Beautiful New World
Pandemic: What comes next and how to get through the present
I’m not an economist, sociologist, epidemiologist, or climate scientist. I am someone trying to get the bigger picture to understand what is happening. I am also a linguist, and so I am able to read and listen to what people are saying in other countries, and that helps fill in some of the colors.
Take this article, for example, printed in Die Zeit on February 11, 2021: “Normal? Wohl kaum” by Bernd Ulrich (“Normal? Hardly”). In it he laments German politicians’ lack of vision for a way out of the pandemic and blames Germans for not holding their feet to the fire. People are looking for a quick fix so life can go back to “normal” and politicians are only too willing to claim to be providing one. It is an approach that keeps the focus on the present, lurching from one lockdown or set of restrictions to a period of easing, to the next cycle of same.
What about examining animal to human transmission, he asks? What about making sure the health care system is robust and there are adequate supplies for the future, rather than claiming it is so and discovering it is not, as happened this time? Would it not be cheaper in the long run if profitability were not an end goal of the health system? How do you keep the state from falling hostage to Big Pharma? How do you improve supply chains so as not to be dependent on other countries? And not least, how to prevent even more dangerous new variants from developing, given there are more human hosts available than ever before?
None of this is part of the public debate in Germany, says Ulrich. No talk of zoonoses, prevention, factory farming, or (bio)diversity. Rather, it’s all about how to get rid of the virus as fast as possible, eyeing the latest numbers and relying wholly on the deus ex machina of a vaccine rescue (loosely interpreting his words).
But then along came the variants and the dawning realization that maybe all of this can’t just be swept away with the wave of a magic vaccine wand. In fact, maybe it’s not a “normal” pandemic anyway, but the beginning of an unprecedented pandemic phase.
The thing is, we don’t know whether it is or not. But increasing human numbers, with that population spreading closer to animal habitats, with mobility unequaled in history, huge agricultural subsidies creating surplus production of foodstuffs, (especially meat, which creates more risk groups — a system tailored to attract viruses ) add up to pandemics waiting to happen.
Simple to understand, yet the quick-fix mentality has become entrenched. All that remains are prevention (health of the environment and the individual) and resilience (a resilient society needs large reserves of masks, pharmaceutical factories, healthcare professionals, ICU beds). But we haven’t made the mental leap to that.
It means giving up the idea of “business as usual” to admit that is an illusion and prevention and resilience make for more comfortable living conditions ultimately than playing catch-up with lockdowns and border closures, vaccine shortages and emergency care.
So much for Ulrich’s article. How much of this is true for other countries? Most, I’d say. However, articles appeared for years before the Covid-19 pandemic decrying deforestation and outlining exactly what the consequences of clearing for mining, palm oil production, biofuel crops, and housing are.
I found a trove of information about climate change and human health in researching this article, all underlining this point: we need to be thinking ahead. The scientists are and have been. It is we who need to catch up in order to bring pressure to bear on legislators for change.
According to the French news channel BFMTV on February 17, 2021, 31% of French people believe life will return to normal in 2021, 30% in 2022, and 17% after 2022. One in five thinks life will never be the same again. Many are having difficulty planning for the future, with 39% living from day to day because the future is too uncertain.
How much reality is bearable? Sometimes denial is the only way we can protect ourselves and get through the day until we are strong enough to accept what is happening, until we are able to process it and find ways to cope. This incidentally goes a long way to explaining the political clashes taking place in the US.
It was true for me when I received a cancer diagnosis a few years back. Every scrap of emotional energy I possessed went to holding it together, yet every time I just began to feel okay someone would smash that to smithereens by pushing me to think about the next phase before I was done processing the one I was in.
Sooner or later you have to pull yourself up and consider your options. Wishing the cancer away wasn’t going to work.
The Corona pandemic has been similar, except we are in collective denial and scarcely anyone is thinking about why this happened and how to prevent it happening again.
When the pandemic broke, we all had to believe it would be better by summer, or just after the summer, or by the end of 2020, or sometime in 2021 — maybe in spring when most will have been vaccinated. Then there were supply delays and new variants appeared.
When I read it might be with us until the end of 2022 I fell into a pit of despair.
Remember March 2020 during the first lockdown? “Tutto andrà bene,” said the Italians — everything will be okay. The rose-colored glasses came off with the heavy death toll.
Yet Italians today are seemingly more optimistic than many others about the outcome of the pandemic.
I wanted to hear “Abbracciame” again, so I listened to it on YouTube. Some will say it was naiveté, even cheesiness. But somehow that video of a whole Naples apartment complex singing together with hope pulled me out of my morass.
We have a long road ahead. After we are immunized the world will still need to be rebuilt on a different foundation. Travel, globalization, agriculture, health care — this and more are due a serious review.
What is wrong with creating moments of beauty to sustain us while we are building a beautiful new world?
