MÁRCIA BARBOSA

Director of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences

What should the world look like after COVID-19?

“I want to be back to normal. I even have a bucket list of things that I would like to do when I’m back to my normal life—things like going running on the beach, travelling, hugging my niece, going to a restaurant. We are trapped in this between time, waiting for normal life to [return]. But I have bad news for you: The old normal is gone. Our lives are going to be changed, and we have to be prepared for that.

“In our old way of living, we have people around the world dying from starvation, from a lack of water, from a lack of health care—people living in places where there is war. But you’re going to tell me ‘Márcia, I don’t live in these “uncivilized” places. It’s not like that where I live.’ But where you live, women make less money than men for the same job. And if a woman has a kid, her salary is lower and her career growth is slower. In the place where you live, scientists have been telling you over and over that there is a climate-change disaster, that we are facing problems with energy and water, that in some places we waste food and water and in others we don’t have food and clean water at all.

“That’s the old, horrible normal. We’ve been [telling] scientists ‘I don’t believe you’ or ‘I believe you, but I’ll [take your advice] tomorrow.’ Tomorrow has arrived. Nowadays, people are sharing more. We are discovering that a number of things that fell to women in the past— things that were often a burden for them—can be shared between women and men, like children’s education, cleaning the house, cooking. We’ve also realized that we can give resources to people who don’t have any—it’s possible, because we’ve been giving people money to survive the pandemic. We are learning that we can share health and education resources. We can put human lives in front of economics. We can do all of that. Wow, we are learning a lot.”

“We are learning that we can share health and education resources. We can put human lives in front of economics. We can do all of that.”