My lessons from COVID-19 - Part 1

I don’t know for others, but as far as I am concerned, this COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus, has been one of the most significant, albeit disruptive, global events which happened in my lifetime. Nothing, not even those worldwide financial crises in past decades, has affected and changed humanity as a whole, on a scale that includes all people, as this plague. Within the span of my lifetime, this is one of the most significant indeed.

No, this is not the most significant. Our lifetimes are actually very short compared to the expanse of eternity – so anything which affects and changes our spiritual lives for the whole of eternity would be immeasurably more significant. And the life-changing decisions that we make, and experience, would be the only one that will matter. After that spiritual experience, then maybe this pandemic will be one of the most significant happenstances. One that we can draw lessons from as we face the future.

On the physical and experiential side, one of the lessons that we might learn concerns our categorization of what we consider important or not, both on a lifetime perspective and in the daily grind. We wake up each day with pre-set ideas on what are important to us and what are not. It covers what we consider essential and non-essential. The pandemic has taught us that we could do a lot of interpersonal dealings without meeting in person. Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams attest to that. Food and non-food delivery services flourished, indicating we don’t really need to go somewhere for anything.

I know it’s sometimes hard, more for some than others, to change. After the lockdowns and restrictions, I know of many friends who go out simply for the sake of going out. We want to go to malls or anywhere we were free to go before. It’s as easy to say we will eat outside as we can opt to stay and eat at home before. COVID-19 changed that, but many want to go back to the old normal as if the pandemic never happened. We were already talking about the “New Normal”, but many want to revert back to the “Old Normal.”

Building designs need to change, too. A year into the pandemic and we now understand that fresh air or open air is safe; that closed spaces, especially hermetically-sealed ones, are bad and dangerous. You might as well be better opening your windows (if you have any), than buying all those air purifiers with “heap” filters, if you’re going to fill your rooms with people anyway. Those old open-air buses might be better than all our new, closed, and air-conditioned ones. The new normal might actually be the old ways.

SARS-COV-2 is not the last virus to affect man; it is certain there will be new ones in the future, some even worse. Man’s continuing utter destruction of the created world makes that certain, especially the habitat of wildlife and the latter’s trafficking. If we don’t learn the lessons from COVID-19, we will make it easier, and sooner, to bring to us the next new one. (To be continued)