Humbling Realities & Bitter Lessons From The Corona Pandemic
Lukman Harees
The world is on a virtual war footing to cope with the unfolding pandemic of the Coronavirus – Covid-19. Sadly humanity is also in the grip of a global pandemic considerably more devastating than the coronavirus. This highly infectious flu has triggered a worldwide contagion of irrational fear and emotion. Man has lost his mind. The ramifications of this universal abdication of reason are vast and unknown. Right now, the world is in total lockdown: Millions of people are in quarantine, a calamity for countless individuals and businesses; stock markets and economies are in free fall, even as federal governments are racking up unparalleled debt trying to save them; and many experts believe the world has entered recession. Meanwhile, national borders are closing, soldiers are being deployed to the streets in cities across the Earth, and some countries are enacting wartime laws and measures, equipping many federal governments with authoritarian power.
They say, in aviation, when a pilot becomes disoriented and loses spatial awareness, he can panic and make decisions that send the aircraft into an out-of-control free fall, a fatal moment called the graveyard spiral. Has the panic over coronavirus plunged mankind into a graveyard spiral? Well! With our political leaders, doctors, scientists and religious leaders having losing control of the coronavirus, it feels like humanity has almost already entered a graveyard spiral. Hope it is not!
A little over one hundred years ago, a novel virus emerged from an unknown animal reservoir and seeded itself silently in settlements around the world. The “Spanish flu,” so-called because the first widely reported outbreak occurred in Madrid in May 1918, swept like wildfire through cities and communities both large and small. By the time the virus had burned itself out, in the spring of 1919, a third of the world’s population had been infected and at least 50 million people were dead. As Bill Gates pointed out in a recent commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine: Global health experts have been saying for years that another pandemic whose speed and severity rivalled those of the 1918 influenza epidemic was a matter not of if but of when… Covid-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about. By contrast, no one has any immunity to the new coronavirus—hence the estimates that as much as 80 percent of the world’s population could have been infected by the time the pandemic will have run its course.
This Corona Pandemic has brought into focus two important social issues into discussion. Social Distancing as well as Depletion of Human compassion, and Curtailment of Human Rights/ Inequality. Finding a due balance is key to ensuring that these measures although important in the short to medium term to save lives, will not permanently erode hard won human right and make people depressed.
Social Distancing
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, public health officials are asking people to do something that does not come naturally to their very social species: Stay away from each other. Many countries are facing a grim dilemma: either effectively shut down society for months to prevent transmission of the coronavirus or see health care systems overwhelmed by people needing treatment for severe infections. Social distancing has become a central aspect of plans to limit the spread of the virus. Social distancing practices are changes in behaviour that can help stop the spread of infections. These often include curtailing social contact, work and schooling among seemingly healthy individuals, with a view to delaying transmission and reducing the size of an outbreak. Social distancing is thus ultimately about creating physical distance between people who don’t live together. Staying home as much as possible, even if a person believes that he/she isn’t infected, is the type of altruistic decision that, when performed en-masse, has the potential to slow the infection rate.
It has however already affected the global economy because people are staying at home and demand for goods and services has fallen. Concerns have also been expressed that social distancing could lead to increased loneliness, especially among older people who are at a higher risk of severe covid-19. This coronavirus pandemic spreading around the world is thus calling on people to suppress their profoundly human hard-wired impulses for connection: seeing friends, getting together in groups, or touching each other. Experts say that “social distancing also tests the human capacity for cooperation, as pandemics are an especially demanding test … because we are not just trying to protect people we know, but also people we do not know or even, possibly, care about.”
The effects of short-term social distancing haven’t been well studied, but several researchers – most of them scrambling to deal with disruptions to their own lives because of the coronavirus. Researchers point out that over long periods of time, social isolation can increase the risk of a variety of health problems, including heart disease, depression, dementia, and even death. People of all ages are susceptible to the ill effects of social isolation and loneliness and older people may be more susceptible. People are fortunate to live in an era where technology will allow them to see and hear their friends and family, even from a distance. Even so, those modes of communication don’t entirely replace face-to-face interactions. When people interact with each other, a lot of the meaning conveyed between two people is actually not conveyed in the actual words, but in nonverbal behaviour. A lot of those subtleties of body language, facial expressions, and gestures can get lost with electronic media. One hundred years ago, French sociologist Émile Durkheim used the phrase “collective effervescence” to describe the shared emotional excitement people experience during religious ceremonies. He says, ‘It dramatically magnifies the sensation for you while also reinforcing the idea that you’re something larger than yourself’. Such events help build cohesiveness.
