- The only thing that now matters is how we adapt to the new rules and how quickly.
- The need to put food on the table has overtaken the possibility of being infected.
- Living amidst the pandemic is not a time to wish or pray alone, rather it is a time to act together to defeat our common nemesis.
- The whole world has also been preparing to set a new precedent to keep the virus on the check even after the pandemic ends. The standardized and stringent safety measures for both symptomatic and asymptomatic have assessed whether similar types of uninvited guests would be hosted again by us or not. As a result, after all this crisis abates, we are hopefully going to live in a new world.
Living in a Pandemic COVID-19
Table of Contents
In a span of a few months, COVID-19 has emerged as a global pandemic across the global infecting millions of lives. It is now part of a list of outbreaks of the pestilence that brought mankind to its knees, including Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis in 1986, Avian influenza in 1997, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, Swine Flu in 2009, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014, Each of these episodes have enlightened us that we live in a world where it is important to respect the balance between the ecosystem and biodiversity so that both human and wildlife can live peacefully and flourish. Fast urbanization and its anthropogenic impacts on the ecosystem and biodiversity have disturbed the balance between both and brought us face to face with the coronavirus.
Because of the virus, for more than four months, our country was under complete lockdown. But bit by our country is beginning to emerge from the lockdown and life is starting to crawl back to normalcy. After the country eased its strict lockdown in June, several industries and businesses reopened, while schools, colleges’ theaters, airlines, and tourism businesses remained shuttered. People have cautiously returned to work knowing that they are now living in the phase of living with the coronavirus and trying to balance the economy and social activity with the stringent preventive measures to prevent its spread.
But cases are still rising every day and that shows that our country is still at a critical juncture. The need for many families to put food on the table has overtaken the possibility of being affected by the virus. But today’s chaos of survival has led us to ignore tomorrow’s survival of chaos.
The improvement in economic indicators at the cost of health indicators is undesirable. Maybe the government’s premature move of lifting the lockdown without any prior preparedness again proves their incapability and inefficacy while dealing with the situation. As a matter of fact, directly or indirectly, they have already admitted that they are willing to let people die just to end the lockdown.
In this pandemic, everyone is a moral relativist. But the question for our government is: How many additional deaths are you willing to take against the certain benefits’ of resuming regular lives? Isn’t this the time for political leaders to have an honest conversation about the moral trade-offs of this pandemic and how to balance them toward the public interest?
The only thing that now matters is how we adapt to the new rules- and how quickly. Those who consider themselves as game changers have failed. Hey failed because they could not tackle the issue as a community together. Living amidst the pandemic is not a time to wish or pray alone, rather it is a time to act together to defeat our common nemesis.
Right now is the time to stay united. Even the global medical community has united to come up with a vaccine and to find other measures to keep the virus at bay. By setting aside all the grudges, nations are helping each other to contain the spread of the virus and this has spread the message of solidarity in humanity’s war against COVID-19. The whole world has also been preparing to set a new precedent to keep the virus on the check even after the pandemic ends. The standardized and stringent safety measures for both symptomatic and asymptomatic have assessed whether similar types of uninvited guests would be hosted again by us or not. As a result, after all this crisis abates, we are hopefully going to live in a new world.
But that is going to take a long time. There are possibilities of the arrival of the second wave in most of the developed countries like China, India, the United States, UK, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Philippines. This proves that the tumult caused by the virus will continue to haunt us for a while at least until an approved treatment or vaccine is available to the global community. At such a time, we are all left with two questions: How are we going to get through this together? When will this pandemic end?
