The Hidden Legacy of COVID

Without question, the devastation of lives, communities, and economies wrought by this pandemic will leave a host of negative legacies in its wake. But just as the tragedies of World War 2 spawned the NHS, I believe COVID also has the potential to change humanity for the better. The pandemic’s potential positives stem from three changes in the way many millions around the world think and feel…  

Tiny events can have global consequences 

Even now, it is almost impossible to fully grasp the astonishing global changes triggered by the smallest of events. The current, although it must be acknowledged to be incomplete, consensus is that COVID-19 first emerged when the coronavirus was transmitted from a bat to a human. That sentence makes it sound very easy, but we’re talking about a collection of molecules around 100 nanometres across being breathed out of a bat, breathed in by a human, and then – for the first time in history – for those molecules to take root within a human cell and begin replicating. For comparison, a human hair is around 100,000 nanometres wide, so when I say we’re talking small, we’re talking mind-blowingly small. 

For me, the sheer incomprehension of that first point of transmission only serves to make the events of the last 12 months all the more staggering. For an event which would have gone completely unnoticed at the time to have subsequently grounded 95% of the worlds aircraft, shuttered shops and businesses from India to Mexico, and seen up to 4 billion people around the world subjected to lockdown orders simultaneously is… well it’s beyond hyperbole. 

This then is the first of the 3 changes which I think hold the key to COVID’s wonderful legacy – we are all now fully aware that the smallest actions in an individual’s life really do have the potential to share the world’s future. 

Shared emotional experiences are powerful, and important 

This may be of particular significance in British culture, a concept which is often synonymous with emotional repression and the awful “stiff upper lip”. The course of the pandemic has opened up collective emotional experiences in a way which I have never experienced before.  

For week after week, millions of us genuinely, enthusiastically, and without a hint of “British awkwardness” stood outside our homes and applauded the entire workforce of the NHS. One 99-year-old man walking laps of his garden so caught the affection and attention of the nation that he received over 150,000 birthday cards when he turned 100. The news that the Prime Minister, a figure who is far from universally supported normally, was critically ill in hospital prompted an almost palpable collective holding of breath as we waited to see if he improved. 

These are just a handful of examples of the kinds of open, even raw emotional experiences which we as a community have shared over the last year. That ability to connect with something as vast and scary as a pandemic on an emotional level, and especially to make that emotional connection as part of an emotional community has been, I feel, central to how we’ve muddled our way through the ups and downs of the pandemic. It is also a key change which can contribute to a positive legacy once it's over. 

We know what really matters 

I know this sounds like a cliché but put that aside for a moment and really think about this with me. The past year has given almost everyone a fresh perspective on which parts of their life are important and fulfilling, and which are not. 

To date, 11.2 million people have spent time off work through the furlough scheme. For some, that experience was painful and distressing because they love what they do and could see the pandemic shaking their workplace and livelihood to the core. For others, it has prompted a realisation that they're not being at work hasn’t really mattered. They personally feel no more or less fulfilled for not going to the office, and in many cases, it is even clear that their organisation has been able to muddle on pretty well without them. Because of COVID, millions of us are reconciling a new perspective on whether how we earn a living is meaningful and fulfilling or not. 

Similarly, the social isolation of repeated lockdowns has thrown our personal relationships into a new, starker relief. How many of us have been surprised to find that those we thought we’d miss, we don’t? And how many connections with people that we considered innate and automatic have we found ourselves missing most of all? Whether it's friends or family, the experience of COVID has put each of us in much closer touch with what we find fulfilling and who we rely on most. 

So then, how do these 3 big changes come together into a legacy which can be considered wonderful? The answer is climate change. The stark reality is that unless things change, these last 12 months will seem like a walk in the park compared to the scale of disaster which the climate emergency will unleash within our lifetimes. But each of the 3 points I’ve outlined above leave us all, I believe, better placed to engage with the changes that need to happen than ever before. 

For years we’ve all been told that the solution to climate change rests with each of us making small changes in our individual lives, which will ultimately save the whole world. That concept has always, to me at least, seemed unrealistic. But now that we living in a world where the sneeze of a bat can change the planet in a matter of months, it seems much more plausible that every human changing a few aspects of their behaviour can save the world in a matter of years. 

We’ve also had years and years of experts attempting to sound the alarm bell on climate change using data, evidence and scientific proof. Whilst that is obviously vital, it is also obvious that it hasn’t changed enough minds. So perhaps the time is right for a new, emotional approach to waking humanity up to the impending climate catastrophe, and perhaps in our current state of heightened collective emotion we are in the best place to respond. 

And finally, until 12 months ago, many of us were so busy with lives full of stuff and things which felt at the time to be fundamental parts of our lives. Buying new clothes every Saturday, flying off on holiday at least once a year, driving the length and breadth of the country visiting friends and family, grabbing microwave meals in plastic containers because we didn’t have time to cook – all things which I know I would have said I couldn’t (or wouldn’t give up). But now, a year into a pandemic which has shut the clothes shops, grounded the flights, left our cars on the driveway for weeks on end, and given us nothing but time at home to do things like cook dinner, so much of what used to fill our lives has lost its savour. There is a possibility here and now that the closing chapters of the pandemic see us all moving forward to new lives, filled with friends and family and all the things we miss the most right now, and that bit less full of consumption and the rampant use of the planet’s resources for our short-term gratification. 

Maybe, with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, the school history essays of the future will be answering the question “To what extend did the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 impact the fight against climate change in the first half of the 21st century?”. 

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