I started to pay attention on 2020-03-11 when the WHO announced it as a global threat or something like that. Being curious, and wanting to understand more, I started reaching out to the different resources to learn more about it.
At first it was a worrying, then scary illness. The more I read about it, the more I realized that it’s not much different from the seasonal heavy flu.
Little by little I quit worrying about it as an illness, but my growing worry now is what’s happening with the world socially, economically, and politically.
Socially, many people are growing more self-conscious. What I’ve learned all my life is that the ego ruins everything*. The capitalistic system that prevailed over the last few decades has amplified the ego of the people living under it**. This is what gives the characteristic greed and carelessness for others that’s prevalent in ‘the western’ culture. This virus scare is causing people to cluster more and grow more self-aware and even more self-centered.
Economically, countries stopping almost all commercial business, schools, and entertainment venues indefinitely are causing their citizens immeasurable damage, at least short-term. But there are also long-term damages. Some businesses will eventually fail and shut down. Employees will be laid off, and the general spending of the average person will drop, which will further affect the rest of the businesses. The rich will have higher chance for surviving. The middle-class and the poor will start to sell some of their properties in order to be able to meet the minimum necessities. The rich will buy them, and when the government decides it is time to open up again, we will have more fortune concentrated in the hands of the rich, causing more polarity in the social classes.
Eventually, there will be more people unable to get their daily bread than before.
The Public Health: When most of the nation is just staying at home, people grow bored then depressed and start doing harmful behaviors. They start eating, watching TV, and/or playing video games for long hours. Bad life style and no exercise will cause more damage on the long run.
Another point is about the illnesses that will be left untreated for two reasons:
1) The medical facilities stopped receiving anything not considered “urgent”.
2) The people’s having less money means they will be less tending to spend on a medical checkup.
For these two points many life-threatening illnesses will be left unchecked and untreated (e.g. cancer in an early stage), which eventually will mean higher treatment costs, or even higher death rates.
Politically, the power map will certainly change, because money is power. The countries imposing a lock-down will suffer great losses. While these losses won’t be of the kind that will take a country down, they’re still powerful enough to cause some tipping in scales. Some nations will find themselves now stronger than a formerly-stronger nation. China seems to be a prominent potential winner from this situation; they are recovering before other nations, and they will soon be starting the production of medical gear (gloves, masks, equipment) and selling them world wide. I’m not keen in economics nor trade, but this seems to me like a HUGE business deal.
On the other hand, perhaps some politicians actually found out and realized that the contingency measures are not warranted, yet the governments couldn’t just call off everything because they need to show to their people that they care. If the government says don’t believe what you’re seeing on TV from all around the world, the people will go crazy and decide that the government is murdering them, so perhaps this is one reason why the politicians will be forced to just go along and pretend like there’s something scary that we must be afraid of and take measures to fight it.
Statistically, there’s clearly a fear factor playing a part, advocated by the media. TVs around the world are producing Corona news like crazy, saturating every channel with Corona topics. A simple look at the statistics shows that number of deaths caused by COVID-19 is less than 1 person per 1000 in the worst affected nations. I wouldn’t call a maximum of 0.1% casualties a pandemic that requires strict lock-downs. It is something that we need to be alert about and act fast to resolve it somehow, but it does not amount to the degree of a national and international emergency.
In the country where I live, people are generally superstitious and careless. They say that god is protecting this country and no harm will be done, then they go on with their lives casually. With a nation of such mentality, the fatality rate is about 2 per 10,000. Does this call for a case of a nation-wide emergency?
A point can be brought forward saying that without the lock-down and other measures we would have been seeing worse rates. My answer is that I have seen with my own eyes how careless people are as they go on top of each other at the grocers, and this is in a major city where the contingency measures were being monitored and applied as hard as possible. Also there are countries that chose not to do a lock-down, and resorted to educating the people to protect themselves and others. Was the situation worse there? Knowing about the human nature, I am sure most (almost all) of the people didn’t take proper protection measures.
Personally, I don’t feel good about what’s happening. This lock-down is not doing us any more good than otherwise. There’s no way such a virus spread can be stopped in this interconnected world. The only way to overcome this is by having herd immunity, and the sooner we get there, the better. It is clear that closing things up is not working, for the points mentioned above, and for what’s clear from the statistics of spreading.
The changes we’re witnessing today are just a tip of an iceberg. The repercussions will come in the near or far future, and I don’t expect them to be anything nice.
This reminds me of how I was watching the World Trade Center towers of New York getting destroyed on TV, not realizing how this event will have a major effect on my life 10 years later. So, after all, perhaps this Corona thing is all broadly planned, and somehow the governments all bought into it, or were forced to act to it in a certain manner, somehow. Time will tell.
Footnotes:
* The book “A New Earth“
** The book “Selfie“