This current Coronavirus Pandemic is truly taking a huge toll on everybody throughout the world, both physically and mentally. The number of lives lost is catastrophic and a huge percent of the world’s population are now unemployed due to the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic. The economy of the world is being crippled. People with serious illnesses are not able to visit their doctors out of the fear of catching the Coronavirus. It seems that the world will take many years to recover from the losses caused by this crisis. However, like everything else in this world there is another side of the story. If we closely examine the impact of this pandemic, it has actually done a lot of good for humanity.
In this day and age we humans tend to look at the glass half empty, we blame others for world issues and make it seem like we are all good and that we cannot make any mistakes. This leads to us thinking of every situation in a very negative way, we never try to look at the silver lining in the cloud and always see the glass half empty. If we would just look at situations in more than one linear way then we would see that every situation has a silver lining.
This pandemic may have brought a wave of death with it, but it also brought some new improvements. Whenever humans are forced into a corner, we make new innovations to help us cope with the situation. This pandemic has separated us with new social distancing rules. To stop the spread of the virus, we are forced to avoid gatherings and meeting other people for business or pleasure.
This has opened up a whole new world of online tools for us, even the most digitally challenged amongst us have started using apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams so that we could stay connected with each other and continue our daily activities like school and office work and ensure the functioning of our world. In addition to helping us continue school and office remotely, these apps also helped the unfortunate people who had to celebrate their birthdays and anniversaries in quarantine to connect with their families and loved ones so that they could at least enjoy their special day with others who matter to them.
The key positive outcome of this crisis however are not the new innovations but the fact that it has prevented of another much bigger crisis. This planet we call home is the reason we came into existence and the reason we still exist. It has given us land to make our homes, food, water and oxygen to sustain our life and it has given us all the raw material to be able to expand our influence both on this Earth and on the other areas of this universe. However, we do not treat it as a gift, we exploit its resources, kill its inhabitants and cause destruction. Our exploitation of the Earth’s resources and not letting them restore is leading to the phenomenon called Global Warming. After a long time, this pandemic is helping the Earth regain some of what was destroyed by us humans. As we know that someday the Earth will take back what it has lost. When this Coronavirus forced us to abandon all unnecessary work and quarantined us for many months, the Earth regained some of its previous health. Nitrogen pollution has decreased by over sixty percent. The Ozone layer has healed, and its surface has increased, and animal deaths have greatly reduced. The global warming crisis is at many levels more dangerous than the current Coronavirus pandemic as it is going to be permanent damage to our Earth. We have the ability to stop it however we are just too stubborn to think of changing our habits in the long term. Human greed has always taken priority over any considerations for the Earth. The situation created by Coronavirus has forced us to take charge of our responsibility towards our planet.
In conclusion, we should not only look at the pain brought in by this pandemic, but we should try to see the benefits coming from these dark times. We should see it as a shift from our daily monotonous routine that we students have been following for over nine years now. Sometimes change is forced on us for our own good. It has given us an opportunity to learn to see the light in the dark.
Ved Bhatnagar (9H)