5 things in COVID-19 pandemic taught mankind
The COVID-19 pandemic will always be a story in the history of mankind about how it was caught off-guard by a microscopic virus. Amidst the enormous loss of life and money, this also acts as a great lesson for the human race- strangely the only species nature picked up to be affected by the virus. It is important that we learn it.
Health is important. Health Knowledge is important
For long we have taken our health for granted. Our diet has shifted from the healthy greens to processed foods, our working patterns have shifted from being physical to sedentary, our sleeping habits are distorted – making our whole lifestyle turned upside down than what our forefathers had preached for ages. It’s not healthy. Rather, it’s opposite to being healthy – UNHEALTHY. And most of us never cared. Worst still, most of us didn’t even know. A little aberration in blood sugar, cholesterol levels, blood pressure levels – majority of the citizens never measured and never cared.
As a result, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, not only did we not know about the disease, we knew too little about our own health condition. Even before humanity could react, the pandemic took away hundreds of thousands of precious life – most of whom had comorbidities i.e. pre-existing lifestyle diseases. We rushed to fill up our quota of health supplements hoping it will be a miracle cure to our decreasing immunity. However, most forgot that immunity building is not a one day task. Neither is it dependent on only one factor. Immunity, as experts explained, is a sum total of multiple factors in our body including our physical, mental health, diet we consume, lifestyle we lead and environment we live in. This, humanity needs to remember, even when the pandemic is over. We need to keep our immunity strong by maintaining a healthy lifestyle and we need to monitor our health parameters regularly to know about our health
Countries need to spend more on health budgets than defence budgets
Most countries in the last few decades have had taken major strides in defence technologies. The ships, planes, missiles, guns, Governments spent their money on, proved to be useless when the Pandemic struck. While there are theories about how the Novel Coronavirus causes the COVID-19 could be a man-made virus and this entire Pandemic could be a representation of what we call biological war, the fact remains that in most countries the healthcare support was not ready even to handle to most basic tasks at a large scale.
While humanity showed great strength by breaking borders and coming together, collaborating in sharing knowledge and acting on war footing for the search of a vaccine, while every country’s front line health workers, doctors, nurses acted as new age soldiers in this war against the unseen enemy, they were often let down by the lack of resources. While in some countries there weren’t enough health workers, in some other there weren’t enough hospital beds, in some others there weren’t enough medical equipment – thus raising the question on health budget allocated by most Government. Most experts believe that COVID-19 pandemic will not be the last one of such incidents that we see and it may become a much more common affair in the days to come. In this era, allocating more budgets to build a robust public health system is of much importance.
Disease treats you equally
Human race have spent a lot of time fighting over money, land, religion, caste and power. However, when the pandemic struck it acted as a great leveller. Rich to poor – everyone was physically struck the same way. Across the world, names of politicians, entertainment stars, rich business tycoons were on the list of infected. Even with all their riches, highly guarded mansions, latest technology and services at their disposal – they couldn’t keep the virus away. Same was the case of religious gurus many of whom had to cancel gathering because they could no longer guarantee protection to their followers.
This creates an opportunity for mankind to see things in new light once the pandemic is over and understand how menial the things we usually fight over are. The importance of life over riches, the importance of humanity over religion or caste probably could not have been taught in any better way. However, the lessons need to be remembered. If we let this opportunity pass and indulge in the same divisive nature that we followed so far, then we probably will only be walking towards our doom.
Conspiracy theories do not save you
When the pandemic struck along with a thousands of fake claims on social media from self-declared experts, we saw a number of conspiracy theories floated too. Theories about how the Coronavirus doesn’t exist, theories about how this entire pandemic is a farce or a ploy by medicine companies etc. floated around sucking in a lot many youngsters into the path of callous self-destruction. While conspiracy theories at times form interesting reads, believing on them, not taking precautions during a calamity can hurt – this has been shown in the course of pandemic. The names of conspiracy theory propagators in the list of infected or deceased should always act as a remembrance about the fact that not everything we read on social media should be believed.
There’s still a lot of social inequality hidden in plain sight
We may have progressed in a lot of ways and many may have started believing that social inequality is a thing of past but the pandemic had shown us that social inequality exists in many forms. With millions of job losses, economy nose diving even in the most prosperous countries, we saw how one section of the society suffers more than other section. For example, in India the stories of migrant labours during the lockdown phase will always remember us about the bitter truth – in the time of crisis, the poor will fall first.
However, at the same time we saw numerous examples of individuals or groups rising up to the occasion and saving humanity. There have been a number of examples how people have come forward and helped others irrespective of caste, creed and religion and that too despite the fear of the virus. This tells us that if we strive for unity, we will be able to achieve it.