Pandemic Journal-II

Stories bring us together in turbulent times. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact lives globally, every individual and every nation has its own narrative of how they endured. How China used its authoritarian power to control the virus. How older Europeans were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, with the majority of all deaths in Spain, for example, being those individuals aged 70 years and above. How hardships prompted by the pandemic forced thousands of women and transgender women into sex work in Mexico.     

In India, a series of draconian lockdowns imposed by the government at the beginning of the pandemic brought the rate of infection down, but only temporarily, and the cost of it was horrific on the country’s economy. With an almost entirely absent public health system there, the country descended into “COVID hell,” as hospitals ran out of oxygen cylinders for ill patients and dead bodies began piling up in morgues and crematoriums and often along river shores. Public health experts and international media estimate the number of COVID-19-related deaths during the pandemic in India could be around four-five million -- more than ten times the death toll of approximately 475,000 people reported by the Indian government.          

In Kenya, schools closed, and thousands of children went to work, many as prostitutes. As an investigation by Reuters reveals, COVID-19 unleashed “shadow pandemics” on girls in Africa. “With families unable to earn in lockdown, girls are married for a dowry or engage in transactional sex, exploited by neighbors, drivers or other locals – just to buy food.”  

Voorhees, NJ, winter 2020

In the United States, the death toll from COVID-19 has now soared above 800,000, which is more than half the population of Philadelphia, as well as the number of Americans who died of cancer in 2019. A continuing, wide-scale vaccination to counter the disease dramatically brought down infections and fatalities and helped the country to shed the virus gloom and at least enjoy a somewhat close-to-normal summer and fall this year.   

New variants of the virus continue to occur globally, with some spreading more easily than others, some being more severe than others and responding differently to treatments. Viruses, in some ways, are like us. They evolve over time, become stronger, and undergo various changes in their lives.  

The pandemic is far from being over yet. 

***

Orange day-lily, summer 2021

Psychologist Lawrence Kutner says toddlerhood is like a musical fugue in which “the themes of intellectual, physical, emotional, and social development intertwine.” The best thing that babies teach us is that the fundamentals of our lives are simple: laughter, cuddles, intimacy, learning, friendships, and spending time with a set of people who are nice to us. They are therapeutic and corrective at times, teaching us that they don’t care how fancy their birthday parties are going to be, how expensive the car we drive is, or even how expensive car seats or strollers we buy for them. 

Brimming with confidence, kids are eager to learn. As a parent, we seem to have learned a great deal about parenting since the child was born. But as confident as we become, thinking that we are really getting a hold of this parenting thing, something would happen every day to remind us that there is still a lot more to learn. How do you pacify a two-year-old baby throwing a tantrum and going boneless? How do you tell the baby to use gentle hands while petting the dogs and not throwing things on them because they are living beings and not animated, playful objects? How do you make her understand that putting her hand inside her friends’ mouth at the daycare [and getting bit] is not what she should be doing? How do you tell her how funny it is to demand to watch the same nursery rhymes and the same kids TV show every day for months?      

A positive consequence of the pandemic has been to allow families to spend more time together amid a slowdown in daily life (conversely, this has also led to a significant rise in divorce and break-up rates globally). My daughter and I created our own chores and rituals: taking the dogs to our house backyard, helping me feed the dogs, letting her help make myself espresso every morning, long drives over weekends, daily drive to her daycare, making her fruit smoothie and popsicles on occasions.          

Parenting is hard, very hard, but closely witnessing tremendous social, emotional, and intellectual changes that a toddler goes through after advancing from infancy is parenthood filled with transcendent moments.    

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Keswick, VA, summer 2021 

Winding through Albemarle and Orange counties on Route 231 in Virginia this summer, when we finally managed to see and spend a few days with my wife’s grandparents in Keswick, was as much as a driving delight as the Pine Barrens, the largest Atlantic coastal pine barrens, close to the home in South Jersey. The drive to/through Keswick via Route 231, a two-lane country road, is one of the most scenic in America. As you drive, the scenic views alternate between enclosures of leafy green tree canopies and the sun-lit pastures of horse and sheep farms. I was reading in an article in the New York Times that very little has changed in the town since a century ago. Sitting in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a few miles east of Charlottesville, the region is soaked in early American history, with much of the areas having been the site of plantations in Colonial days.             

The areas around Chatsworth in Woodland Township of Burlington County in New Jersey are full of ghost towns housing ramshackle factories from industries no longer surviving. Nestling in the Pine Barrens, they are prime examples of a Garden State industry that is still thriving — cranberry farming. A drive on Route 563 offers one-of-a-kind views of red masses bobbing on flat bogs. In normal times, there is an annual cranberry festival, one of the best and most interesting festivals in the Mid Atlantic, every fall. With hundreds of vendors, festival foods, live entertainment, an antique car show, and tens of thousands of visitors, the event is sort of a tribute to the Pine Barrens and local culture. The festival remains canceled for the last two years due to the pandemic.   

Not by traveling to some foreign lands – as we had hoped we would do last year and this year, but we did build some memories during our road trips that we took, on occasions, to see our family members, as well as during weekends with the baby and the dogs.      

***

An article published in the Harvard Gazette earlier this year points to the ongoing pandemic pushing mental health to the breaking point, with the young adults and the children being the most impacted and the effects likely being long-lasting. Prior to the pandemic, one in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness; the number is now two in five. Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard Chan School, says, “it will be months, if not years before we are fully able to grasp the scope of the mental health issues born out of this pandemic. Long after we’ve gained control of the virus, the mental health repercussions will likely continue to reverberate.”

