Perspective has always been a challenge for journalism. This is ever more the case as news sources move to instant online feeds. Keeping perspective on Covid-19 is a near impossible task. The daily volumes of unfiltered, often dubious, seldom comparable information about tests, cases, death numbers, vaccine trials , theories of origin , health impacts, age, race and other relative vulnerabilities from a multitude of countries are bewildering. I sympathise with governments which must address Covid-19 without devastating other aspects of our lives. It is natural for experts on viruses to want to be heard at this time, even if they may not actually be able to agree on very much. It is natural for epidemiologists to want to be heard, even though different models of the spread of the virus are often so wide apart that governments have unenviable choices: do you believe A or X, and proceed accordingly? Or do you take a middle path and hope for the best? In this case, experts and non-experts can only learn through experience. Thus, early on, many, including the World Health Organisation, were not convinced of the value of masks. Now even US President Donald Trump has learned from experience. But experience also shows that lockdowns cannot eradicate a virus which is now everywhere so that places such as Hong Kong, which went for a sustained period without any local cases, now find themselves facing a small wave . Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor will find that repeated lockdowns no more kill off the virus than the national security law can eliminate demands for free speech and assembly. The logic of repeated lockdowns must be questioned if economies , employment and international travel are ever to return to normal without the discovery of a vaccine that will at least ameliorate the disease, if not prevent it. The news on that front varies from day to day as reflected on Wall Street. Don’t hold your breath. Instead, stop, for a moment, thinking about the ravages of Covid-19 and consider tuberculosis. So far, Covid has reportedly killed over 585,000 people worldwide – compared to around 440,000 killed in India alone by tuberculosis every year. The annual global tuberculosis toll is well over a million. Unlike Covid-19, many of them are young people, mostly in poor countries. Also to be noted about tuberculosis: there is a vaccine called BCG but it is not wholly effective and then mainly for children, hence it is mainly given to children in poor countries where tuberculosis is most prevalent. That vaccine was invented in 1921. Nothing better has emerged since then, other than overall public health standards. Malaria still kills half a million annually worldwide despite decades of efforts at treatment as well as prevention. The young and pregnant women are particularly at risk. Pneumonia kills about 1.5 million a year, not all elderly even in developed countries, despite vaccines and antibiotics. Dengue affects millions and kills tens of thousands. While billions are being pumped into Covid-19 vaccine research, investment in new antibiotic drugs languishes despite mounting resistance to existing treatments, partly due to overuse (as by doctors in Hong Kong). Why there’s nowhere for India’s Covid-19 scoreboard to go but up We need to ask whether attention is focused on Covid-19 because it has mainly impacted old people in rich countries, who are now landing younger generations with gigantic government debt burdens. Children are deprived of education, particularly in poorer countries without widespread access to online learning and where parents might lack the capacity to teach the basics of reading and maths. More than ever, we must demand to know the net benefit, if any, of lockdowns and border closures after taking all other health, social and other impacts into consideration. We also need to ask why we are constantly assailed by misleading, fear-inducing death statistics. Hong Kong has fortunately had so few deaths that there is limited data to analyse. But so much disruption for a disease which has so far killed 12 , mostly old people, in six months compared with an average of 100 a year in road accidents? Elsewhere, alarmist headlines disguise pertinent facts. Take the United Kingdom, which has the highest Covid-19 death rate in Europe according to crude data – 45,000 or 662 per million people. Some people will have died of the disease but not been tested. However, more died with the disease than from it, death being primarily caused by some existing condition. For the true death impact of Covid-19, one must look at overall deaths. In the UK case, headlines focus on “excess deaths” by comparison with the average of the previous five years. But after adjusting for the increase in both population (about 2 million or 3 per cent) and a death rate which had risen from 9.1 to 9.4 per thousand between 2014 and 2019 due to ageing, deaths for the first half of 2020 were similar to the five-year average despite a brief Covid-19 spike. Lockdowns may have prevented some deaths, such as road accidents, but equally increased others now or in the near future because of huge drops in tests and treatments for other conditions. In the United States, there has been a huge fall in claims for non-coronavirus-related visits and treatments. Sooner or later, those untreated ailments will cause preventable deaths. As for Covid-19, you can run but you can’t hide. Let’s not fool ourselves. Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator