Our lessons learned from the years of Covid (Part:1)
[Read More: Part-2]
How can we briefly describe the time of Covid from a historical point of view? Many believe that this horror of the coronavirus proves how insignificant man is to nature. In fact, the year 2020 has shown that man is not so helpless in the face of nature. The epidemic is no longer an uncontrollable force of nature. Science dares to control them.
Then why so much death, so much suffering? Because of the result of dishonest political decisions.
When people faced Black Death at earlier ages, they did not know what the disease was and how to deal with it. In 1918, scientists did not recognize the deadly virus when influenza struck the earth. Many of the mechanisms were ineffective, and attempts to invent a vaccine were in vain.
But at the time of Covid-19, it was completely different. An epidemic was announced in late December 2019. On January 10, 2020, scientists identified the virus and published all the information online, including the genome of the virus. Within a few months, it became clear how the chain attack of the virus could be prevented. And in less than a year, multiple effective vaccines began to be produced commercially. Humans have never been so powerful in the war against humans and pathogens.
Online based life
In addition to these unprecedented advances in biotechnology, Covid’s time has given us an idea of the importance of information technology. In earlier times, people could seldom stop the epidemic because they could not observe the real-time infection chain at that time, as the duration of the lockdown was not considered for economic reasons. In 1918, you could have quarantined people who had been infected with the deadly virus. But those who were asymptomatic carriers of the virus were difficult to identify. If you forced everyone in a country to stay home for a few weeks, the economy would collapse, society would collapse, and people would starve to death.
On the other hand, due to the digital surveillance of 2020, vector surveillance of diseases has become a trivial matter, making quarantine more selective and useful. Essentially, automation and the Internet have made this lockdown period more acceptable, at least in developed countries. Although the human experience in developing countries was similar to that of the plague, most developed countries have changed everything through the digital revolution.
When we consider agriculture, we see that people believed in manual labor for food production for thousands of years, and 90% of the people were involved in agriculture. That look is no longer seen in the developed world today. Only 1.5% of people in the United States now work in agriculture. However, even after producing enough food for themselves, they are still at the top of the list of food-exporting countries. They are using machines in almost all areas of agriculture, which helps them to prevent the spread of diseases. That is why lockdown has caused very little disruption in their agriculture.
Imagine a field of plague epidemics. If you force farmers to stay indoors during the agricultural season, you will starve to death. But if you let them farm, maybe they can infect each other, so which one would you choose?
Now imagine a wheat field in 2020. The whole field can be farmed very successfully with the help of a GPS system machine without any possibility of infection. In 1349, a farmer could collect an average of only 175 liters or 8 gallons of grain by working all day. Still, in 2014, there is a record of harvesting an average of 1 million 50 thousand liters of grain per day through machines. As a result, Covid-19 did not cause any major disruption in the production of food grains, such as wheat, maize and paddy.
Grain production alone is not enough to provide food to the people. You also have to arrange for that grain to be transported, sometimes traveling thousands of miles. Trade was the main villain in the history of the epidemic. Deadly pathogens spread around the world via commercial vessels and long-distance caravans. The plague, for example, spreads from East Asia to the Middle East along the Silk Road. Then the disease enters Europe via Genoese merchant ships. The trade was so severe that every wagon needed at least one pilot, and even a small ship needed dozens of sailors. As a result, overcrowded ships and hotels were the base of germs.
In 2020, global trade was fairly smooth, with only a small number of people involved. Container ships of the present era can carry more cargo than modern merchant ships of the past. In 1582, an English merchant fleet with a carrying capacity of 68,000 tons required 16,000 sailors. And in 2016, a container ship named OOCL Hong Kong could carry 200,000 tons of cargo with the help of only 22 sailors.
In fact, it is the passengers in pleasure boats and airplanes who have played a significant role in the transmission of the Covid-19. But tourism and travel are not necessary for business. When automated ships and unmanned trains kept the wheels of the economy moving, tourists could stay at home, and business people could hold business meetings through the Zoom app. When a ban on international travel was imposed in 2020, only 4 percent of offshore trade was lost.
Automation and digitization have made significant contributions to the delivery of services. In 1918 it was unthinkable that offices, educational institutions, courts, and churches could be run during the lockdown. How do you conduct educational activities if students and faculty stay at home? We now know the answer to this question. In addition to the immense stress, there are many other problems online. This has led to a number of unimaginable problems, such as a lawyer speaking in court at an online meeting about a cat’s animation over software complications, which has gone viral. That’s the decent thing to do, and it should end there.
