During a catastrophic health crisis, such as the current coronavirus, the greatest threat is man's capacity to understand things - to reason.

When animals are engulfed by a plague, they don't seek to explain whatever afflicts them; for, unlike us humans, animals don't have the capacity to understand things. Ordinarily, the capacity to understand things should be our advantage over animals. Paradoxically, the opposite is the case.

When animals are threatened by a pandemic, we humans think for them. We are able to quarantine them, test vaccines on them, and conduct experiments on them without the animals trying to find their own solutions.

That is not the case with us humans. When we are threatened by a pandemic, we listen to a medical doctor with one ear while the other ear listens to chancers who manufacture their own fake explanations and solutions.

Medical experts have explained clearly that Covid-19 is a human fluid or surface transmittable virus that causes damage to the lungs (and thereby our ability to breathe), but people don't stop manufacturing and spreading their own fake theories.

A video is busy circulating of a fake man of God who apparently "prophesied" in 2016 that a time would come when a "disease of the sea" would exit the ocean and land among humans. The fake man of God says the disease he foresaw in his spiritual hallucinations will kill "thousands, millions and even billions of people".

Because we humans have the capacity to understand things, a part of us gets tempted to ignore the facts of medical science and entertain lies and opportunistic prophecies manufactured by spiritual chancers.

Even outside religion there are people who invent all kinds of stories about the coronavirus. A security guard in Pretoria said the other day that it is the disease of the rich. "We the poor will not get the disease."

What the security guard does not know is that while the coronavirus may have been brought to SA by members of the chattering class, the poor are the most vulnerable to the virus. The destitute who live in unhygienic and congested abodes are more vulnerable than the rich who have big spaces for requisite isolation in their mansions.

It is not only a poor security guard who has a stupid theory about the coronavirus. Last Thursday I observed groups of school-going children (more than 20 of them) playing together at a park of an upper middle-class gated residential estate.

The whole point of closing schools was to ensure that children stay isolated in their homes to limit the potential risk of getting coronavirus from fellow students or teachers who may have it.

Instead of keeping children behind closed doors, there are "educated" parents who presumably believe that children will not get Covid-19 from their friends.

If we are to win the war against the virus, we must make it clear that no man of God, no poor security guard, and no rich idiot has a solution to the coronavirus.

A definitive medical solution will come neither from a religious text nor the fertile mind of some belief manufacturer. A solution will eventually come from a scientific laboratory in the form of a vaccine.

Before a vaccine is found, we must listen to the advice of the medical experts who are telling us to avoid social contact and to practise good hygiene. Parents must keep their children at home.

As for our government, it must move swiftly to limit people's movement. The starting point must be to ban the movement of people from one province to another. If this is not done, Gauteng and the Western Cape will widely spread the coronavirus to the rest of the country during the coming Easter holiday.

If we don't change the way we live, we will die like flies.