COVID19 – Exposure of Humanity’s Diversity in Decency and Degeneracy

Life’s Episodes: Most activities, events, and occurrences in our world of experience are characterized by episodic swings from periods of peaceful quietude to spikes of excessive, even frenzied activity. From the formation of the universe, the rise and fall of planets and stars, to the ecosystems of planets like Earth, to the moments in the temporally tiny span of human lives, we are astonished and often befuddled by the ebb and flow of actions, reactions and consequences. At times, events are so explosively disruptive, they exceed the capacity of even our wisest collective conscience to comprehend what is happening.  Such are our lives in this time of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID19 it conveys.

SARS-CoV-2, The Protagonist: There have been prior pandemics around the globe, including the now famously recalled 1918 Spanish influenza scourge, and the more recently memorable HIV-1 and SARS-CoV epidemics that have sizeably affected Canada. As well there are ongoing scourges, including tuberculosis, malaria, dengue fever, and other brutal organismic battles that microbes inevitably enter into with humans. However, SARS-CoV-2, the protagonist, and the weaponry that it brings in its attack on humans, is a formidable foe. The array of clinical syndromes that the virus produces across age groups and especially among the most vulnerable peoples is quite impressive. The virus is skilled at being the consummate parasite, preying on those least able to fight back for the ultimate kill, but also invoking clinical events that are less clearly explained like excessive blood clots across ages and surges in self-attacking immune responses in children. The consequences of these latter virus-induced processes are not as frequent as death in the elderly or in those with overall ill health in the mid-life, but they do cause much suffering and at times death too. This is the situation we face.

Memories of Attacks Fade: Life as we knew it before the end of January, 2020, was changed irrevocably by the insidious, relentless spread of COVID19 around the world. In Wuhan, then onwards to other cities, countries and continent, the virus brought its morbid and mortal signature. It truly gave our heads a shake. The virus and its sequelae reminded us how poor we are at remembering past experiences. Not until weeks into the battle did we harbour enough fear to intensify memory recall, or in fact, learning about this new adversary. Given the rolling waves of invasion that the virus employed as it clandestinely crossed geo-political boundaries, night and day, it is perhaps not surprising that we felt taken by surprise.  This series of surprise attacks caught us on our heels, not really ready, not believing.

Confusion and Confabulation in Communication: Being caught off-guard is understandable, but once the pestilence had emerged, the human race adapted very spottily and irregularly. Part of this failure to react with coordinated vigour to squelch the legions of virus related to the multitude of voices, the dyssynchrony of messages, the frailty of facts, and the uncharted mysteries of a novel human-pathogenic virus. The failure to plan for this pandemic, despite prior pandemics, and despite sage advice from virologists, epidemiologists, and public health officials resides significantly in failures in political leadership around the world. Failure to acknowledge the emergent threat has cost many lives. Indeed, throughout all of this cataclysm, we have variously been reminded how important the economy is, and, as a deflection, how many deaths occur from other causes.  We still are hearing how important the economy is to each country and to the world at large.  While no one can argue that a lot of what has built the world we know boils down to dollars and cents, the juxtaposition of dollars-lost with lives-lost, smacks of inhumanity, injustice, inequality and even criminal messaging.  The virus decided to jump to humans at a bad time in the global communications environment, one in which messaging can rapidly ad repeatedly confuse innocent bystanders.

The collision of a deadly virus with a post-truth world, one in which money speaks too loudly and compassion speaks too softly, has wreaked havoc on those exposed citizens who work in transit services, law enforcement, firefighting, as essential home product supplies, and more. Our healthcare workers, including the custodial staff and others less evident than nurses, physicians, and technicians, have taken a beating. The right equipment has rarely been at hand.  Strange deals have been made to get supplies that are necessary, a number of which yielded no supplies or faulty supplies.  Testing for the virus is all over the map, even to this very day – variable quality, variable availability, variable policy of implementation, variable interpretation, and so forth. We don’t really know who is infected, how many have been infected, nor how many are infectious. The door of opportunity has opened for several scams and the hackers of the world have rallied to their golden egg of electronic communications to reach into more private data sets than usual.

Crucial Leadership: I hold leaders responsible for what has been a haphazard effort during this pandemic. Political leaders have been too worried about election or re-election, not able to make decisions in the interests of the public’s well-being. Opposition, like the leaders, are too focused on ideology and not enough on principles. They are too worried about the economy to protect social and economically vulnerable workers in the meat and fossil fuels industries; too worried about job losses than life losses. Genuine leadership requires integrity: selfless, humanistic, thoughtful, fair, substantive and consistent leadership. Too often through this crisis, on a global scale we have seen deceit, dishonesty, degeneracy.  To lead requires enough humility to listen, grow one’s ears and rest one’s voice. It demands advisement by experts, working in syncopated harmony, in an “action-room” where the lights burn 24 hours a day. Leadership needs avenues for correspondence and communication of truths, of real issues, and strategies for winning the fight. This means, of course, that the relationship to a reliable public press and media core is never more critical than when such crisis is upon us all as a global village. Leadership means making sure that corporate partners in building technologies are of high integrity and high skill. In Canada, we have been quite fortunate that despite having a very fragmentary healthcare “system” with certain critical gaps for the elderly, we have had great advisement by wise scholars and practitioners.  And our leaders have mostly listened well and acted accordingly.  Others peoples internationally have not been so lucky.

Learning for the Next Wave: As we push forward, gradually beating back the first wave of attack by SARS-CoV-2, we must be persistent, vigilant and cooperative in our commitment to save lives, save health care, save the economy, protect human decency and quell the obtuse voices. Together new understanding will emerge, new effective therapeutics will arise, a vaccine will come. We will have grown. We should be stronger. The temporal lobes must keep memories of these times, not to make us afraid or sad, but to allow us the informed courage to fight again when another attack sweeps in upon us.