When the deadly influenza outbreak in 1918, people were only familiar with the real world, with no place to go except in the real world. Most people today live in two worlds – real and virtual. When the coronavirus spread in the real world, many people started living more and more in the virtual world and the coronavirus could no longer attack the virtual world!
Of course, people still live in the real world, and it is impossible to digitalize everything. The idea of how much low-paid professionals like nurses, health workers, truck drivers, cashiers, couriers have contributed to our civilization was discovered during this covid. In a word, every civilization is only three times as far away from barbarism. In 2020, deliverymen have become the most important lifeline in capturing civilization.
The Internet has taken us by surprise.
As mankind moves into automated, digital, and online life, this life pushes us into new dangers. The most notable thing about Covid’s time was that there was no interruption in the internet connection. Suppose we have a large number of people crossing a bridge, in fact. In that case, there is a possibility of traffic jams, even if the bridge collapses due to excess load. In 2020, schools, colleges, and churches launched online activities day and night, but the Internet also tolerated that.
We are not thinking about this yet, but we should start thinking. In 2020, we learned that we could move on even if a country is actually in lockdown. Now try to imagine what would happen if the digital structure was destroyed?
Information technology has given us a lot of relief in dealing with organic viruses. At the same time, we have also been given a lot of discomfort due to malware and cyber-war. A lot of people are now asking, ” What could the next Covid actually be? ” The next candidate could be a blow to our digital infrastructure. The coronavirus took months to infect millions of people worldwide. It may take just a day for our digital infrastructure to collapse. How long do you think it would take us to get back to the e-mail age from this e-mail era where our schools and offices were able to start online activities in a very short time?
What should we do?
A special difficulty of scientific and technological power has come to our notice during this Kovid. Science will never take the place of politics. When we have to make a decision about a policy, we have to take into account many advantages and disadvantages and ethics; it is not possible to make a decision on any scientific method. No scientific method can tell for sure what we should actually do.
For example, when a lockdown is decided somewhere, it is not enough to ask, ” How many people could be infected with Covid -19 if the lockdown is not granted? ” Can they suffer? How many may suffer from malnutrition? How many may drop out of school or how many may lose their jobs? How many may be abused or killed by their spouses? “
And even if all this data is accurate and credible, we still have to ask, ” What should we do? Who decides what we should do? How do we evaluate one survey against another? ” It is political work. Politicians have to come up with an acceptable policy keeping in view the medical, commercial, and social issues.
Similarly, engineers are now creating all-new digital platforms that help us work in the midst of lockdowns. These new supervisory tools are helping us break the chain of transmission. But these digital and supervisory practices endanger our privacy and pave the way for unprecedented totalitarian regimes. In 2020, surveillance of the people had become more legal and commonplace. The epidemic needs to be tackled, but does that mean it will undermine our freedom? It is the job of politicians, not engineers, to strike a balance between the necessary supervision and dystopian nightmares.
Even during an epidemic like the plague, three basic rules can save us from digital dictatorship. First, whenever you collect information from people — especially their physical information, you need to use that information to their advantage instead of confusing, controlling, and harming them. My personal doctor knows a lot of confidential information about me. I’m used to it because I know he’ll use this information to my advantage. My personal doctor should never sell this information to any corporation or political party. This is exactly how any ‘epidemiological authority’ should act.
Second, supervision should be from all angles. If surveillance is carried out only from top to bottom, it will be the road to dictatorship. So when you increase surveillance of individuals, you also need to increase surveillance of government and corporations. For example, the government is currently providing large sums of money. The way these funds are disbursed should be much more transparent. As a citizen, I want to know who gets what and who gets the money, who decides. I want to make sure that a small businessman who really needs a grant is getting the grant instead of the owner of a big corporation known to a minister. If any government says it is impossible to monitor the epidemic so thoroughly, do not believe them. While it is not a matter of keeping an eye on what you are doing, it is not a difficult task to keep an eye on the activities of the government.
Third, never allow too much information to be stored in one place. Not at the time of the epidemic, not even after the epidemic’s end. An integrated data collection is a strategy of dictatorship. So if biometric data collection is initiated to prevent an epidemic, this should be done either by the police or by an independent health ministry. And this information needs to be kept separate from government cabinets and large corporations. It will certainly cause exaggeration and inefficiency. Incompetence is just a feature. It is not a germ. Do you want to prevent digital dictatorship? Let things be at least somewhat inefficient.