World Events / End of Covid

Where Did Everybody Go?

The world moved on and so did our attention.

It was 2 years ago, almost to the day, that many among us picked up epidemiology as a hobby.

The media played a role in this, so did the internet. Many of us were let down by an education system that was never designed to prepare us for how to behave and act on information during a global pandemic. As a result, some felt helpless in their ignorance and sought answers that suited a particular worldview. Many showed a willingness to listen less to experts who had devoted their lives to the study of this very topic, and more to people who “had done their research” and were “just asking questions”.

Many of these same people, one gathers, have realised they’ve done all they can as amateur epidemiologists and have now moved into careers as armchair military planners and Eastern European history buffs. The speed at which this switch has been made is breathtaking.

The school I was working at decided to keep kids at home, while teachers met for what was to be two days of planning for the move to online learning. Zoom and how to use it had to be explained to us. How a communication platform that the week before no one had ever heard of managed to elbow its way to the front of what was surely a long line, is still anyone’s guess. The two days that were set aside turned into just 3 hours as at 11:30am that Monday, the Principal of the school stood up, asked for quiet and with a bit of a tear in his eye, told us that the first case had arrived in our East African home and that everything was being shut down.

Go home and prepare on your own for online learning, beginning Wednesday morning.

The need to lockdown everything was obvious and immediate in many parts of the world. In others, it was less so. But if we take a look today at any graph that shows the daily infection rate in a given country, we’ll see that the initial numbers that caused massive panic and dislocation in March 2020 aren’t even visible on them anymore. They are dwarfed by the current numbers.

However, virtually all countries are ending their Covid restrictions. Yet Germany and France, among others, are still recording record numbers of daily cases. In Vancouver you can go to a hockey game with 18,000 other people and nobody has to wear a mask.

Yes, we are moving on. Who’s coming along?

No more vaccine passes, no more face masks, no more costly PCR tests to enter countries. Hopefully no more trucker convoys either. Travel is back and people are literally pouring off the virus incubating machines known as cruise ships and airplanes, once again.

Developed countries got through it with varying degrees of success and failure. For kids there with steady internet access and a laptop, at-home learning was far from ideal, but do-able for the most part. However, In many developed countries, including the one I was living in at the time, a full lockdown of society was a logistical impossibility, as was hoping that children would be able to learn at home. Many of them stopped going to school, started working and aren’t planning to return now that their school has reopened.

The negative impact of this reality on those places is immeasurable. It could mean the continuation of the “developing” label on those countries for at least the coming generation.

It was hard. It almost broke us. It may yet again. We are just two months on from the last explosion of cases. But suddenly, none of this really matters to us. Our governments directed us to isolate and shut down our lives. So most of us did as we were told. And now, although Covid still rages, and anyone who’s been paying attention knows that another variant is on the way, we can end our precautions.

Our attention went elsewhere. Has it really been made to shift that quickly? Where did it go?

Is it on the climate crisis and the destruction of the only environment we can live in?

Is it on the obscene amount of wealth that has been accumulated by the already richest people in the world over the past 2 years?

Is it on the trillions that have been spent on the military and its weapons under the guise of our own defence, to the exclusion of spending on the things that make life liveable for everyone? That now can’t be used to oppose the slaughter of the innocents of one country against the naked aggression of another?

Is it on the vast profits that military weapons manufacturers make every time there is armed conflict somewhere in the world?

Is it on the use of the vast power and might of the global economic and financial network that few of us understand that was expected to bring a totalitarian ruler to his knees….and subsequently on understanding why that hasn’t stopped him, after we were told that he wouldn’t be able to survive without it?

(And then realising that for all the power that money has, a lack of access to it hasn’t really been much of a deterrent for Russia yet. Patience still on this one, perhaps.)

Is it on the thin ice on which democracy in the West finds itself, thanks to conspiracy theories and an ignorant population that has little concept of history because they weren’t taught it properly by a crumbling public education system?

Is it on the widening gap between the richest and the poorest? On the rapacious greed of last stage capitalism? On the shifting nature of work?

Is it on the humiliations of having to work in a gig economy just to make ends meet? On the inability of the majority of the population to experience the pleasure and privilege of the much hyped Great Resignation?

No. None of these things are getting our full attention.

But the war in Ukraine is. I am not saying it doesn’t deserve it nor am I saying that the people of Ukraine don’t deserve our full support. But isn’t it amazing how quickly and seamlessly another crisis arrives to keep our attentions rapt?

It’s not only the Ukrainians who deserve our help. We don’t need reminding that there is a list as long as your arm of all the oppressed people in the world. Yet one wonders why they don’t get the same support we’ve tried to offer the people of Ukraine?

Actually, one doesn’t really have to wonder too hard. One can draw one’s own conclusions.

And so, we continue, focused on our daily treadmills, just grateful that we have a job and a roof remains over our heads. We see the horror that Ukranians in their multitudes are facing in a desperate escape from their homes ahead of the punishment of the Russian military. We shake our heads in disbelief that we are seeing this in our century. We mumble to ourselves some version of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” We realise that for some reason, the same God that we believe in has chosen to forsake the Ukrainian people.

So where are we now? Are we still moving forwards? Are we still so certain of the notion of progress that has underpinned Western thought since at least the middle of the 1600s? Are we so sure that we are heading for a brighter future just over the horizon? Are we so sure that this right now is the best it’s ever been for humankind?

The arc of history bends toward justice, we have been told. Does it? For whom? Just a few years ago, one could have made a powerful argument that this was indeed the case, slowly but surely. One wonders about that now, a little bit less certain of our shared destiny, as we are.

Or are we starting to realise that maybe this isn’t going to last much longer? That maybe we are going backwards? That maybe it’s our actions as individuals and as a collective that has gotten us into this? That maybe the altar of technology that we have bowed down to and organised our lives around won’t actually get us out of this?

It almost makes you want to go back to January 2020, when you first heard of what was still at the time called Coronavirus. We dismissed it as something that was happening in China. This was at our peril, we soon learned. We aren’t dismissing the situation in Ukraine the same way, and rightly so. Instead, we are gripped by it.

The daily shock of the past two years makes me very glad I didn’t know then what I can barely understand now. Thankfully, there is no shortage of people willing to explain it to me.

A few further thoughts on this topic (in chronological order of publishing from latest to earliest:

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