I Ask Myself

Unsere Kolumnistin glaubt, dass COVID-19 eine Botschaft für uns bereithält – unabhängig davon, wie sich die Krankheit weiter entwickelt.

Amy Argetsinger on lessons to be learned from the coronavirus

Iwas at a meeting at my daughter’s school when I realized how much everything was about to change.

This was in the final days of February, and the United States had just discovered a case of coronavirus that had been contracted inside the country — the first in the US of unknown origin. It meant that the disease, which we had spent months quietly hoping was just an Asian and European problem, was here, in America, and it was spreading locally.

As I drove to the meeting, a health expert on the radio was explaining how this was going to change our lives, including how we greet people. I suddenly thought of all the handshakes I exchange in a day, all the hugs. At the meeting, there was a table of snacks: chips in bags, dips in containers. Children were taking chips from the bags with their hands, then dipping them into the guacamole.

How many times had I seen this scenario and never given it a thought?

By the time you read this in the spring, we’ll know how serious the coronavirus crisis turned out to be. It could be grim, like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that infected half a billion people and killed one in ten of those. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be as mild as H1N1, also known as swine flu — a disease that gave us a scare 11 years ago, but was less aggressive than the Spanish flu. Hopefully, we’ll eventually become immune to the worst effects of the coronavirus. Still, it is certainly giving us a scare. Perhaps a scare is what we need.

Hard times can create good habits. Those who grew up during the Great Depression had to save their pennies and make do with little. For the rest of their lives, they lived frugally and abhorred waste — habits that we who grew up in healthy economies, spoiled by opportunity, never learned.

My generation was also spoiled by the last century’s breakthroughs in healthcare. Vaccines and antibiotics protected us from once-fatal infections and diseases. We grew up thinking that, yes, we might get sick, but we’d never get really, truly, desperately sick.

Even when coronavirus starts to recede, worse could be on the way. Climate change is pushing once-distant species together, along with their germs, and allowing cold-sensitive microbes to flourish. Antibiotics are losing their effect, because of overuse. According to the World Health Organization, drug-resistant diseases kill at least 700,000 people each year. To be ready for what’s ahead, we need to adopt some hard-times habits. Thorough handwashing is a great start — as we all now know. So is staying home when we’re sick, and watching what we eat and where it comes from. Call me crazy, but maybe also not letting our dogs lick our faces and hands so much.

Let’s hope scientists find a vaccine for COVID-19 very soon, but in the meantime, if it makes us rethink some of our behavior — well, that’s not such a bad thing.