It is a strange time, totally different from what we are used to. This virus changed it all, within a few weeks. We have been pushed out of our comfy bubble of pseudo-safety. And all of it because of a tiny virus, a variation of the flu.
Hundreds of thousands are infected meanwhile, many thousands died and the forecast, especially in the US, paints an even darker picture. Being locked down at home is the luckier variant, no doubt. But this entire situation slowly develops into a nightmare. Almost nobody had such a pandemic on the radar. We felt safe and invincible. But now look at us. We are certainly not. And we haven’t been prepared for such an outbreak, not at all. We had been unprepared like the people in 1918 when the Spanish flu hit humankind.
But looking at it in a more realistic way, such pandemics have had happened quite a few times in history before. There has been the Antonine plage in the Roman empire killing about 5 million people. And of course one of the most popular, the Black Death in the 13th century, which wiped out over half of the population of Europe. And not to forget, the Spanish flu in1918, killing 500 million people worldwide. Those things happened before, just not in our lifetime or the lifetime of our parents. So just because we didn’t have such an outbreak in our recent past, we shouldn’t feel so damn sure that this can not happen to us.
Actually the risk nowadays is higher than ever before, because of our mobility. Millions of people are travelling every day, everywhere around the globe. Of course, perfect conditions to distribute a virus quite fast into every country on this planet. And this is what happened with COVID-19. In combination with some egoism, ignorance and greed, it spreads even faster.
So actually we can be happy that this happened, as cruel as it might sound. This is the wake-up call for the world. Imagine this virus would have been deadlier, e.g. 50% death rate. In this case, half of the world’s population would die within the next months and nobody could do anything about it. The death rate of COVID-19 is still quite low. Let’s learn something from that pandemic and hopefully, we’ll be prepared next time when a much deadlier virus might come.