#479: After Covid19, “normal” is not good enough

This moment tries our patience, our courage, and our hope. But that does not mean we should yearn to return to what we had. Instead, we should imagine something better and safer.

When Jesus called Lazarus from his grave, it was just a temporary return to his normal life. Lazarus would still die a natural death, only some time later. But for Christians observing the Easter season, the resurrection of Christ is something different.  The resurrection is proof that love can conquer death itself. The resurrection brings, not just an extension of life, but an altogether new life beyond death--what Benedict XVI called “an evolutionary leap.”

Like the doubting Thomas of last week’s gospel, we naturally seek certainty—and right now, there is very little certainty about what life beyond Covid19 will be like. But just last week Pope Francis proposed Un plan para resucitar (“A plan for rising up again”) and suggested that,  even if the shape of things to come is uncertain, we should imagine the aftermath of this crisis as a creative leap:

That aftermath has already begun to be revealed as tragic and painful, which is why we must be thinking about it now. I’m living this as a time of great uncertainty. It’s a time for inventing, for creativity. The creativity of the Christian needs to show forth in opening up new horizons, opening windows, opening transcendence toward God and toward people…save yourself for better times, for in those times remembering what has happened will help us.

If we are smart, life after pandemic will not be the same, but will bring a “New Normal.” Indeed, Francis argues that our response so far proves we can shape our future life:

If the health authorities order that we remain confined in our home, it is the people who make this possible, aware of their co-responsibility in stopping the pandemic.”

We’ve seen this in so many small acts of solidarity: people delivering food, making masks, sharing stories, beautiful images, gallows humor, and “meeting” online, inventing things to do together at home, honoring front line workers, and donating to those needing help.

Thus in the very act of cooperating to “flatten the curve,” Francis says, “We have recognized the importance of joining the entire human family in the search for a sustainable and integral development.” And we have also understood that “for better or worse all our actions affect others because everything is connected in our common home. An emergency like Covid-19 is overcome in the first place by the antibodies of solidarity.”

I believe Francis is right: to protect the future health of our people and our planet, to rise again, the best “antibody” is solidarity itself. But that means we must learn and implement at least four main lessons.

Lesson #1: We must dismiss the denials and doubletalk.  For the last month I’ve been debating online with folks in denial. They asserted that Covid19 is no worse than the flu, that shut down orders are the overreaching, “draconian” measures of an authoritarian state, that people’s rights and even free will are being violated.

My wife and others advise me against debating deniers as a waste of time.  But in this crisis the deniers are dangerous people, exposing others and risking the overburdened healthcare workers.  I figured it was worth a try. 

And some people actually looked at facts and listened to reason. When one Facebook commenter suggested that those protesting shutdowns were merely exercising free will, I said:

Yes, but free will should take account of the common good....it's why no rights are absolute. If I test positive, does my free will allow me to infect as many others as possible? True public safety (eg traffic lights) and public health (eg rules against dumping toxic materials) will always cause limits to individual free will. These limits are the dues we pay to live in civilization.

Happily, my comment got a favorable response, and we found common ground. But most of my debating has been futile.  Some people have fixed opinions that no facts dent.  Others kept arguing around the facts, acting so desperate for “normalcy” they simply resorted to magical thinking. 

In the future, we must sideline such deniers quickly; they contribute nothing to shaping our new future.  We must challenge their “alternative” reality, and then distance them if they persist.  If they are office holders, we must dismiss them from office. We cannot trust our lives to those who cannot face reality, to leaders who pass the buck or waste our time playing blame games.  We cannot follow those whose fragile egos resort to settling scores.  If 10% of Americans reject social distancing and refuse to stay at home, we must shun them. The virus is more powerful than politics, and deaths don’t lie.  We have no vaccine for incurable stupidity; we can only quarantine it.

Lesson #2: We must fix what’s broken:

The virus has exposed many fissures in American Life. 

·   We have no universal health system to collect nationwide data or track infections.

·     We have no federal structure to mobilize a pandemic plan or response. 

·     Millions of Americans lost health benefits when they lost their jobs, exposing our mistake of tying health care to employment.

·      Many other Americans have no health coverage at all.

·     The virus hit minorities and poor people, who are less able to social distance and stay at home or work or study remotely, and because they’re less able to lose income and still pay their bills.

