Lessons learned from the Coronavirus

About a week ago, Singapore just extended its circuit breaker period, promising me that another month will be spent at home with my family. My family is fortunate enough to be relatively cohesive and my house big enough to avoid the times when cracks in relationships are prodded and probed (as my brother likes to do). Life has been relatively different but manageable, with Marcus Aurelius there to guide me during these trying times in his book "Meditations", a highly recommended read. 

But now that I have some free time, I'd like to spend it talking about the things that I have learned from this Coronavirus pandemic.

1. Humans, when counted on, will fail
   
   I think that we are very fallible creatures. When things happen in the past, we often do not make enough of an effort to learn from our mistakes and go onto making it again. Pandemics have been around since the beginning of time and there is little that we have done to ensure that it doesn't happen again, or their impacts less profound. So long as humans are shortsighted, uncommunicative, and selfish, this will always be the case. Alas, God made us with exactly these characteristics. How quickly we forget things so long as it has never happened in our lifetime. For the Earth, a human lifetime is like a blink of an eye, and we should be sure to adapt to the timeline of nature, rather than our own.
   
2. There is huge apathy between different social classes
   
   Nonsense like Gal Gadot singing "Imagine" on social media or celebrities saying that "we are in this together" spare no concern for the poor who live from paycheck to paycheck, nor do they do anything about it. Like all disasters, the rich will always last longer than the poor, and I find it appalling that people of huge influence and power of the private sector has done little to help socially with the needs of the poor, whether mentally or healthcare wise. I never knew this gap of apathy between these social classes existed, and I am ashamed to realise this only now in the midst of a crisis.
   
3.  The Coronavirus period marks the downfall of America
   
   There are many events in history that have marked the superiority of nations that is remembered forever. Such examples include Pearl Harbour to mark the superior prowess of the Japanese Military and the atomic bomb to mark the power of America's Technological power. Of course, there are many downfalls that will be remembered as well. Greece swimming in debt and their banks becoming insolvent, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and recently the way that America has dealt with the Coronavirus incident has destroyed the confidence of what many people thought was the greatest country in the world.  Moving forward, America will be continuing to be an economic powerhouse for some time, but I feel that this incident has changed the way that businesses view America and their infrastructure, and the shift to China will be a lot stronger and faster. I will be very keen to see what the election results will be like this year. 

There are many more events that I have anticipated that have happened: a second wave of the virus in areas of the world, a sudden surge in numbers in areas that society has failed to anticipate (Singapore and its migrant workers) and of course, the protests to release the lockdown in America. You can always leave it to the Americans to act in the most ridiculous way possible. 

Those are my thoughts, there may be updates or additions to this list in the future. 

How about you? How has this Coronavirus pandemic affected you and more importantly, what have you learned from it?

Cheers,

Matthew Tan