A Covid legacy
As 2021 draws to a close with the world still buffeted by the Covid-19 pandemic, one can perhaps look back wryly at the universal human naivety that had denounced 2020 as the worst year in recent history and assumed that this one would have been better. It was not. In many ways and for millions of people, it was, in fact, worse.
World pandemic figures moved from 418,213 new cases daily at the end of January this year to over 900,000 new cases per day twelve months later, higher than in 2020, where the numbers stood at just over 700,000 daily cases at the end of the year. As at December 28, the total reported cases of Covid worldwide stood at 281,877,774, with 5,423,191 deaths and 251,219,777 people recovered, some of whom now have what is being called Long Covid, which means they could have ongoing health concerns for months. There is no specific treatment or known cure for Long Covid at the moment.
Despite the yeoman work that has been done and is still ongoing by researchers and scientists toward the development of vaccines and medicines to treat this novel coronavirus, and the other measures undertaken by countries, success in curbing it has been mixed. Some countries have managed to lower the numbers and keep them down. In other places, Guyana included, a combination of poor or no adherence to mask wearing and social distancing, as well as vaccine hesitancy and unavailability, resulted in the development of several new variants, including Delta, Alpha, Beta and the one currently on everyone’s lips, Omicron.
While we can all hope that 2022 is going to be different, the current signs are not good. For one thing, global access to vaccines remains unequal. For another, though vaccine skepticism has not grown, neither has it decreased enough to make a difference. Furthermore, ignorance prevails over mask wearing and social distancing, notwithstanding the education and scientific information that is now widely available. Shockingly, conspiracy theories and Covid denials still abound, confirming the adage that we are our own worst enemies.
As is typical in times of hardship, those most adversely affected are the poor and vulnerable, the majority of whom are women and children. Early on, lockdown measures instituted by governments forced both groups to remain in homes where they were being constantly abused. Intimate partner violence and femicide also reached pandemic status, as did all forms of child abuse.
Recent studies have revealed that education disruption as a result of Covid has set children back significantly. This is even noticeable among the many who were fortunate enough to have access to online learning. UNICEF estimated the loss of inperson schooling as of the end of September this year at 1.8 trillion hours and counting. Among poorer children, there was increased vulnerability to trafficking and child labour.
A June 2021 report by the International Labour Organization and UNICEF said global progress against child labour had “stalled for the first time” in two decades. It noted that the latest estimates cast a shadow on international commitments to end child labour by 2025. At the beginning of 2020, global child labour was pegged at nearly 160 million children, the report said. Fresh analysis, it revealed, suggests that a further 8.9 million children will be added by the end of 2022, as a result of the pandemic and deepening poverty. Covid deaths also increased the number of orphans worldwide, already high owing to conflicts as well as the devastating effects of natural disasters caused by climate change.
In a world that seems to be lurching from one disaster to the next, the challenges to survival are huge, though not insurmountable. The coronavirus with all its variants seems to be here to stay and accepting that there will be no return to ‘normal’ is vital to our collective well-being. Covid’s legacy is a world now defined by being responsible and putting safety first. Those who choose to do otherwise will find there is a price to pay.
The changes forced by the pandemic, which we had all assumed were temporary, are not, but there is no use whingeing on about them when there is still so much work to be done. All of the world problems, including hunger, homelessness, diseases, climate change, conflict, terrorism, immigration and displacement, remain and have been exacerbated by Covid. If the world is to have any chance of substantial recovery, our collective resolution for 2022 has to be all hands on deck.