While the most urgent measures to contain the Covid-19 virus and its impacts are the highest priority, we need to also think of and initiate long-term measures that help prevent such disasters in the future. Otherwise we will be staggering from one pandemic to the other; we’ve had many over the last 100 years, and many more are predicted if the conditions creating them continue as now.
Like this time, we will be able to respond in only knee-jerk ways, out of panic and rush, and make massive mistakes of the kind we are seeing in so many countries. In some, drastic lockdown measures are leading to joblesslessness, hunger, and other impacts especially on the most marginalized, that may sometimes be worse than the impacts of the virus. And in many places there is greater state surveillance, restrictions on democratic freedoms in the name of security, loosening of environmental and labour regulations, and so on, all in the name of emergency response… all of which could be even worse next time around unless we are a very different society.
The virus crisis has however also brought out the best of human nature, in the shape of more social solidarity (in the midst of ‘physical distancing’, wrongly labelled ‘social distancing’), neighbourliness, civil society and governmental efforts to reach out to the most vulnerable, and people reconnecting with family and friends, and, why not? – also with themselves. And it has had a noticeable impact on the environment, with cleaner air and water, wildlife reclaiming spaces, and much else, as human mobility and activity dramatically reduces across the earth.
