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My wife and I used to watch Governor Phil Murphy’s press briefing on coronavirus every noon in the beginning weeks of the pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, she even used to keep a daily record of new positive cases of the virus and confirmed virus-related deaths not just in New Jersey but also in the township and the county where we live.
Historic Smithville NJ, minus its touristic hustle and bustle, May 27, 2020
The first COVID-19-linked death in New Jersey occurred on March 10. The number of fatalities reported every day reached around 70 by the end of March and tripled within a week. By mid-April, more than 3,500 people died as a result of coronavirus in the small state of around nine million residents. It was around that time we stopped watching the official daily press briefing, weighing that there are more bleak weeks ahead for the state and its residents and that it would be better to use our lunchtime watching something worthy of entertainment rather than a similar sad narrative of deaths and pestilence every noon.
At the time of this writing, a total of 14,046 lives have been lost to coronavirus, with more than 185,000 positive cases of infections reported, in New Jersey alone.
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The spring came and passed off without the world noticing it. The winter earlier this year was relatively less harsh, with the tri-state area – New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut – receiving much less snow than usual and making way for spring to quietly camp in. It was not just the appearance of the first bout of leaves on trees, the first crocuses peeking through the snow, and other signs of spring bloom being imminent, but the wholesomeness of spring as a season that we missed.
Meeting Ln, Evesham Township, NJ. March 19, 2020, the spring equinox.
By the time spring arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, coronavirus had America firmly in its grip. What followed spring was the furnace of summer, by then around five million Americans would be infected with the virus and one hundred and sixty thousands dead.
While the rest of the world has been on pause, daily life, in general, in America has not been hit as much as in other countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, where it is easier for governments to implement drastic movement restrictions for the public.
The number of infections and deaths has drastically decreased in New Jersey and neighboring New York but is rapidly swelling in much of the United States. With multidimensional losses, incurred by coronavirus, that fundamentally changed our lives, we are left to speculate when the virus is going to end. Will it be gone by the fall? Or maybe by the winter? Based on various current projections, there will likely be around three hundred thousand people dead because of the virus by the end of this year.
A sense of uncertainty pervades, with so much unclear.
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“Actually, it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-August, the plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.”
~ Albert Camus, The Plague
I started reading Camus’ The Plague (La Peste, in French) in April, a few weeks into when New Jersey and New York, the erstwhile epicenter of coronavirus in the United States, were in the grip of coronavirus. The novel - set in Oran, French Algeria, in the 1940s, presenting Camus’ distinguishing absurdist point of view, seemed vehemently relevant even after eight decades. Every city in the world today is Oran, every country is Oran, the entire world is Oran.
Reading The Plague helps us understand that suffering is often not an individual difficulty but a shared experience, and that we should acknowledge the universality of suffering and turn it into something affirmative. In times like COVID-19 pandemic, suffering is universal, as Camus says in his book, “Everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune.”
The powerlessness of individual characters to control their destinies is the essence of absurdism. Camus advocated that identifying and understanding the absurdity of life should not lead us to hopelessness but to redemption, which aids us to soften our hearts and moralize thankfulness and joy.
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Aside from human death toll, the economy has been the biggest casualty claimed by coronavirus.
The financial impact of the closure of local and transnational businesses, as well as of countries’ borders, has been immense. Most acutely felt is unemployment: labor statistics suggest more than thirty-three million Americans, out of total three hundred and thirty million people, have filed for unemployment benefits in recent weeks. In April, the unemployment rate in the United State rose to 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Ocean City boardwalk, NJ. May 16, 2020; beaches reopen after weeks of closure.
The system is built to make capitalism work. If you have money, the system helps you make more money. If one is broke, there are only limited ways in which one can find means to survive on, and the situation has exacerbated these days due to coronavirus.
Economists have also been calling it “a homelessness pandemic” given the grim estimation that around thirty million people in the United States are at risk of home evictions and foreclosures as a result of financial hardships triggered by the virus.
The economic situation is far bleaker in other parts of the world. A World Bank report published last week indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing between seventy-one and one hundred million people into extreme poverty.
The World Bank forecasts around 5.2% contraction in global GDP in 2020.
India, where several weeks of a historic and the world’s most stringent lockdown imposed by the government virtually shut the country’s economy, is one of the worst-hit countries by the virus. International Labor Organization projects that around 400 million people in India risk falling into poverty. The economic forecast for other developing economies, such as South Africa and Nigeria, and relatively poorer Sub-Saharan African countries look similarly dismal. Gulf nations are experiencing their worst economic crisis in history due to the double shock of plummeting oil prices and COVID-19. In Europe, where the UK, Spain, France, and Italy have been hit hard by the virus, many countries’ economies will need to be aided by rescue and recovery packages by international agencies and the European Union.
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Despite all the pessimism surrounding coronavirus, there are ways in which we can all be positive and see some silver linings in the global crisis. What used to be a luxury hard-earned in days prior to COVID-19, family time is plentiful these days as people stay home and work from home during the pestilence.
As stated by Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, “When society is facing a tremendous challenge or there’s a big uptick in suffering, people orient themselves in a less self-centered way and in a more family-centric way.”
My wife and I stopped sending our infant daughter to the daycare in late March, and that meant all of us would be staying home together for a few months to come.
Letter for my infant daughter from her teachers at the daycare
The baby, who will be ten months old in two weeks, has since gone through several development stages, witnessing which have been a sheer parental delight: rolling over, babbling, sitting up, giggling, teething, crawling, standing up on her own and cruising a few steps while holding onto furniture or someone’s hand, stringing words together and say “ma-ma”, “da-da”, “pa-pa”, and “ba-ba”. The baby’s absence from the daycare for a few months also allowed her to spend a great deal of time with her grandparents - my wife’s parents - and give us all opportunities to cultivate family togetherness.
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They say there will be vaccines for the virus available by the end of this year or early next year. In an unprecedented effort, the United States has launched Operation Warp Speed that will help a large-scale public-private partnership to come up with vaccines for coronavirus in record time. Similar efforts are under way in other developed economies, including the United Kingdom and Germany.
We have vaccines for many infectious diseases – polio, hepatitis, diphtheria, rotavirus, influenza, varicella, et al. I often wonder how many of them have actually been eradicated. While vaccines will greatly reduce the coronavirus disease and ease the burden on hospitals swamped with coronavirus patients, there are fears and speculations by biologists and scientists that the virus will actually never go away.
The virus outbreaks will persist and the disease will emerge or reemerge, here and there. We will likely be living with this virus for the rest of our lives, as Albert Camus sums up in the final passage of The Plague:
“And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux [the central character of the book] remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
Human’s struggle against suffering is everlasting. This shared struggle - and shared humanity - is what kindles our acceptance in the value of optimism in times of hopelessness, and serves as an essential ingredient for a successful society.
