🔒 WORLDVIEW: Covid-19 may yet kill you, but so could lots of things

I understand why countries locked down. In Covid-19, governments were faced with a virtually unknown threat. Information was scarce – no one really knew how deadly this thing was, how fast it would spread, and how sick it would make how many people.

In the face of this, many earnest and sincere epidemiologists made the best predictions they could, and many earnest and sincere politicians made the choices that they thought would be best – choices they hoped would save lives and give their societies time to prepare for the disease to hit.

And the truth is, after China and Italy – the first two countries hit with the plague – locked down their citizens to contain Covid-19, it was pretty much inevitable that other countries would follow suit. No one wanted to be the odd man out (except Sweden and, in the face of its high death toll, Sweden is now expressing regrets about its approach). Lockdowns were happening, one way or another.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Then, the consequences of lockdown began smacking us in the face. Millions upon millions unemployed, widespread hunger, GDP crashing, business confidence plunging. In the face of all this, governments could not remain idle any more than they could in the face of Covid-19 back in March.

Ready or not, globally, we are now moving into reopening. Even as cases in India spiral, the country is reopening, and the same is true of Russia, Mexico, and a dozen other places. Just as countries plunged headfirst into lockdowns, we are now plunging headfirst into reopening.

Only hindsight can tell us if our responses made sense – and even then, we may never know. We can’t know what would have happened to public health without lockdowns and we can’t know how economies would have fared either. This type of external shock is something new. Who knows what the right choices would have been?

There’s no real point in debating whether lockdowns made sense. They happened, and we are now dealing with their consequences. We are also still dealing with Covid-19, and there is still much we don’t know about the disease. If heat reduces infection why are new cases growing so fast in sweltering Arizona? What is the role of super-spreaders? How infectious are asymptomatic individuals?

In this chaotic environment, we are all searching for certainty. Uninformed people are confidently claiming to understand things scientists are still trying to figure out.

But there is no certainty to be had. Heck, the world’s best economists are struggling to do something as simple as predicting how many jobs are being lost or created in America, the world’s most closely monitored economy. We just don’t know what’s going on or what’s going to happen.

That is very hard to accept. People will do almost anything – will believe almost any crazy thing – rather than accept that we simply do not know. Yet the path to wisdom begins by acknowledging your own ignorance.

I don’t know if you or I are going to die from Covid-19 – it seems to kill at random, sometimes. I don’t know if we’ll get it – it seems to spread in a lot of strange ways. I don’t know if the economy will recover this year, or ever. I don’t know what will happen to our jobs or our savings.

Here is what I do know.

I know that every day is a risk. Driving in a car, walking down the street, eating a sandwich – whenever you do these things you risk death in a thousand ways. A car crash, a stray bullet, a sudden heart attack, salmonella, a random evolution in a stray cell that leads to a painful death from cancer. There are no guarantees in this life.

Being human means living with risk. The only people who risk nothing are the dead. All we can do, the only thing we can do, is prepare ourselves as much as possible and try to make decisions as best we can.

Reopening is happening and, just as with lockdowns, we are all being sucked along by forces greater than ourselves (this goes for politicians too – they are being forced to action by Covid-19, by the economic downturn, by the winds of fate, just like us).

So, as you move forward, accept two things: You don’t know what will happen and you and your family will be facing many risks. Try to make peace with that and to behave accordingly.

This means many things. It means washing your hands, wearing masks, and sticking to outdoor gatherings as much as you can and then accepting that you can’t get your risk down to zero. It means cutting expenses, looking for creative ways to make money, and then accepting that financial insecurity is a new reality for us all. Take time to connect with those you love and focus on being grateful for the little things. The world is uncertain these days, but then, it always was.

Visited 1,080 times, 1 visit(s) today