8 July 2021
A dystopian world is not difficult to conjure for the future, this being imagination and inspiration in parts, one that is actually brought about by lack of both in the present. Yet, the past year has been a series of such missteps and calculative fuss, an obsession with numbers and headlines, with bytes and optics, that the substantial gave way to circumstantial.
Imagine if in 2020 January, the Hubei province had alerted Beijing about an outbreak in Wuhan, imagine if the best virologists and public health experts of the global commons had inspected ‘ground zero’ with the WHO experts briefing the world about the progress by the hour! Imagine if in abundant caution, the global commons froze all travel, if flights from Wuhan or to, if flights from any where to elsewhere, had been stopped and the world took a modified winter break for two months, while the experts working on ground in Wuhan dissected the threat from a novel coronavirus strain! Imagine if people had been worthy of not being awash on conspiracy, if they held back just that bit, pausing their ‘lives’ as it were, to allow for the science to scope the outbreak and for the global commons to cope with it!
It is not that such scenarios were not played out in seminars, in Hollywood movies, in novels and theses, rather most responsible governments across nationhood actually had clear compendium of sorts, a playbook for exactly the kind of pandemic we now have visiting us. Imagine, which school going child has not heard of ‘want of a shoe lace…’ or its variation in their tongue, of how a small step could have avoided a major catastrophe. So now think, if children are familiar, adults should have been well versed with and steadfast in adapting to such a situation?
When the first Italian businesses reopened after the Year End Celebrations in January, when businesses elsewhere reopened, only Taiwan red flagged the rumour of a mysterious viral outbreak from Wuhan, the exact same fashion from which the earlier SARS outbreak had occurred. One could not have hoped for a ‘demonstration’ better than SARS for the SARS CoV2 outbreak, nor could we have been found wanting, for there was a clear interval between the two- less than two decades. Enough time for the science and for the system to scope and cope. So public health was ready at action stations, sirens sounding, ordinary folk being dispensed with comfortable face covers, with hand washes and protective shields that kept them from harm’s way! A environmentally safe autodigestive non woven fabric mask, a environmentally non degrading non detergent based hand wash, a light flash in hands of people that distilled the germs from the air around them when they converged indoors, using a mix of spectrum seen and unseen, that removed viruses from the surrounding air- in ten years the world had all of it and ready! For health care workers, comfortable, non bulky personal protection kits were stocked for ready use, that would allow them to work in a contagion environment while keeping their person sterile from contact with it. And an array of vaccine possibilities that just needed the offender genome sequenced to throw up candidates for offering immunity to humans within days of inoculation.
After a brief pause of several months, humanity resumed its ways, not before scientists had checked and given their all clear, like how a fire chief hails an all clear after quenching a flame in our neighbourhood. Children went back to school, parents back to jobs, essential workers were now given a break of a fortnight with only barest minimum amongst them left to cater for emergencies. Round the clock hospitals had conducted checks, tested for the novel strain, traced those who came with any flu and tracked to their satisfaction the arrest of the cluster from Wuhan and the containment of this outbreak. Seminars and reviews were now held to see how humans had reacted to be cloistered in their confines, homes and tenements, how businesses had coped after being stalled, and policy makers briefed politicians about how things were handled and how they were going to be improved going forward. One key lesson was that any future pandemic would be most probably airborne, and it was better for the world to continue to research on masks and other face protective gear! There were spin offs from this exercise of containment, which included ‘respirators, filters and air purifiers’ which would be handy when climate risk of raging forest fires confronted neighbourhoods.
What saved the global commons the tragedy that was otherwise theirs to come, was their foresight, the ability of humans to pass on experience, to envision future scenarios far worse than their current visitations, that made them invest and institute capacities and capabilities for the next outbreak after SARS. What was distinctly a human endeavour was how value was shifted from entertainment to environment, from investing in Roman Circuses to investing in Science and Understanding. Instead of paying top dollar to footballers, tennis stars and actors, the best tags and closely contested transfers were scientific community of experts. Folk whose passion was to thwart the ability of the unforeseen to surprise, by first imagining and refining, by researching and delivering, solutions that involved genetic codes to calculations of asteroid trajectories and splicing intersections to avert disasters to humans as a species. If there was one character every human learnt to identify and guard against, it had been ‘hubris’ and this vigil would pay off well in how humans coped with SARS CoV2 outbreak in 2020 as well as the asteroid strike of 2041!
Humans are natural risk takers, yet they have always built on their past. The meticulous way in which humans overcame their prejudices, their doctrinaire postures by harnessing science and understanding, ensured that humans were able to mitigate every possible risk including the Climate Challenge that threatened to make humans frogs in a ever warming soup! Today the future is here, as a extraterrestrial species, humans keep with their myriad tongues, their multitudinous faiths and beliefs, their connect with their ancestors, even though now a vast majority do not call this pale blue dot that is ‘Earth’ their home!
This was tomorrow imagined in Y2K and euphoria of the dawn of the next millennium! It is a toast to possibilities and potential of humans as individuals and as species, their rationality and their unique race that brought them to dominate Earth.Even now, whether it is Lockean or Hobbesian or Roussean view of human nature, this much is clear that if modern nations catered for science and environment the way they do for military contingencies, our responses to global existential challenges would be far superior!
Human intelligence is far more resilient than fables that speak of it, however human hubris appears to be far stronger? For the manner of this present pandemic that has laid civilisation low, disrupting progress and growth across populations and nations, if future generations were told that it was a mere reenactment of the first SARS outbreak with just this difference that the lowest form of life- an RNA virus strain learnt better lessons that the most complex and apex creature of evolution- H sapiens did, would we be that laughing stock? That we kept fooling ourselves with quotas, with Carbon footprints, with offsets and ‘green alternatives’ until our Earth turned pale and a splitting image of Mars next door?
We know in any given circumstance, which tomorrow as humans we would prefer if we were yesterday- The wiser, the swifter, the better, the survivor! Now is that ‘a tomorrow that never comes’?
indiarubberman.com 