.
The infection rate reported in Iraq has steadily dropped from more than 3,000 new cases per day in November to less than 800 on most days in January. The decline contributed to what experts say is a false sense of security.
“Honestly, it’s lull before the storm,” said Ali Mokdad, director of Middle East Initiatives at the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment. “There is a potential wave coming in, unless Iraqis are vaccinated or take social distance measures.”
Mokdad says the drop in infection rates can be explained in part by Iraq’s temperate winter, when windows are kept open. The relative youth of the Iraqi population can explain the reduction in deaths and hospitalizations.
Other experts suspect that the actual number of coronavirus cases in Iraq is likely to be double or triple the reported number.
But as the official number dropped, Iraqi authorities eased restrictions.
At the height of the pandemic last year, Iraq closed mosques, schools and restaurants while its decrepit health care system struggled to cope. These restrictions were loosened last fall as infection rates dropped.
Now the government is waging a lost public relations battle to persuade Iraqis to wear masks and stop shaking hands and kissing cheeks, the common salutation among people of the same sex in Iraq.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical professionals and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. So for now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will be no different than the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none of them reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including flu-like pain and symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before being destroyed.
The campaign was hampered by local and provincial health officials, who claimed that the rate fell because enough Iraqis were exposed to the virus to obtain collective immunity.
But public health experts doubt that Iraq is close to that.
It is generally believed that herd immunity occurs when 70% or more of the population has been infected or vaccinated. This offers a virus less potential hosts and provides the population with some resistance to an outbreak.
Dr. Mokdad says that Iraq does not conduct random tests that would allow accurate infection rates to be determined, but that the best estimate is about 20% of the population.
“It is unacceptable for Iraqis and educated officials to come and say ‘we are immune’ or we have a different variety, because it gives a false sense of security,” he said.
In mosques, some preachers have told worshipers that they should not fear the virus as long as they follow God.
Even Iraq’s Health Minister, Dr. Hassan al-Tamimi, has not tried to directly correct the misinformation.
Asked about the herd’s immunity, he did not endorse or refute the idea. In an interview, he responded by crediting the drop in mortality rates to the country’s greater ability to treat Covid-19 cases and the decline in infection rates to divine protection.
“The main factor is God’s mercy,” said Dr. al-Tamimi.
He expressed concern about the highly contagious variant of the virus recently identified in Britain, and the government has taken steps to try to prevent infection from abroad.
Last week, the government banned most non-Iraqi travelers from 20 countries with high infection rates, including those with the variant. But the restriction leaves huge gaps for people to come from other countries where the variant has been identified.
Dr Riyadh Lafta, a professor of epidemiology at Al Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, said he expected another wave, more severe, to arrive by March or April, putting at risk not only those with compromised immunity, but also younger, healthier people.
“We are afraid of another wave like the one that happened in Europe,” he said. “So this is the risk and the threat that we are waiting for. Unfortunately, many people are still not very aware of this. “
Iraq, a country of 40 million people, is ill-prepared for a second wave.
A damaged infrastructure, a system of granting control of ministries to political factions based on loyalty and rampant corruption devastated the country’s health system. Last summer, the scarcity of oxygen cylinders caused riots in some hospitals among relatives forced to try to acquire life-saving equipment on their own.
Dr al-Tamimi said Iraq opened 47 new factories to make or refill oxygen cylinders and added 14,000 new beds and 63 new hospitals to help deal with the pandemic. The number of hospitals could not be verified immediately independently. Another public health official said the number was less than 25.
Iraq has reserved 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, al-Tamimi said, and is purchasing ultracold freezers to store them for a vaccination campaign that hopes to start in early March.
But Lafta and other public health experts said they doubted that enough Iraqis would agree to be vaccinated for the campaign to succeed.
“People here don’t like vaccines,” he said. “We were struggling a lot in the past year just to convince them to vaccinate their children against polio and measles.”
He said that, given the widespread poverty that prevents many Iraqis from social detachment, he was not surprised that they chose to believe that they are immune rather than accepting that they are at risk.
“It’s about making a living,” he said. “Because social distancing means that the poor do not work, do not go out on the street to sell their goods. They think that if they worried about the coronavirus, they would starve to death ”.
Jaafar al-Waely and Falih Hassan contributed reporting.