Covid-19 Lessons - The Best and Worse in Us

The virus exposed a lot, good and evil. As with the disaster at the World Trade Towers 2001, which had cost more than 3000 lives and the impact of which we are still experiencing, also the long term effects of the Covid- 19 outbreak on the global society will still remain to be evaluated some twenty years into the future. Hopefully with positive outcome.

However, some symptoms and indicators became visible already during the early stages.

What might be positive is the discipline most people around the globe were willing to exercise in being willing to self-isolate and thus reduce stress on the health care system. Also the coping strategies and care for others have been impressive. Social media contributed to being able to communicate with loved ones and support each other. People everywhere on the globe have engaged in charitable actions to support homeless and migrant workers and stray pets who now were without food.

Photo by Patrick Hendry@worldsbetweenlines

Many services and events had been moved online. People all around the globe had been able to reduce air traffic by more than 80% within an instant and almost without warning. Nature began to recover quickly from centuries of abuse.

Those and various other behaviors and capabilities can hopefully immediately be adapted and continued also once the virus no longer poses any significant threat. Maybe we can use those traits in order to also tackle other global issues, like climate change, hunger, other regionally concentrated diseases. We learned a lot. Most of all we learned to respect health care workers, bus and truck drivers and supermarket cashiers, all of which are underpaid, yet crucial to our supply and survival.

We also finally began to understand how human exploitation of the planet and the animals and the continues war against human and biodiversity has made us extremely vulnerable to virus spread.  

One more important lesson we already learned is that racism, xenophobia and colonialist thinking remains to be a global problem. Racism has re-surfaced and increased in different parts of the world.

The first outbreak was reported from Wuhan in China. During this initial period not only Chinese citizens, but all Asians suffered racist assaults all over the world.

Soon enough, as the virus spread further, others began to feel the virulence of racism as well. Muslims in India, who were already being attacked over religious issues, were now marked as a major source of virus spread and the Covid/19 virus was used as an excuse to restrict Muslims from entering villages and towns and to push them out of jobs.

Next came two French doctors who thought of Africa as a great testing field for new vaccines, using the argument that Africans would go unprotected anyhow and compared Africans to prostitutes.

Ironically enough, once the virus seemed to be controlled in Wuhan, people in China, who had just been the target of racism themselves,  now began to discriminate against Africans, based on the fear of them spreading Covid- 19 again.

Already a very few weeks into the spread into the USA it became clear that black and Latino US-citizens die twice as often from Covid- 19 related health issues, compared to white and Asian citizens. This is based on several discrimination related issues. Black and Latino citizens working more in health care and other jobs which expose them to risks and helps spread the virus in those communities and poor access to health care are two of them. Also black and Latino citizens are prohibited from wearing face masks and due to racial profiling scared of the risk of being shot in the streets while wearing protective masks.

@nci

Meanwhile Finnish public servants exposed a great lack of intercultural communications skills and found themselves unable to engage in global markets and preferred to put themselves at the mercy of Finnish dubious business people with out of state accounts, instead of directly contacting regular Chinese agencies and providers of hygiene products. Of course, failing and being left with useless products at high costs.

One other worrisome occurrence is the loss of personal freedom. Of course, it has been necessary to react quickly and to reduce the stress on the health care structures and so the voluntary and often government ordered social isolation was necessary and it was great to see how disciplined and willingly people complied and adapted. Still, in many instances the fear of the virus has been abused by governments.

For example the US president prohibited all travel from Europeans into the USA except for UK citizens, while the virus was already spreading in the USA. This was clearly politically motivated in order to punish EU citizens for being skeptical of Trump and the EU being an economic and political counter balance to the USA. At the same time Britain seemed to be awarded for having left the European Union, maybe for others to be encouraged to follow suit.

In other states the internet had been shut down and communication had been put under strict control. Could mature citizens not be trusted with information? Blue tooth tracking of peoples movements has been implemented. Private citizens began policing others both in the streets and shops as well as online. This reminded quickly of the “Blockwart” mentality in Nazi Germany. Critical thoughts and voices were being suppressed. It is scary to think of how easily our liberties could be taken away in the future, if only the feeling of fear is fuelled by certain interest groups and becomes great enough.

It seems many people now have become aware of the imbalance in the reaction to Covid/19, compared to earlier reactions on human life, animals and nature threatening phenomena as war, hunger, pollution, racism and poverty. We also became once more reminded of the value of our liberties and how easily they can be taken away and how racism and xenophobia is still a threat to mankind.

Hopefully we all learn fast enough from all those lessons, both the positive and wonderful examples of solidarity and care, as well as the threatening ones and we won’t repeat past mistakes. There are great chances in all that we can have learned, let’s embrace them towards a better post-corona world. May many of us have found new purpose in life!