Dear Editor,

When a country has a highly infectious respiratory disease starting to run rampant in its population, I find it exemplary what countries ought not to do. Neither its ruler/leader, nor certainly its top leadership, should be congregating at events and making physical contact with potential carriers of the said disease. Yet, we see examples of this basic ignorant behaviour in the USA and Iran.

They ought to know better, but they have other priorities than to follow basic health practices.

A person who later turns out to have a highly contagious disease, here it’s the coronavirus (COVID-19), shaking the hands of the elderly ruler, or coughing in his presence, and in the presence of hundreds of the elderly ruling elite of a country at a mass gathering is the stuff of science-fiction thrillers, where the leadership of a country is decimated in one event. This could result in the removal of the rulers of a country at one time, if this madness does not stop.

Thank goodness our leaders are smarter than that.

Howard Chin

hmc14@cwjamaica.com