Is drinking liquor an antidote to coronavirus?

"I am quite immune to corona virus. The virus can hardly affect me simply because at night, before going to bed, I take liquor", said so proudly with an air of certainty the mobile vegetable-vendor who on his bicycle with his basket of vegetables sells his stuff in our street. When I heard his words uttered so confidently, I was flabbergasted. I also got the similar experience a few months ago.

While returning home in the morning, having made a purchase of groceries at the market in our city, I happened to glimpse a serpentine queue of folks holding umbrellas at a wine shop. In the long queue, I found men, young and old, from different walks of life.

Wondering at the spectacle of long queues, out of curiosity, I made enquiries and was surprised terribly to know from a couple of young men in the queue that they were bent on fighting the pandemic by consuming liquor. On my way, I also noticed two more wine shops where large number of people gathered to collect the bottles of liquor. In our neighbourhood also during the worst times of corona virus last year, many men drank liquor, thinking that liquor would keep the virus at bay. For habitual drunks the virus is a pretext, for occasional tipplers, it is an opportunity and for other alcoholics, it is an assumed so-called safety strategy to consume liquor to prevent the assault of the virus.

Is liquor an antidote to the life-threatening virus? Can a person who consumes liquor be safe from Covid 19? Does the consumption of liquor help man to develop immunity and to prevent the virus? These are the doubts that sprang up in my mind at the moment. The very notion that consumption of liquor, containing alcohol content, acts as an antidote to the virus is absurd, absolutely baseless and false unsupported by the medical science. Liquor in whatever quantity is consumed by humans can never prevent the virus from afflicting humanity. I am at a loss to understand how this misconception got deeply rooted in the psyche of these misguided masses.

Of course, sales of liquor increase, contributing substantially to the revenue of the state government with more and more people consuming liquor in a vain bid to battle against the virus and these people unwisely run the risk of playing havoc with their health and destroying their families. So, it's time for the authorities to swing into action and through print and electronic media, must dispel this misconception and issue wide publicity about the unscientific, baseless, irrational false notion of liquor being a potential, preventive drug against the corona virus. Let the ignorant, misguided masses realise that only the vaccine is the effective, protective shield against the corona virus.

— Dr Venugopala Rao Kaki, Kakinada