Covid-19: How could it have gone differently?
Covid-19 is all over the news right now. There are articles about if it's dangerous, how to protect yourself, where it is, who has it, and many more different topics. But today the topic will be about the coronavirus in itself. How grave is the situation? Why and When did it get so severe? Those and many more questions will be answered here today, if you just keep on reading you’ll see it for yourself
Coronavirus has turned the world around in a month, then turned it over again in another week. It first cut China’s economy by half and forced numerous places to shut down. But now it is stampeding on the rest of the world, locking people in their homes, closing all the borders, closing down schools and forcing kids to learn on a screen all around the world. But one of the questions we need to ask ourselves is: How did we get here?
How Bad is it?
The media hasn’t been overrating the damage it has caused, but it was mostly to blame for making people all around the world panic as much in the first few weeks of worldwide lockdown. According to corona count, it has infected 4,444,670 people as of today, (15/5/2020) it has killed 211,079 people and 894,312 people have recovered. Those numbers are still, slowly but surely, getting higher every day.
These numbers show that the coronavirus is something to be very cautious and worried about, nevertheless, it still shouldn’t have been anything that should make you think that it is the end of the world as we know it.
Even though most of the whole economic world has mostly come to standby, the earth itself seems to appreciate it. Water in the canals in Venice is clear for the first time in forever, monkeys are roaming freely in cities in China, and dolphins are closer to the Italian coast than ever before. Since we have stopped using as many cars and stopped polluting the earth, it shows that the virus has given us a very much necessary opportunity to become sustainable since we seem to be planet earth’s virus.
Why did it get so bad?
The coronavirus has made governments flail and back down, and surprisingly, few to no countries have handled it as well as China did. But Tomas Pueyo had an interesting point of view he shared on medium.com about this topic. It was a different way to handle the coronavirus that could’ve changed the situation, certain countries, and even the whole world is looking at right now. They said “Within a week, countries around the world have gone from: “This coronavirus thing is not a big deal” to declaring the state of emergency. Yet many countries are still not doing much. Why?”
That sentence shows how much could have been different if the governments around the world had fought the coronavirus instead of telling people to lock themselves in their home for weeks that can turn into months. This shows that it got to the point where everyone started panicking because the measures the government took were too little too late
What Have We Learned?
As we see in these testing times, we see how many people respect their own health. People are still going outside even though they know they will be fined. They hang out with friends that could potentially have the virus and help spread it around houses, supermarkets, and neighborhoods. We can also take this time to evaluate our government leaders and healthcare systems, Donald Trump spoke in an interview the other day, and said this:
“Then I see that disinfectant knocks it [Covid-19] out in a minute.” …and is there a way we can do something like that, by injection, inside the body?”
He said all this in this interview. Clearly that would not only be dangerous, it could also kill you depending on the amount of disinfectant you inject yourself with. That is something anybody should know before telling millions of people to try it. After that, the doctors rushed out to tell everyone not to, and a few days later Donald Trump claimed he was being sarcastic. This is just some proof of how we should take a moment to reflect on our healthcare and governments all around the world.
What Happens Now?
Now finally people are soon going to be able to go outside, and in places like Denmark the kids can go to school again, Switzerland following their tracks. But is this the right decision? When Italy stopped pushing as much for people to stay home, we saw another enormous increase in the cases there. So as country after country slowly try to make life go back to normal, will we see a repeat in the pattern? Or will the deaths per day and new cases per day keep dropping? That is only something time will tell.
As the confirmed cases reach 5,480,000 the deaths 346,079 and the recovered cases hit 2,233,258. The world continues to make plans for the future, when will sporting events come back, when the world tries its best to start the process of this “new normal,” the world will be better prepared from something like this to happen ever again.
