There are fundamental lessons we must learn from the coronavirus crisis

When you are an academic who systematically stores news items you find interesting in a repository and you suddenly find yourself living through a crisis like the current one, simply looking back a month and reviewing your chronicle of events and other themes can provide much-needed perspective.

Looking at things in perspective is invaluable when trying to make sense of things. Thinking about where we are now, the first obvious thing that emerges is that, despite living in an interconnected world where information flows almost in real time, no country has taken the opportunity to learn from the experience of those ahead of them on the coronavirus curve. The total absence of global leadership has led countries to repeat the same mistakes one after another, to delay the containment measures needed to stop the pandemic, while watching the death and infection rate climb, knowing also that, in almost all cases, we are talking about very poorly measured variables. This lack of coordination has meant that we have not even been able to agree on how to count the number of cases.

Depending on where you live, you may be experiencing the beginnings of the public health crisis, you may have already entered the exponential phase, or you may have reached or passed the peak of the expansion. And I’m talking here only about the public health crisis: the economic crisis caused by this lockdown is yet to bite.

What should we all learn from a crisis like this? Epidemics define the societies they hit. Take the disaster unfolding in the United States, where people continued to go to work because almost half of them would have lost their jobs otherwise, as well as avoiding going to hospital even if they had clear symptoms because they couldn’t afford to or because they had no coverage. The West’s model has proved itself to be an unsustainable catastrophe, incapable of protecting its citizens in the face of a crisis, and led by a buffoon. Learning from the crisis will mean being able to build a social safety net that will protect Americans not just in the face of another pandemic, but all the time.

The pandemic is offering us a unique learning opportunity: to see how our world reacts when our activity stops. Linking the response to the coronavirus with the climate emergency makes a lot of sense, especially when we see sharp falls in pollution levels as a result of drastic containment measures, but let us not be under any illusion: if we do nothing to prevent it, those levels will go right back up as soon as normal life resumes. How can we maintain low levels while rebuilding our economies? The pandemic is bad news for the climate emergency, because it alters our priorities and distracts us with fake news about how nature is supposedly able to recover from the human pandemic we’ve inflicted on the planet in a few days.

If we want to recover from the pandemic by taking advantage of it to try to correct some of the factors that created this climate emergency, we will have to make many changes. The voices calling for the cruise industry to be allowed to go under get this: we are talking about enormously harmful companies that destroy the environment, avoid paying their taxes and that quite simply, we don’t need.

But luxury cruises are just one aspect: what about the airlines now calling for a bailout? Does the world really need so many, and that in past crises have simply invested those bailouts in buying up their own shares to raise their prices? Would it not be more reasonable to link the bailout to forcing them to use clean energy, at least for domestic flights? Should we not do the same with logistics transportation, now that we know this is possible? Going further, some economists are saying that oil companies should be nationalized so we can manage their progressive disappearance in the most reasonable way possible.

Shouldn’t we be planning a transition to an economy where people no longer commute to work and back home every day at the same times, perhaps even fostering the adoption of virtual reality technology? How about taking advantage of the fact that our cities are empty to rethink their planning and finding ways to end street parking, making it possible for us to move around them and keep our distance, without being crammed in the sidewalks?

A mature society is one that is able not only to overcome a crisis, but also to learn from it and use it to respond to the larger crisis around us. Younger generations are asking themselves this: if they must change their habits to protect their elders from the pandemic, what makes those same elders unable to change theirs to protect them and their future on the planet?

We will come emerge from the coronavirus crisis sooner or later, and the impact it will leave will depend fundamentally on leadership that governments have shown. Now the fundamental thing is to think about what lessons we can learn to better focus on dealing with the next, inevitable, crisis.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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