OPINION - Since the lockdown began I have been attempting a prognosis of life in the future. It is clear that human existence in the decades to come will be characterised by people having to continually pick up the pieces.
Nothing can ever be the same after the Covid-19 pandemic. The cost in suffering and loss of life is enormous and will continue to be an affliction in one way or another for a long time to come.
Indifference has been shaken to the core. What has happened has become everyone’s nightmare.
Plagues that spread slowly through ships docking in distant ports in the past are reaching everywhere with the landing of jetliners at airports across the world.
The truth of the world as a global village has been made manifest in the most concrete and frightening way possible. This is not all. Climate change is damaging or destroying ecosystems and disturbing ecology. We are in a headlong and sideways collision course with destiny.
Our failure to halt climate change is creating new vectors for pathogens. Viruses are routinely jumping species. Furthermore, scientists are concerned that viruses which become habituated to higher temperatures will survive fevers that would have killed them in the past.
Viruses will continue to pose an existential threat. Vaccines will help but once many novel coronaviruses are let out of Pandora’s box at once, the success of containment might see us lagging and on the back foot.
I wish we could use the lockdown to bring science and religion together to combat climate change and ecosystem degradation. Nothing less will help to relieve us of the disasters piling up to afflict us in a way we have never been afflicted.
We are under a compulsion to take drastic steps to halt climate change and all that which follows in its wake. Otherwise, our lives are going to be about picking up the pieces, with no end in sight.