By Brent McGregor
It would not be an exaggeration to say the world has changed dramatically since the occurrence of the Covid-19 corona virus pandemic. Y2K and the Global Financial Crises were just blips on the timeline in comparison. Not since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has the world seen a virulent health crisis of this magnitude. It would be naïve of me not to at least make reference to the Aids crisis of the 1980s and the Ebola outbreak in Africa, I know, but I am referencing the way in which Covid-19 has rapidly and aggressively spread across the globe, in so little time. It is unprecedented.
As I write this blog, I am in isolation. Australia like a lot of countries has imposed certain restrictions around social distancing to help slow the rate of community transmission. Which means citizens have to legally stay in their homes unless they have a reasonable excuse, such as for obtaining food, for medical care, and traveling for the purposes of work (if the person cannot work from home). The country is in lock-down. All non-essential businesses have been forced to close, and international borders have been closed to flights in or out. Some people are wearing surgical masks if they do go outside, and the roads are nearly empty of vehicles.
Panic buying in the supermarkets was one of the first indicators that the situation was escalating hear at home, with a shortage on fresh groceries, shelves strangely devoid of paper towel and toilet rolls – as people prepared for the long weeks and perhaps months in isolation. Somewhere the survivalists must be snickering to themselves. However the thing that has unsettled me the most, apart from the obvious potential risks to ones health, has been the rapidity and ease in which Covid-19 has ‘stopped the system,’ changing our day-to-day lives. Things went from normal to haywire, and all in a matter of weeks. Which just seems to point to the fragility of it all, doesn’t it?
Some would argue that art imitates life, whereas in truth life may imitate art on a more frequent basis. I suspect the popularity of dystopian fiction and horror in recent times, represented by films like The Road, Outbreak, Contagion, and TV’s The Walking Dead, could have been interpreted as an unconscious expression, a weather vane, of what we knew was coming all along. If you can appreciate the language of mythology and folklore is psychology, you can also understand how the popular monsters of our dreams and fairy tales (vampires, zombies etc.) are actually symbols of our collective fears: disease, pestilence, death. But now that we have become acquainted with these fears, first hand – lived with the Corona Virus in the daily news, known someone who had the virus or passed away, or perhaps even had the virus ourselves – I wonder what form our new imagined monsters might take. Will the popularity of zombie and dystopian films start to decline, or will our enjoyment of these forms of entertainment continue to endure, albeit with an added sense of unease?
It has been some weeks now. Australia has so far been lucky. The rate of community infection (knock on wood) has slowed. But the change, for me, has maybe ushered in a different set of worries, and I wonder what might happen if there is a Covid-21, or a Covid-22! You need not have had a crystal ball to know this was coming. We could have looked back over history, and just known from the cyclical nature of things. Nevertheless we were surprised. We were not ready for this. I never expected it to happen in my lifetime. And I only hope we don’t see anything like this again for a very… very long time, if at all.
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