Harper and Lizzie-I, summer 2020

Pandemic fatigue is real. So real. The World Health Organization describes the fatigue as “demotivated and exhausted with the demands of life” during the pandemic. And it affects us in so many unique, different ways. And one of the worst impacts of it is to lose boundaries of things we do every day. The boundaries vanish as we switch between dozens of tabs on our computers and mobile phones, streaming TV shows and podcasts, shopping online, responding to work emails, and attending daily household chores. The average American in 2018 spent more than 200 hours commuting. However, during the pandemic, as more people are working from home, they have been working three hours more daily than they did before. 

In a feature article titled “Living With Depression and Anxiety During a Global Pandemic” in the 5280 – a city magazine based in Denver, Colorado – Geoff Van Dyke, the editorial director of the magazine and the writer of the article, aptly sums up the pandemic fatigue, emotional exhaustion and the stress and monotony of staying home:  

“The darkness comes at night, or in the morning, or sometimes the late afternoon, in that liminal time between daytime and nighttime. It doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care that I have work to finish or that I should wash the dishes stacked in the sink or that I need to check in on how my two boys’ distance-learning schoolwork is going. It doesn’t care that, after seven months of mostly staying at home, I have already been examining the uglier recesses of my psyche.”

*** 

It is unlikely that the world after the pandemic will return to the world we saw prior to the pandemic. Numerous trends, with far-reaching consequences, impacting individuals, societies, and countries, are already under way, and one of the most notables is how the health crisis has changed businesses across the globe. 

The disruption led by the pandemic has wiped billions of dollars off the auto industry’s profits. Indoor dining in restaurants will likely not return to normal levels for at least a few years. COVID-19 has rapidly accelerated the growth of digital healthcare. In the education sector, while remote/online learning boomed during the pandemic, it has also augmented existing challenges related to inequalities, inclusion, and drop-out rates.

Pro-Trump graffiti, Route 70, NJ. Presidential election, December 2020

There are geopolitical implications involved as well. Ian Bremmer, an American author and political scientist, says that Coronavirus has accelerated three of the key geopolitical trends that will shape our next world order: deglobalization, the inevitable growth of nationalism and “my nation first” politics, and China’s geopolitical rise.    

***     

In a New Yorker article titled “Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?” published earlier in 2021, the writer John Seabrook asks an existential question: “What’s an office for? Is it a place for newbies to learn from experienced colleagues? A way for bosses to oversee shirkers? A platform for collaboration? A source of friends and social life? A respite from the family? A reason to leave the house? It turns out that work, which is what the office was supposed to be for, is possible to do from somewhere else.”   

It took a few decades and a spate of quiet revolutions to change the way offices are used – stamping out hierarchies of cubicles and walls and building them into team-based, open-plan layouts. However, technological advancements in office communications that brought in digital tools, such as emails, cloud computing systems, virtual team meetings, and video conferencing, which co-existed with offices in normal times, found a way to reach their prime exactly when the pandemic began, making a worker’s presence in offices less essential. 

While it’s true that digital technology cannot be a substitute for human connection, it’s also true that since the beginning of the pandemic millions of Americans have moved out of major cities and will likely not go back to offices. While companies, managers, and workers continue to struggle to figure out and reimagine what post-COVID-19 offices will look like, it appears that the pandemic may have already quickened the demise of offices. 

***

Choices made by individuals, societies, and nations during major crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have the potential to shape the world for generations to come. What is critically important is us taking collective action to build societies and economies that bring inclusive and sustainable growth and prosperity for all.

Pandemic Journal

One way of telling the story of our daily lives in the coronavirus pandemic is to overlook any sense of normalcy and record everything that is missing or is in disarray: in-person meetings, driving to work, sitting next to colleagues in the office, going out without carrying face masks, dining out, gym, and plans to take my infant daughter to swimming lessons this summer, travel to Virginia and Connecticut to see my wife’s families, planning a family trip to Iceland this fall, and so on.

*

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.

*

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.

*

“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.

*

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.

*

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.

* 

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.

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Ethics in Time of Pandemic

There is a constant, unpredictable and everlasting warfare between humans and bacterium. This war occurs not just between human and bug, but actually also engages every living thing on earth, with each of us in a perpetual state of combat against countless bacteria, parasites and viruses.

In his new book, “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” the historian Frank M. Snowden explores the effect of epidemic diseases and how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped our societies. Mass outbreak of diseases – such as smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola – have not only influenced public health and medical science, but also transformed the history, warfare, arts, personal relationships and religion.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Snowden says, “epidemics like the coronavirus outbreak are a mirror for humanity, reflecting the moral relationships that people have toward one other.”

The Plague in Rome, 17th century. Museo Storico Nazionale Dell'Arte Sanitaria, Rome.

A pandemic raises several challenging ethical issues. According to The World Health Organization, these include: priority of access to healthcare resources with increased demand and possible shortages; obligations of healthcare workers in light of risks to their own health; and the fine balance between reducing disease spread through isolation and travel measures whilst protecting the right of individuals to freedom of movement.

As the US and large swathes of the world reel under the onslaught of the unabated COVID-19 pandemic since weeks, it reveals profound doubts about our preparedness for the next generation of diseases. It’s essential, and never late, to reflect on ethical concerns related to the planning, preparedness, and responses to pandemics.

Some of the vital steps that public health experts suggest we can take in order to respond to a pandemic include maintaining a focus on public health strategies that could be helpful in controlling the infection, providing affected countries with necessary infrastructure support, acting fast to treat infections and reduce their speed, and reviewing scientific and ethical standards for clinical trials for drugs and vaccines.

Equally important, but the hardest, step is to analytically examine the economic and sociopolitical conditions that create the circumstances for such disease outbreaks occur. 
             

Unless we face these structural problems and honestly consider and implement effective policies and strategies, the global problems such as coronavirus will be boundlessly repeated.

Lessons from a pandemic are instructive, but only if we are willing to learn from them.