We must not forget the pandemic.

On a bright January morning in 2020 , a WhatsApp message popped up in my mobile screen. It read something like : “A new virus is spreading in China … Beware!!!!!.... “ At that time I felt, just like the 1.2 billion of us ki yeh India mein kahaan hi aayega! Fast forward to a year later, India was a COVID-19 hell. We were seeing people suffer, beyond caste, class and religion. I am talking about the 2nd wave. This widespread destitution was accompanied by lack of proper medical facilities, harrowing pictures of bodies floating on our holy rivers, funerals on sea shores and rising misery, all in a jiffy! To quote Shakespeare:” When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” But what does this virus really means to us? Even if the endemic comes some day, what COVID-19 leaves for us? Let’s try to find out. 
Nowadays, if you search for a timeline of the pandemic on the internet ,  you will find that it’s flooded with statistics. But will it be pertinent for us, as social beings, to weigh several lives through simple mathematics and calculations? I don’t think so. 

We know that on  December 31, 2019, Chinese officials informed the World Health Organization (WHO) China Country Office that 27 cases of pneumonia of unknown cause were detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. The pathogen was called coronavirus 2019 nCoV by Chinese authorities, identifying that it spreads via airborne droplets. India’s first novel coronavirus patient – a student studying at Wuhan University – was reported in Kerala’s Thrissur district, as more than 7500 cases were reported in 20 countries of the world. A week after claiming that the outbreak doesn’t yet constitute a public emergency of international concern and that there is “no evidence” of the virus spreading between humans outside of China, WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. On February 3 ,Kerala government declared coronavirus a state calamity after two more cases were reported in Alappuzha and Kasaragod district. On February 4 ,India cancelled existing visas for Chinese and foreigners who had visited China in the last two weeks, the day after the death toll in China exceeded that of the 2002-03 SARS outbreak. And finally, on February 11 , WHO announced that the new coronavirus disease will be known by the official name of COVID-19. 

……and it has been an awful situation since then! For everyone, for every country, for every community and specially for the poor and downtrodden. Many people lost their jobs. Many children left schools. Many young people’s dreams were shattered. Many loved ones departed without any acknowledgement. And those who survived, fought till they became mentally devastated. Last year, when the 2nd wave stuck India on the onset of a rather hot and long summer (thanks to the climate crisis)and an ongoing election season full of huge crowds and rallies , foreign media outlets were flooded with the images of an Indian agony. And social media platforms were flooded with mobile phone numbers, hospital addresses, requests for blood donors, oxygen cylinders, ambulances and what not! Exams were postponed and eventually cancelled, online classes were conducted, much to the harm of students. It often comes to my mind that whether our country, so much steeped in so many problems, from social to economic , has smartphones in its every household. Obviously no! People barely get to eat in some areas of India, let alone possessing a phone and attending online classes. Theatres got closed, bookshops shut down, religious festivals cancelled and our consciousness shifted to a huge extent. 

On such painful days, one looks at the sky. Under the sky, a dusty, hot, third world country fighting to save it’s people. The history of this country goes a long way. The most invaded country in human history. A post-WW2 republic. Three wars – one lost, two won. The era of emergency and revolutions. A nuclear power. A globalised nation in the 90s . The new century brought in by gruesome riots and killings, an economic boom, a terrorist attack and an election in 2014 that changed the country. Was India ever ready for a pandemic? We can’t say. Perhaps no. But that applies for many other countries. What makes India different is our impulse to ‘kindly adjust'. So we adjusted. Very unkindly though! As the rose-tinted Indian sky fades to give way to darkness, we again look up at it ; this is one of the most polluted skies in the globe. The condescending first world leaders ask us to reduce our coal consumption. What is the significance of this proposition for a coal mine worker who is barely able to make his ends meet? What about those children working in the mines? They have younger mouths to fill, younger minds to ignite. They have sacrificed their own for them. 

The recent rise and dip of Omicron cases and increasing immunity among living organisms have led scientists to speculate an endemic. We don’t know whether that is a possibility or not as scientists in Wuhan – the place where the virus is known to have originated from, have been warning about a new strain of coronavirus that could be even deadlier than Covid-19 dubbed as Neo-Cov. No, Neo-Cov is not a new Covid-19 variant. It is a strain or another type of coronavirus that was first reported in 2012 and then again during the 2015 outbreak of MERS-Cov. Unlike Delta or Omicron, Neo-Cov is not a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 symptoms among affected humans. It is another type of novel coronavirus. The study found current immunity or antibodies gained from vaccinations or prior Covid-19 infections may not be effective in preventing NeoCov. This new strain has been found to infect only bats. So, even if the endemic comes, this will seem kinda obvious. It is a truth universally acknowledged that no misery lasts against human resilience. But we MUST NOT take this as a victory. Nowadays, we often talk about 'normalcy’, as Mary Hopkins said : Those were the days, my friend! But does that mean that everything was perfect and going for ALL of us? NO! Absolutely not! The pandemic has made us realise the concept of inequality like nothing before. Inequality – social , cultural, economic, political. This means that we were always flawed  as thinking creatures. It is just that it took us a health crisis to understand. As soon as we will return to that ‘normalcy ‘ , we will return to our inequalities, our stereotypes and prejudices. Some of us will act as propagators of it, while some of us will remain mere observers. (Obviously since it is not effecting us in any way)
When we talk of normalcy, we must remember the lessons that COVID-19 has taught us. Initially, the pandemic seemed so overwhelming, just like the Second World War or 9/11 attacks that we couldn’t figure out the strange encounter between us and this wretchedness. But now, we know. And this makes it all the more difficult. If we return to our old ideas, old prejudices, then we have failed to acknowledge our own hardships during the pandemic . Because COVID-19 , though now seems like the major crisis today, will soon get dwarfed by the climate crisis and prevailing geopolitical tensions. Not to mention our own vices as nations. But we must remember COVID-19 . And through COVID-19, we must remember our civil liberties and how they are at stake today. We must matter self-sufficiency. We must remember humanism and global cooperation over patriotism . For without this, the virus could have been a lot more lethal. We must not forget how inequality and injustice took away the lives of so many. We must not turn a cold shoulder to our labourers and migrants workers, mostly from the Dalit and Adivasi communities. We all remember those chilling images of 16 migrant workers run over by train in Aurangabad. And finally, we must not forget our own duty, the responsibilities that come with being the powerful, the ‘thinking man'. The great innovations didn’t happen to destroy the earth. The wheel was not invented in ancient Mesopotamia to run over the bodies of the poor. The Renaissance didn’t happen to belittle the values of men and to commercialize art to an unimaginable extent. Great men taught religion not to propagate hate but to spread peace. The Industrial Revolution started not to make the man a machine himself. Similarly, the COVID-19 Pandemic didn’t come to make us hapless, but it came to teach us a lesson that perhaps we were moving too far from the adjective of a 'thinking man'. Can they tell you these things through the statistics? No, they can’t! 

If, after all these, we return to normalcy, that will be the single most dreadful for our planet. Don’t think of this as a virus. Finally, something has the attention of the greedy human and humans must make the most of it. Historically, pandemics have obliged humans to start fresh and imagine the world anew. Breaking away from the past, people have been obliged to witness a new and different sunrise – a new world. But as we enter the new world, we are presented with two choices – we can bring our old ideas, our prejudices and stereotypes, our old grudges and our failing ecosystem or we can enter the new world with a light head, read to repair ourselves, our surroundings, ready to imagine the unimaginable. 

The choice, in the modern world, is always ours!