Picturing life after COVID-19 pandemic subsides, including the consequences of present-day actions on our future.
Three months ago, SARS-CoV-2 was a thought none of us were even familiar with. As individuals, communities and countries – we were battling too many other forces of disruption already, in India itself; widespread protests against Citizenship AA-NRC were being endowed nationwide to save the fabric of democracy. In hindsight, all of that seems like a prologue to what feels now is an apocalypse we only read and saw on cinema screens – as a form of entertainment. Oh, how the tables turn.
Covid-19 has crashed economies, broken healthcare systems, and devastated the lives of the working class. Modern society has been disrupted on a scale most of the living people today have never witnessed. We’re living in historic times – something that will so profoundly shape our future from now that we won’t even have time to process what our ‘normal’ past felt like.
According to The Atlantic, all children who’ll be born into a world forever altered by Covid-19 should henceforth be referred to as Generation C. In a post coronavirus world, which in itself is still a luxury to imagine (there is no cure or vaccine for the virus, as of today); our relationship with the digital world will be tremendously interrelated.
If the current round of social distancing measures work, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. But as the status quo of chaos returns, so could the virus. Stephen Kissler of Harvard said, “We need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing.” There’s a greater threat of recovered survivors of Covid-19 being stigmatized by society, a pattern familiar in history with survivors of Ebola, HIV and SARS. There is also a mental health pandemic running unchecked, one with increasing chances of proving fatal due to dearth of community mobilization in these times – isolation, especially in a toxic environment, is dangerous for those who suffer from mental illnesses.
“Over the coming weeks, much will be at stake collectively, and for some of us also individually. Today, uncertainty about what the post-pandemic world will look like is rife, but we do know it will be built upon the words and deeds we choose now”, writes Javier Solana
Feature Image Credits: Joan Wong for The Atlantic
Paridhi Puri
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