Coronavirus and Mother Earth

In my late teens I faced a terrible flooding in my homeland, and there, surrounded by nothing but endless water, I learned a lesson that never fight nature. In the end nature will always have its final say. It was a lesson pretty much lost on me for most of my years till the past couple of decades. The 'noise' of global warming and the melting ice packs and the decimation of many of our animal and plant life made one think that we are perhaps not kind to Mother Earth.

Conspiracy theories aside, there is little denying that we as the human race has disrespected the very earth that has nurtured us and provided for us. We have dumped chemicals in the rivers, garbage in the seas, carbon dioxide in the air, wiped out the rain forests and done it all in one sweeping slogan for the well being of only our own kind. We ignored scientists when we were told much of what we are doing could well be irreversible, we assume that the seas bounties would never diminish and water will clean itself of the pollution we have imposed upon it.

Now after almost 20 days of an world lockdown caused by the coronavirus we need to pause and think if its more deeper and important message.

Covid 19, the deadly strain of the coronavirus, has crippled the world like no other plague, natural or man made disaster or calamity could do so. Airlines are grounded, businesses are closed, people around the globe are in lockdown, sporting events suspended and the economic impact of this virus will run into trillions of dollars. Indeed in terms of its mortality rate it is less dangerous, thus far, than the flu or the ebola virus. However its ability to spread silently across the world, at times dormant, with a speed that is frightening suggests that this virus has perhaps effected more people than we currently have tested.

One has to wonder if this is not Mother Earth's way of telling us that it needs to breathe again. To remind us just as hard as it is to breathe when inflicted by this virus the Earth too has found it difficult to breathe for a good 100 years. There are no ventilators the for the earth to use, no ICUs and no hand sanitizers to wash off the germs of man's greedy exploitation of the Earth. For almost a month now the planes are not dumping the CO2 in the atmosphere, and cars and trains are less numbers, allowing the streets to breathe again. Look up into the sky now and the smog is much less and you can see the majesty of the sky at night, if only we can take this message from nature and remember is for centuries ahead.

It would seem however, the fight against this virus is far from over. Yes some countries have made notable progress in their actions, (China and South Korea) and countries who have acted fast and decisively have not had a mushrooming of cases (UAE, Germany, France among some others) and those who have acted late will perhaps witness the worse still to come (USA, and UK). Then there is a whole host of nations in Africa and Asia where the testing facilities are simply not in place so we really do not know the extent and scale of the virus' presence in these countries. Added to the fact that we have seen countries with fairly well developed health care systems struggle under the enormity of this pandemic, Italy, UK, USA, one shudders to think how countries will weak medical care facilities and little or no infrastructure, like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc will cope should this virus spread widely in these countries.

On the medium term outlook we do not know enough of the virus not to be sure that even where there has been success in combating it, like in China, there will not be second wave of infections down the road. The vaccine to combat this virus is far from ready and even on a fast track it will not be before the year end that we could see a vaccine emerge. What this means is that the COVID 19 virus will be part of our lives for quite a few months and we should adjust our lifestyle to be safe rather than sorry. It might give us pause to reflect whether this is not Mother Earths was of getting back to us.