Why I choose to be hopeful

I feel the need to look for green shoots, something positive that might come out of this COVID19 reset across the world. There is enough sobering news--no need for me to add to that.   

The proximate impetus for this burst of positive energy is that I have to think of what to say this weekend on Facebook Live to thousands of youth across South Asia.

My parents tell me that, in my native Delhi, pollution levels are down for the first time in a while. You can see the blue sky and you don’t choke when you walk around wherever permitted in your immediate neighborhood. From parts of North India you can see distant mountains, unheard of in recent years. In the normally muddy and dirty Yamuna River as it meanders near Delhi, apparently dolphins have been spotted again. I can’t recall the last time this happened.

That’s fine, a skeptic might say, but it’ll just go back to its polluted state once the lockdowns pass. Well, maybe. But perhaps instead this re-set situation, sans pollution, can be a new focal point for society to anchor around. 

Sal Khan, some years ago, helped popularize online learning with his ingenious and fun Khan Academy videos. But online learning has really gone mainstream these past few weeks. Primary schoolers through college students are all studying intently on platforms like Zoom, Teams, and so on. I’ve used Zoom to teach my classes at Harvard in the past, but even I’m amazed at how functional this has all been. Pedagogy will not be the same hereafter.

Similarly, remote medicine and at-home diagnostics will come of age so that patients can be treated closer to home, rather than brought into hospital settings. It’s not just device engineering and the science of diagnosis that is getting a fillip, but rules and regulations are evolving fast as well. For example, doctors and dentists in the US can now bill insurance companies for some forms of tele-diagnoses in ways that were not contemplated just four weeks ago.

Anecdotally, in the startup ecosystems in which I have ringside views – in Boston and in Bangalore – there appears to be healthy competition to come up with ideas that are relevant to addressing the COVID19 threat, all aspects of it. Certainly, scientists appear a bit less proprietary – I hope it’s not my imagination – and share ideas with somewhat greater abandon. So competition exists, but with a healthy collaborative undertone.

An example is www.covid19mobility.org a technology non-profit set up by epidemiologists and doctors at my university. This collaborative provides daily ‘situation reports,’ by micro-geography, of social distancing in the previous 24 hours, interpreted by a volunteer collection of scientists around the world, and made available to local policy makers. So a local mayor, or equivalent, might realize where there is an epidemic hotspot emerging, or where better communication should be targeted, in near-real time. Just done from the goodness of folks’ hearts.

I had a chance to be re-inspired recently in a chat with the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors without Borders. She reminded me that their doctors are on the front lines of this pandemic and the scary ones of the recent past (Ebola, SARS, MERS). A salute to these intrepid warriors, and also to the world’s health care providers putting themselves at risk treating patients. 

Back to clear Delhi skies. If I’m allowed the ‘audacity of hope,’ why limit myself to clean cities in poor countries, but ask for a renewed impetus to global cooperation to address the climate challenge? Do you also see, as do I, the need to drive and fly less, to be mindful of excess consumption and waste?

The Yale historian, Frank Snowden, reminds us that pandemics change history. They re-set societies. Let’s make sure that part of this re-set brings out something positive.