A Post-Pandemic Thought
Recently I was asked to contribute a short note about what would happen after the pandemic has transpired a few days ago, and I just found myself in the middle of a shut down of my university as a result of a recent spread of the disease here in Thailand. So, I just found time to write something for his request. It is perhaps too early right now to know for certain what will actually happen after the pandemic. After all, there are so many things that we do not know about it, so thinking about the future after the pandemic seems to be a little futile. For one thing, we do not even know that there will be such a thing as a situation after the pandemic. For all we know, COVID-19 could stay with us indefinitely.
If that is the case, then the term ‘post-pandemic’ might refer to the situation where we learn how to co-exist with the virus without one side destroying the other completely. We have lived with many viruses in our tenure on earth as a species, both old and new. All of us have experienced the common cold, a disease for which until now there is no cure. But even if there is no cure we have lived with it for as long as there is humanity. Common cold and COVID-19 are caused by the same type of virus, the coronavirus. Certainly they are of different strains, but sooner or later we could find a way to live with the strain that causes COVID-19 in the same way as we have lived with the common cold.
By ‘living with the strain that causes COVID-19’ what I mean is that some of us may forever be infected with the strain, officially named SARS-CoV-2. I strongly doubt that the virus will be eliminated completely. If that is the case, then we have to find a way to avoid large scale infection while we continue our daily activities. Perhaps that is the biggest challenge waiting for us for some time to come. So far we have not been able to figure that out yet. Thus, we have faced with the familiar dilemma: Too stringent a measure, and the economy suffers, but if we relax the measures even a little, then the infection rate shoots up.
So perhaps one of the challenges is to learn how to keep up the economy while containing the infection rate. We can do that, for example, by staying online. I think that this will be a more or less permanent situation in the near future, and the most likely feature of the post-pandemic world will be one where the internet pervades our lives even more than it does right now. Many businesses and industries have to adapt.
One might think, on the contrary, that the vaccines that have recently been rolled out might help bring back the “old normal” way of life. I doubt it, however. There will always be those who are not vaccinated, and the vaccines will invariably produce unintended results. We have to learn new things while we stumble along with what we don’t have adequate knowledge at all. Even in the situation where the vaccines work wonderfully, there will be a gap between those who are vaccinated and those who are not. We have to tackle the social problems that ensue. It is now too early to see how efficacious the vaccines really are. That always take some time. But since the virus has learned to inhabit the human host, it will continue to evolve. Thus, there will be an arms race between us humans and the newer strains of SARS-CoV-2. I don’t foresee that the race will stop anytime soon.
So, in the end, the message is that we have to learn how to live with the virus, and accept the fact that there will always be those who are infected. The world has changed forever. We can only look back to 2019 and the years before that with longing eyes. Nonetheless, there is nothing to gain by looking back. We must always find a way to go on to the uncertain future the best we can.