If, like me, you’ve found yourself seeking comfort in pouring over the daily feed of numbers, comparing the ratio of new cases per million population, hoping for the merest suggestion of a change in the relentless trends, you may, if you’re lucky, find some.
Lucky, that is, if you live in the right country or state or city or region.
Conversely, you might have been unlucky enough to be born in a country whose leader believes the best approach is to ban the use of the word ‘coronavirus’. If you utter it, you will be arrested. That’s how to beat the virus – pretend it's not there. A sick joke? I wish it was.
But in other places, the danger is multiplied by poverty. Even if the knowledge and the will exists to do the right things, there is simple no money to buy that PPE or those test kits, let alone a vaccine when its ready.
I’m sure that when the time comes, as the rich nations turn the corner and begin to focus on re-starting their economies, news will come of the catastrophe in the third world. And we will respond. Aid will flow, it will make a difference, eventually.
Privately we will all feel sorrow at the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves. Not just in the pandemic but whenever we’re exposed to injustice & inequality in all its forms.
If, at such moments, there existed a button we could press to banish this situation forever, what would that button trigger?
Answering that question would bring an almost infinite number of ideas. So many, in fact that we might be overwhelmed with choice.
We should be so lucky.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash