Workers place a mask on a figure made for the Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain, on 11 March 2020. The festival, which was scheduled to take place on March 13, has been cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak
It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? A reset. From rising inequality, division and conflict across the world, to rapacious human need disrupting and devastating the natural environment, something had to give. But, Hollywood’s screenwriters aside, who could have envisaged anything like this? A deadly menace heading your way, a faceless nemesis crossing borders, picking us off one by one, shaking our foundations…
This is a very unsettling period in so many ways. Thousands of lives lost and hundreds of thousands of others struck down by a virus no one has the measure of. The rest of us hanging on every breaking news report and data set like a live match report or scoreboard. What’s the latest? What are our chances? It’s the unknown, ambush element in all of this that is most unnerving.
Well, that and how unprepared our politicians and leaders are to manage this epidemic. Think of the weeks (and lives) wasted vacillating between herd immunity and enforcing social distancing to flatten the curve. Why wasn’t contact tracing or another more front-footed measure considered sooner like in Singapore? To ignore the warning of Italy or China, instead grossly underestimating the risk, forcing medical professionals to work without the proper protective equipment and make impossible decisions is disgraceful.
Think about that. Devoted hospital staff simply don’t have the right tools to do the job. Moreover, they feel that instead of saving lives they could be jeopardising them. This senior consultant’s prognosis for life on the frontline is unflinching and heartbreaking. At peak demand, the NHS could require as many as 100,000 ventilators. We currently have around 5% of that. The UK and US governments have rightly been criticised for the red tape preventing tests from being made more readily available. Those are tests that could help us to target public health responses without having to shut down large swaths of an economy.
Amid the ensuing chaos, billions are trying to figure out how to work and live in an unfamiliar world. Many of us lament the disconnected nature of the modern age where so much of life is conducted at speed, often frivolously, through the interface of a screen. And yet here we are, increasingly in actual isolation, confronted by ourselves and leaning on technology like never before. This is “unprecedented” indeed.
I don’t dream that much but my mind has been turning over like a dynamo at night. Wild fantasies in dystopia, like trying to evading the military patrol mid-lockdown – and those flesh-eating panic buyers – as I sneak out to get some bread. Or slipping into darkness, through nooks and alleyways, to find the illicit rave where lonely souls surrender to sound, as they rediscover the pleasure of human touch, the thrill of a kiss, a drunken communion of sanitiser-soaked bodies moving to one another… Oh, I lost myself for a minute. Anyway, let’s hope some unbelievable writing comes out of this.
It’s been fascinating to follow all the different tributaries of the coronavirus story as they develop – socio-economic, political, cultural. Obviously, isolation puts many businesses at risk in multiple sectors: aviation (the biggest loser at $113 billion), bars, cafes, restaurants, gyms, cinemas, arts spaces, live music venues etc Several of them are trying to adapt. Eat-in becomes takeaway and delivery only. Restaurants are also making merchandise so we have something to lounge in. Museums are offering access to virtual galleries. The workout is coming to fitness fanatics’ homes. Musicians are live-streaming gigs and paying at virtual festivals (although how they’ll earn a living in an already tough industry that’s set to lose up $5 billion is anyone’s guess). I can spare a dollar for Erykah Badu.
As The Atlantic reports, “This is our great economic crisis in a nutshell: Consumers are vanishing, but financial obligations are not. Without a major intervention, the entire global leisure and retail economy – and soon, perhaps, the entire economy, period – is facing mass layoffs, mass bankruptcy or both.”
In times of financial turmoil, basic economics dictates that the best way to alleviate pressure on the most vulnerable is to minimise the difference between what comes in and what goes out. UK chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £350 billion bailout combining state-backed loans and aid is a welcome shot in the arm for small businesses and homeowners but it doesn’t really help the renters, freelancers, self-employed, and those on zero-hours contracts. And what about parents who can’t afford to take unpaid leave to care for their kids? Surely it’s time to develop a universal basic income to cover such cases? If you think so, sign here.
