What will change after COVID-19?

It is more than two weeks since the lockdown because of the pandemic. COVID-19. I am getting used to life of “staying home.” Yet the question remains in my mind: what will it be like when it is all over. I think that it will change and afraid how it will change.

Epidemics and pandemics are not new to human history but it happens only every one hundred years, so it still surprises each time it happens. It comes as a jolt to what we consider normal living which means we eat, sleep and go out with friends. But these days we are forced to stay home. Gone is the freedom of going out when and where we choose to.

A friend said ”today we are all under arrest.” But that is true only of those who have houses to live in. Since I live in a house in a subdivision, I do not know how those without can be put in isolation. Without houses the rule to stay at home is an irony. Yet this is the most important rule of the pandemic “stay at home.”

Of the many epidemics and pandemics in human history, some writers say that it was the Spanish flu in 1918 which was the deadliest.

There were quick reactions that COVID-19 directly came from climate change. But that theory was quickly shoved aside because there is nothing about it that can be said to have the characteristics of what we have known of climate change, especially of global warming. We simply do not know. But it does not mean that we should take either pandemics or climate change for granted. Indeed it is the time to prepare for epidemics that will come after. Climate change may not be directly related to COVID-19 but it cannot be ignored. It will have other effects that we should be ready for.

To me, COVID-19 was spread by our modern way of living closely to each other and air travel that has become quick and convenient. We thought it was progress, never thinking that it would be one of the causes of its quick spread.

As far as medical experts are concerned and able to say is that it is a virus. But how the virus came about is not known as it is also true of other viruses in the past. Although we cannot know certainly that climate change was the direct cause of COVID-19, we would be careless not to think that if we continue to “deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history” will give birth to another kind of virus that can be deadlier.

It is said that COVID-19 does not thrive in warm weather, but there are greater numbers in countries with cold weather. That tells us a simple lesson. “Man is not the master of nature. He cannot do whatever he wants with it. Nature is mighty, and scary, and we have not defeated it but live within it, subject to its temperamental power, no matter where it is that you live or how protected you may normally feel.”

The coronavirus has paralyzed much of the northern hemisphere. We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial, as George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian. “Living behind screens, passing between capsules our houses, cars, offices and shopping malls, we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilizations seek: insulation from natural hazards.”

COVID-19 is one such hazard that we never thought of would come in our modern” world. I hope that if anything at all we should be humbled by this pandemic. We are not as invulnerable as we thought we were.

More frightening is the fact scientists have now discovered sicknesses that we thought we had already defeated. Scientists have now discovered that plagues of the past can be revived. “There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years, in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

Already, in laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated: a 32,000-year-old ”extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an eight-million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, a 3.5-million-year-old one a Russian scientist self-injected, out of curiosity, just to see what would happen. (He survived.) In 2018, scientists revived something a bit bigger, a worm that had been frozen in permafrost for the last 42,000 years.”

The Arctic also stores terrifying diseases from more recent times. ”In Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million, about three percent of the world’s population, and more had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. Scientists suspect smallpox is trapped in Siberian ice, among many other diseases that have otherwise passed into human legend, an abridged history of devastating sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.”

The spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus has drawn comparisons with devastating periods such as World War II, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 1918 Spanish flu.

“We need a much stronger coordination,” said IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva adding that she had written to the world’s 20 largest economies (G20) and would join their virtual meeting later this week.

“Coordination in making sure that not only the developed countries can respond effectively to the disease, but that there is massive support to the developing world not to let the disease spread like wildfire,” she said.

Moreover, this coordination is critical when we begin to think about “the exit plan”­ and people need to begin thinking about this. Will we open up to the whole world? How? What is everyone else doing? How to make sure we don’t get a second or third wave?