Covid-19 - Some Thoughts and Reflections

On New Year’s Eve 2019, my husband and I were lucky enough to be spending a few days’ skiing in the French Alps with another couple. We mutually enjoy escaping the UK for New Year and swopped stories that night about some particularly testing times we had both had to live through in recent years. We noted how everyone goes into New Year wishing each other ‘the best one yet’ or ‘let’s hope it’s better than last year!’. It all seems rather pointless because the salutations are well-intended but ultimately meaningless: ‘best’ and ‘better’ are both relative terms and let’s face it, every year has its fair share of good and bad - sometimes it all goes swimmingly till just before the end (just as you were getting smug) then comes and slaps you in the face with a great big 'thwack'; and sometimes it goes tits up before it’s barely started. However, spurred on by good food, good wine, blue skies and abundant snow we started our New Year in a positive spirit, repeating the mantra: ‘It’s 2020, it’s got to be good!’ Little did we know what lay just around the corner (do we ever…?).

2020 will go down as a landmark year for all the wrong reasons. It is 102 years since the last pandemic - Spanish Flu in 1918 - which claimed an estimated 50 million lives worldwide with India being the worst hit. 

The world was a very different place in those days. Not least of all because we were in the last throes of one of the bloodiest world wars in history with countries on their knees physically, mentally and emotionally; but also because there were major issues with communications due to news blackouts and a total lack of the technology and systems we take for granted today. 

The key factors in our current worldwide battle against an ‘invisible enemy’ will be communications. It will be good communications between nations which will save nations; it which will be good communications between a nation’s citizens which will support the national effort as well as keeping the isolated sane.

I was listening to a Ted Talk yesterday with Gary Liu, CEO of the South China Morning Post, a news media organization that has reported on China and Asia for more than a century. SCMP’s mission is to ‘elevate thought’. A noble ideal indeed and one I fully subscribe to. 

The key elements that I drew from the illuminating discussion were these:-

• the THREE PHASE timescale of the disease progression in China and what steps were taken at each stage
• that TESTING, CONTACT TRACING, and ISOLATION are KEY to the control of the virus (witness how South Korea have achieved an admirable suppression and control of the original huge spike of the disease)
• that RAPID and DECISIVE action has to be taken by Governments from the very outset of the discovery of initial cases of infection
• that Southern Asia, and especially Hong Kong, had LEARNED MASSIVE LESSONS from the deadly SARS virus outbreak in 2002-2003 which allowed swifter understanding and control of the new virus.
• that COMMUNICATION is vital between Government and its people, and between Governments worldwide
• that SOCIETAL CHANGES will take place after the resolution of this pandemic.

(You can listen to this talk by clicking here. I highly recommend it.)

Looking back at how we, over here in Europe, have handled the situation we have not necessarily got it all right. But nor have we got it all wrong. I was disheartened to hear from a friend in France, how they think Britain are making such a bad fist of it. The first thing I would say is that each nation is unique. We have our own unique populations, demographics, geographies, politics, histories and cultural mindsets. We have our own unique set of problems to overcome. This really is not the time to be throwing stones at each other. In fact, au contraire (as the French would say). This is the time to share information and learn from each other’s mistakes and successes. ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ [Patrick Geddes - sociologist, biologist, geographer, innovative town planner and forefather of Green Politics] has never been a more appropriate catchphrase. 

A couple of weeks ago, ahead of British ‘lockdown’, I was driving to collect one of our daughters from university. I was listening to the radio and taking comfort from the presenter’s positive, encouraging tones while still acknowledging the fear and apprehension and hardship we were all facing. There were stories of celebrities like Chris Martin of Coldplay doing philanthropic things during their ‘unemployment’ and self-isolation like streaming live music sessions from their homes or bringing celebrity friends together to each sing a line of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. As one of the guests commented, creatives will always want to connect with people. It’s in their DNA. Out of this has come the hashtag TogetherAtHome from the charitable organization Global Citizen

Since then, this whole idea has exploded and we now have Gareth Malone doing the Great British Home Choir together with all the other choirs around the country doing similar ‘virtual’ rehearsals. People are setting up virtual coffee mornings, virtual pub quizzes, virtual meetings, virtual social gatherings over a drink - the list is endless and I’m sure it will get more and more creative as we continue through the long weeks of lockdown. It will be a new way of connecting, communicating and living - but all thanks to the rapid advances in modern communications technology. Strangely, it will become our norm.