Many of us are also using this crisis as a spur to be more compassionate. You’ve got breweries producing and donating hand sanitiser, a battery company becoming the world’s largest manufacturer of face masks, a corner shop handing out free sanitising packs to the elderly, a supermarket prioritising them in the shopping queue, strangers helping each other to pay their bills and local communities looking out for the most vulnerable.
Elsewhere, therapists are offering free online sessions to counter soaring anxiety levels, parents are giving each other home-schooling tips (although the digital divide prevents so many from harnessing tools like this), neighbours are entertaining each other while in isolation (pulling out ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and other classics), theatre performers are making the world their stage and two artists are facilitating dial-up chats to overcome social distancing, which would be a boon for the over-60s (16% of whom live alone according to Pew Research Center).
Amazon orders are surging in this new phase of remote living but not enough has been done to minimise the threat of infection among its workforce (which is in excess of 800,000 around the world, many of whom work in their warehouses in countries such as Spain and Italy).
Employees in New York and Chicago told The Washington Post that their nearest restroom is two to three minutes away, making it hard for them to regularly wash hands while facing constant pressure to fulfil those orders. “It may not just be workers’ safety at stake,” says the reporter. “Recent research shows the coronavirus can potentially remain viable — capable of infecting a person — for up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to three days on plastic and stainless steel, though COVID-19 has primarily spread through direct person-to-person contact.”
Now more than ever, perhaps, the spotlight is on the actions of governments. How far can and should they go to protect the welfare of citizens? Israeli cellphone carriers were ordered by law to transfer metadata to state agency Shin Bet to help them locate people who may have come into contact with the virus. This measure is usually invoked to safeguard national security but critics fear a slippery slope to state surveillance and the erosion of privacy. Meanwhile, commentators in the UK are watching closely as Johnson’s government prepares to table an emergency Coronavirus Bill, which includes police detention powers. Can they be trusted to apply them judiciously?
On Tuesday, Iran announced the temporary release of 85,000 people from jail, many political prisoners, in an attempt to prevent the spread among the prisoners. Al Jazeera reports that in Brazil more than 500 prisoners who fled four jails ahead of a planned lockdown over the coronavirus pandemic were recaptured. (Local reports claim the figure was as high as 1,300.)
The buzzword “disruption” is thrown around with abandon in places like Silicon Valley, and often without true meaning or significance. But this is the real deal. The crisis has already plunged the world’s economy into a global recession according to credit-rating agency S&P Global. Trump’s administration is forecasting that the epidemic could last 18 months. After coronavirus has finished ravaging markets and decimating livelihoods, who will be left standing? On what will each of us place ultimate value?
Trend forecaster Li Edelkoort thinks we’ll rebound, reinvent systems from scratch and ultimately “build a new economy with other values and ways of handling production, transport, distribution and retail”. On a more human level, she predicts the origin of an alternative and profoundly different world, one where we savour more and consume less (or more respectfully at least).
This experience will certainly give us a pause for reflection – what we spend time on, how we relate to one another, how we rely on each other, our interconnectedness, the simple pleasures we take for granted beyond our door – but I’m skeptical as to how resistant the majority of the world will be to resuming their tunnel-visioned quest for more. One can only hope.
My guiding thought is put best by Rupi Kaur in this poem.
Yes, let’s all think about how we can be more useful to one another. Practice solidarity. But do it in solitude for the time being. Looking beyond the tragedy of loss, let’s treat this as an opportunity to learn rather than something to endure. Ask yourself: what are you really capable of?
In the meantime … pick up that new skill you’ve been threatening to try, finish the book you’ve been neglecting by your bedside, get into some DIY or home improvement, take a trip through the wonder of cinema and music, lace up for a run, walk beyond the comfort of your seat, make more calls (note to self), have a House Party or sit back and LOL at the genius of some internet comedians. See, the possibilities are endless.
Ok, I’m off to write my debut novel, 100+ Days of Solitude. Till we meet again…