Covid pandemic 2nd anniversary | An optimist's view of life since Covid

India's vaccination drive sputtered and faltered in its initial stage. But no one can deny that it also went on to become one of the greatest successes ever of its type. (Image: Reuters)

Exactly two years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the spread of the novel coronavirus 2019 as a pandemic. And the life of every human being on earth was affected—from the world’s wealthiest people to the most austere of monks. This plague was entirely unexpected, entirely sudden; no Big Data analytical model could have predicted it.

But we have coped with it.

Yes, I am by nature an optimist. I believe that human beings are ingenious enough to develop technologies that will ensure that our seas do not boil over, that it is a matter of time before we find affordable and sustainable solutions to the global warming problem. I believe that the history of Homo Sapiens is about finding solutions and ways to progress, from taming fire to inventing vaccines for Covid at blinding speed.

This is not to deny that our history is also one of needless wars, mindless cruelty and horrifying injustice. But we have always managed to plod along and be better. How else do you explain the following numbers?

In the year 1800, 85% of the world population lived in extreme poverty (zero food security, no access to clean drinking water, no sanitation, endemic malnutrition, low immunity to diseases). Today, that number is 8%.

Life expectancy was 31 years in 1800. Today it is above 70 years.

Even the average IQ of human beings has been steadily rising.

As for climate change, the world has been making progress, due to more efficient energy usage, policy decisions and a vast number of people rising up the income ladder and being able to make the right choices. Per capita carbon emission has been falling for many years now.

In the last 20 years, the global suicide rate has fallen by 25%.

Around 18% of companies across the world today have women in top management positions.

These numbers are from the books Factfulness by Hans Rosling and Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker and the brilliant data site gapminder.org which is the late Rosling’s legacy. The trends that gapminder reveals may surprise many of us. The site also proves, through data, that while the world has been getting better in many ways, most of us are either unaware or refuse to believe it.

Also read: Two years of COVID-19: India fares better, but still not indefensible against another wave, another pandemic

But what does all this have to do with the two years of the pandemic? Simple. We were faced with a completely new calamity and we coped. Yes, many of us have lost loved ones to this demonic virus (I have lost two people who were very close to me). Many of us have lost jobs, many of us have seen our incomes diminished, many of us have had our personal relationships damaged by unpredictable stress. But we have been able to cope.

The findings of a Pew Research survey of Americans, released in March last year, a year into the pandemic, are revelatory. The vast majority (89 percent) mentioned at least one negative change in their own lives. But 73 percent of the respondents also mentioned at least one unexpected upside. Two-thirds (67 percent) of those surveyed mentioned at least one negative and at least one positive change since the pandemic began.

Also read: 2 years of the pandemic | Dear COVID. Un-happy birthday to you!

I am consciously avoiding the economic data—GDP, unemployment rate, etc., etc. Because I do think that the data is an extremely imperfect and inadequate reflection of what we have gone through in these two years. The human cost.

In India, we have had a very rocky ride. No one can deny the hardships caused by the national lockdown that imposed with four hours’ notice. The vaccination drive sputtered and faltered in its initial stage. But no one also can deny that it went on to become one of the greatest successes ever of its type. We are talking mammoth numbers here, with an infrastructure that we cannot even begin to compare with what the developed world takes for granted.

Also read: We should stop managing COVID-19 the way we did in 2020: Gagandeep Kang

Perhaps, maybe at a distance of a few years, someone will write a dispassionate account of India in the times of Covid, from the deplorable politics of it to the heroism of our healthcare professionals. But this article is not about that.

We are people. We have not only survived this blow to the lives that we have lived and known so far; we are still pretty cool. We have learnt to breathe through masks, most of us have been able to teach ourselves how to live with some constraints, and we have adjusted and adapted to all sorts of regulations issued by governments blundering along as scientists’ opinions and recommendations kept changing almost every week.

We have been through hell. We have seen our systems fail, but we have also seen them pushed to the limit and hold firm. We have endured the crazies and have had to wade neck-deep through half-truths and misinformation. And many of us have, for the first time in our lives, been made constantly aware of our mortality.

And the story is hardly over. There may be a fourth wave and a fifth and a sixth. But each of them will be weaker—in terms of lethality—than the one before it. One does not need to be a virologist or molecular biologist to figure that out.

Also read: Healing Space | 2 years of the pandemic: Why we need Islands of Refuge

A virus may not strictly be a life form, but it does seem to want to survive and propagate. It can survive only through its host—a body—and it propagates by infecting those in proximity to the host—the migration of its family members. When the host dies, the virus ceases to exist and cannot propagate.

The Ebola virus, first detected in western Africa, did not cause a global epidemic because it was too lethal—its average fatality rate was 50 percent. By killing too many of its hosts, the virus guaranteed its own defeat. It makes absolute evolutionary sense for the Covid virus to mutate to milder and less deadly forms—but potentially more contagious—and ensure its survival. We have already seen this in the third wave of Covid and the Omicron variant—fatalities dropped but the spread was faster. And new avatars of the virus always crowd the earlier ones out.

Also read: Diary of an Omicron patient

We must accept the fact that we will have to live with this virus. But we should not worry too much about it. We have been living with viruses like the common cold and flu for ages. We just need to get back up and get going. After all, in the two weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, how much time have we—or the media—spent thinking of Covid? We will keep moving our attention on to more novel problems. That is what we humans are.

Also read: COVID pandemic 2nd anniversary: 3 things we got wrong, and 3 things to watch out for

However, the one critical issue that all of us need to focus on is our children. They have been sitting at home for two years—some of them with intermittent gaps—without the essential joys of childhood and growing up. They have not hugged and fought with friends, they have not messed around in dirt and on grass, they have not tripped and fallen and hurt their knees and elbows. Little children have been deprived of learning socialization skills, the most vital gifts that kindergartens and early schooling give.

The children are the people we should worry about. We have survived and done fairly well, if we look at humanity at a macro level, even as we grieve our personal losses individually. But what Covid may have done to children is horrific. That is what we must address urgently and with all that we have—give our children back what they have lost in these two years.