Equally, many people are taking this new reality as a moment to reflect and, hopefully, to grow. This is the time that many never had in their busy, modern lives to connect, not just externally, but internally too. This is the moment to take a look inside yourself. Find your strengths, work on your weaknesses, expand your mind, come up with new business ideas, write that best-seller, read those books on your bookshelves, paint those pictures you always wanted to paint. Learn something new. Discard old habits. Get fit. It has been noted already that some of the greatest works of art in history were produced during times of plague and pestilence, in isolation behind closed doors. Notably, Shakespeare wrote his astonishingly powerful and moving tragedy, King Lear, during the bubonic plague years. At the heart of this otherwise extraordinarily bleak work is the examination of the truth within oneself and the redemptive powers of suffering - compassion, pity and consideration for others.

I was struck, as I drove across the high, wide-open spaces of those moors two weeks ago, by the irony of the situation: the very social media platforms that have played a large part in causing dysfunction in our current society (the angst of mentally fragile youth torturing themselves with the promoted, false glamour of other people’s lives through the likes of Facebook and Instagram; the suicide forums; the obsession with self and selfies; the cult of celebrity; the age of the Influencer etc etc) may now, in this current situation of social distancing and self-isolation, prove to regain momentum as the tools for togetherness which they were originally designed to be, rather than for isolation and division as they seemed to have become. The virtual world has become as real to us now as the real one once was - and finally, I dare to hope, we are really connecting. 

It is this same technology which is allowing us to stay connected in isolation which also allows us to learn, to ‘elevate thought’. The online courses and resources for self-education are at an absolute peak. There has never been a better moment to sit at home and improve your mind or learn new skills. As I learned from that same radio show I was listening to, Harry Styles is aiming to learn sign language and Italian. Suddenly the cult of celebrity seems to have been grounded with us mere mortals - and they are responding as the humans they really are. 

I have been saying for as long as I can remember that we needed something like another world war to shake us out of our complacency, our consumer-led desires, our conspicuous consumption - to have an urgently needed seismic shift in consciousness and behaviour. Obviously I didn’t really want a world war - that would be unthinkable and totally disastrous for humankind. While as awful as our current situation is - for some, of course, much more than for others - I am grateful at least that the ‘enemy’ has turned out to be something non-human. In a way it seems as if it is the universe’s best solution to the problems we are facing in the 21st century - those of social disintegration, terrorism, global warming, deforestation, war, rising sea levels, the poverty gap, the battle between eastern and western ideologies and religions. Frankly, the world is a mess and mass humanity, if it continues to embrace ignorance, denial, self-indulgence and lack of humility, is on a long-term path to self-destruction. 

At least by having to face, together, across the globe, the challenges of this pandemic, we are not having to fight each other. There will, of course, be many casualties in this war, which no-one wants to see - especially amongst the poorly equipped frontline troops of the NHS and beyond. Ironically, we will have been drawn together by this microscopic parasite, a stealthy, unseen enemy. With a new higher consciousness, with enlightenment, we can perhaps finally work together fully and properly and cohesively to try and heal the ills of collective humanity, to ensure the survival, across future millennia, of our planet - to truly appreciate what we have and our role in guarding it and nurturing it. For this to happen, we need to work on ourselves. We are the roots of the healthy societies which should grow out of us, each and every one of us a small but vital cog in the smooth running of the global machine.

Perhaps, when eventually we come, blinking, back out into the sunlight, when the worst of the storm has passed, we will have learned some lessons. Perhaps we will have learned to fully appreciate the freedoms which our forefathers fought and died for and build something more meaningful with those freedoms. Perhaps we will have learned the value of family. Perhaps we will have truly learned the meaning of Love Thy Neighbour. Perhaps we will be more community spirited, more aware of others less fortunate, more selfless and less self-obsessed, more concerned about the long-term not the short-term, with the meaningful rather than the superficial, with the very essence of our relationship with ourselves, with each other and with the planet we call home.

The human spirit has enormous powers of adaptation when challenged. We are facing one of the greatest challenges of our generation. Let’s not throw away that opportunity for positive change. Let’s live, and fundamentally learn, by our past mistakes. If we learn through this to love ourselves, love each other and love our planet, we might actually start to make some progress.

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