[Blog] The Day After COVID-19

Perhaps it sounds strange and premature to write on “the day after” at this time when we have no idea of when, and most surely, on how the COVID-19 crisis will end. However, we feel it proper and justified that one should start thinking at the post Corona era. Without being over-optimistic or over-pessimistic. Just coolly realistic!
 
  Will there be a “day-after COVID-19”?

  Or, is the coronavirus the beginning of the end-of-the-world? Will it wipe-out all trace off homo sapiens from the surface of the globe?

  Or, will it only decimate the present overcrowded world-population and let live only a handful of survivors to multiply and people afresh a new world? A modern replica of Biblical Great Flood?

  Or, will our labs come out with the miracle-vaccine in time to procure us “days-after”?

  Or {the more likely scenario} will the covid-19 gradually fizzle-out by itself and leave us – or whosoever are left of us -- to breath-in freely again?  
        
A lot has already been said and written on COVID-19 and, undoubtedly, much, much, more will follow – including many fake and widely imagined news.

Starting in China, the virus found its way through Europe and reached US, further spreading, day by day, all over the globe. WHO and national governments were forced to take drastic measures – some, promptly, some, belatedly --, with some accompanying social measures for the affected population.
 
Drastic measures? What measures?

  Confinement – quarantine or home;

  Keeping “social-distance” with each other;

  A few sanitary steps – regular hand-wash, don’t-touch-mouth-nose-eyes-with-fingers, cough-sneeze-in-handkerchief, and some such elementary measures
 
THAT’S ALL.
 
No vaccine – at least, till the present - more than three months after the first manifestation of the virus in Wuhan.
 
  In fact, as yet, our world’s topmost scientists and laboratories –
 
  haven’t come-up with – let alone a vaccine – any remedy that could control the pandemic;

  don’t even know -

{a} the exact genetic formation of the virus,

{b} whether the virus retains its original structure and its
       original ill-effects, or do its genes mutate into something
       else – maybe, even more resistant and long-lasting?

{c} its life-duration – is it really 14 days?

         {d} whether humans are the sole vector for transmission –
                solely, person-to-person – or can it be transmitted through other vectors?
 
In fact, the “confinement” is just a capitulation of all the world force, the world power put together in face of a tiny virus. It is, in military language, simple and plain capitulating retreat to only minimize the casualties, not a strategy to fight and defeat the enemy. We, the world, have been forced to humbly kneel down; to humiliatingly fly and hide ourselves in our homes and other quarantines.   
 
How long will the crisis last? How long, especially, will the impact of the crisis and the measures that have been taken will affect the world, affect us? Experts, or so-called experts, are saying that we will bear the costs of this crisis for decades.

Others are saying the world, if it survives, will no longer be the same. Our way of thinking, our perception, our way of living, our habits and activities, our relationship – familial, social, business {local and international} – will be changed.

We will have, it seems, no other alternative than to adapt ourselves to and adopt the new environment, whatever be the after COVID-19 days.
 
Jagdish Seebaruth