·     Millions of homeless are marooned without safe haven, and millions of elders have suffered as senior care facilities became super spreaders.

·     We find US federalism too creaky to respond as fast as the virus spread, with federal officials claiming either too little responsibility or too much authority, while state officials pushed a patchwork of policies that reflected local politics more than public health.

Our new normal will need to be better than what came before.  We will need to tackle the dire legacy of our 50-year growing wealth gap.  We’ll need yet again to ask what holds back the people of color, and what to do about it.  We’ll need to find the homeless homes, and guarantee health coverage to all, and make nursing homes truly safe.  We’ll need a national agency to coordinate public health policies at all levels.

Even without a new pandemic on the horizon, we have a lot of work ahead do. But there will be a new pandemic on the horizon.

Lesson #3: We won’t get fooled again.  Anyone who says we could not see this coming is DEAD WRONG.  After Sars in 2003 many scientists predicted the inevitability of more deadly epidemics, and Bill Gates’ 2015 Ted talk described our own coming pandemic in graphic terms that now seem all too familiar: (https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready)

Yet no major leader called to rebuild our public health structures or to establish a national pandemic response plan. And Covid19 caught us unprepared.

Consider, by contrast, the best practices of countries that have suffered less, like South Korea, Germany, Iceland, and especially Taiwan. With 30 million people just off China’s coast, Taiwan (the world’s 9th densest country) figured to be Covid19’s second global hot spot. But Taiwan prepared for pandemic after widespread Sars deaths in 2003, and its universal health system kicked their epidemic plan into full gear. On December 31 they began screening passengers on board arriving airplanes, isolating anyone testing positive or revealing sick contacts, and tracking their previous contacts. Every new case of respiratory disease showed up in their national health systems database.  Quick isolation and contact tracing stopped the virus before it spread, and made “stay at home” orders unnecessary. Everything stayed open, yet Taiwan has only 6 confirmed deaths--the equivalent of 72 U.S. deaths, while the U.S. itself at this writing has more than 55,000 deaths and still counting.

Next time--and there will be a next time--we must be prepared.  Our old standards are not good enough.  The 1918 “Spanish Flu” spread because infected WWI soldiers returned on troop ships to their native lands.  Those trips took days or even weeks, but today continents are only hours apart.  Our modern global village leaves no time to prepare for an infection that spreads this fast.  We must be prepared with all the systems and equipment already in place, or when the next “early warning” comes, it will already be too late.

We were fooled this time. We paid a gruesome price.  We simply cannot get fooled again.  This is true not just for the next pandemic, but for other threats we can see coming.  And the biggest threat, by far, is climate change.

Lesson #4: We must avoid the fate of the frog.  We know the fable of the frog in the lily pond who boils to death because the pond is heated one-degree-per-day, too gradual for him to notice until it’s too late.  Our terrestrial lily pond is also heating, but too many people refuse to notice.

As with pandemic, we have ample warning about climate change.  Both are natural disasters we’ve failed to  prepare for. But there are two differences.  First, the threat of climate change--making large regions of the earth uninhabitable for billions of people--is much worse.  Second, the impact of climate takes not weeks but years. Whereas nations mobilized once Covid19 suddenly started killing people, the deaths from climate change seem slow enough to ignore.  Until we begin to boil.

Both my son Chris and Pope Francis have described Covid19 as mother nature’s wake up call, warning us to take better care of what Francis calls “our common home,” the planet. I suspect they are right: we may survive our failures over Covid19, but we will not survive climate change unless we learn our lesson.  

Our delay responding to Civid19 cost many lives and trillions of dollars. We cannot delay the challenge of reversing our collision course with climate disaster. Don’t we all wish the response to pandemic warnings had been quicker, more aggressive?  Don’t we want that quicker, more aggressive response on climate? So we need to shape our aftermath with changes that show we have learned our lessons.

Pope Francis has long decried the “globalization of indifference” that accepts business as usual, but pandemic has imposed the “timeout” we might need, an opportunity we might heed, to act on climate. And the “antibodies of solidarity” we’ve witnessed during this crisis proves we can do it as long as we do it together.

We still have time to overpower climate change. This is our moment to say: going back to normal is no longer good enough!

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020