After COVID-19, a social climate change

David Leonhardt recently wrote in the New York times what he foresees as society’s next phase in a post-pandemic world. Leonhardt projects four major changes that will define this new norm — changes more profound than any post-911 security changes had on global air travel.

According to Leonhardt, the current evolution of societal norms, beyond social distancing and no aloha hugs or kisses, will be defined by a new “abnormal”. He predicts that as early as next month, the number of new COVID-19 cases will be greatly reduced across much of the United States, as the first wave of the virus retreats — for more on COVID-19 waves: https://www.beyondkona.com/before-and-after-waves-of-covid-19/

The desire to quickly return to normal life, which most of us share, will likely be more elusive than most people realize. The pandemic won’t just disappear, and a return to normal activity (too quickly) would likely spark new outbreaks, especially with a substantial portion of the infected population being asymptomatic during this COVID-19 outbreak and testing, essential in determining who is sick will continue to fail to meet demand on the scale of this natural emergency.

Looking Forward – what can we expect?

Restaurants could re-open but with people sitting only at every other table. Offices may reopen — but with workers alternating between on and off days, as has happened in parts of Asia.
No large gatherings where people come in close contact, like sporting events, concerts and conferences, could still be a long time off. “That’s going to be hard,” Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said …“and I don’t know that most Americans have come to grips with that.”
Testing — even a partial return to normal life will require tremendous amounts of testing — testing of anyone who develops potential symptoms as well as random testing to know where hot spots are developing. The United States remains behind on testing and will need to continue catching up in coming weeks.
Contact tracing. That’s the technical term for tracking down anybody who has come in contact with a person who’s newly diagnosed with the virus. Some countries are using personal cellphone data, closed-circuit cameras and credit card data to help their tracing efforts. Americans may not be comfortable with that approach — which would mean the American effort could either be less effective or more labor-intensive, or both.
Quarantine. Knowing who has the virus isn’t enough, of course. People with new cases must be kept away from everyone else, immediately. What happens when somebody with the virus refuses to be quarantined? A question whose answer has yet to fully play out in the United States.

People will be impatient to return to their old lives. But here is the cruel reality: The places that return too quickly — and cause new outbreaks — will be the ones that end up suffering the longest periods of social distancing in the end.

Beyond COVID-19 there is the larger truth — humans are more at risk from diseases (and pandemics) as biodiversity disappears and the Earth heats up.

Our responses to climate change and the coronavirus are linked. We also live in an age of intersecting crises on a global scale, producing unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation, climate destabilization, none of which can be effectively addressed when accompanied by new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting global health threats.

According to new research published in Nature, December 2019, a healthy biodiversity is essential to human health. As species (marine, terrestrial, and airborne) disappear, infectious diseases rise in humans and throughout the animal kingdom, so extinctions directly affect our health and chances for survival as a species. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/humans-are-more-at-risk-from-diseases-as-biodiversity-disappears/

“Biodiversity loss tends to increase pathogen transmission across a wide range of infectious disease systems,” according to Bard College ecologist Felicia Keesing. These pathogens can include viruses, bacteria and fungi. And humans are not the only ones at risk: all manner of other animal and plant species could be affected.

Biodiversity around the world is declining at a very fast pace, extinction is the new norm

The human population has swelled to over 7.5 billion and our species’ has produced a massive footprint on planet Earth with a devastating impact on mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and marine life. We’ve driven thousands of species to extinction through habitat loss, over-hunting and over-fishing, the introduction of invasive species into new ecosystems, toxic pollution, petro-chemical agricultural, and the macro element: climate change in the form of global heating.

Many scientists now believe humans are living through a “mass extinction,” or an epoch during which at least 75 percent of all species vanish from the planet.

The current and ongoing extinction event of species (sometimes called Anthropocene) is the direct result of human activity. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

Earth has supported life in some form for about 4.2 billion years. The previous five mass extinctions occurred over the past 450 million years; the last one occurred about 66 million years ago, when the aftermath of a massive asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs.

All global crises facing humankind are slowly tipping the balance from sustainability to extinction

Questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past requires us to rethink our next steps.

The coronavirus pandemic may lead to a deeper understanding of the ties that bind us on a global scale.
Well-resourced healthcare systems are essential to protect us from health security threats, including climate change.
The support to resuscitate the economy after the pandemic should promote health, equity, and environmental protection.

There are, to a certain degree, parallels that can be drawn between the current COVID-19 pandemic and some of the other contemporary crises our world is facing.

All require a global-to-local response and long-term thinking;
all need to be guided by science and need to protect the most vulnerable among us; and
all require the political will to make fundamental changes when faced with existential risks.

In this sense, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic could help us come to grips with the largest public health threat of the century, a human-induced climate crisis.

Many of today’s health impacts have a clear climate change signature, such as the increasing frequency and strength of extreme weather events or the expanding range and spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria or dengue. For others, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the connection with climate change is less clear cut, but to ignore the science and our role in creating many of the problems we face as species could prove fatal to the future of the human race. Ff Pollution

There are common elements that almost all global health shocks have in common:

They hit the poorest and the most vulnerable the hardest
They act as poverty multipliers, forcing families into extreme poverty because they have to pay for health care.
Nearly half of the world’s population does not have access to clean water or access to basic health services.

When health disasters hit – and in a business-as-usual scenario they will do so increasingly – global inequality is sustained and reinforced, and paid for with the lives of the poor and marginalized.

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What better than a global pandemic, which does not discriminate by income, race, religion, or country, and kills, to serve as a better wake-up call for all of humanity.

Another way to view this historic moment in human history… how many deaths will it take before we all place a stop sign at this present, and most dangerous, 21st century intersection for which we find ourselves?

One answer, we must prioritize (without delay) planetary stewardship ahead of short term profits for the few. This will require global cooperation and a clean energy economy on the scale of the Paris Climate Accord – before Trump. We can start with:

The preservation and conservation of Earth’s remaining environmental treasures from forests to global ocean ecosystems
A global security focus on 21st century opportunities essential in the transition to living “in balance” with bounty of our planet Earth, rather than to consuming, polluting, and wasting that bounty.
Globally, governments must enable financial and social support recover packages designed not to resuscitate and prop-up unsustainable global economic sectors, such as oil, gas and, coal, but to hasten the transition to a zero emissions global grid and EV transportation fleet.
Advancing present day R&D efforts presently engaged in a clean energy transition for both water transport, train a global workforce for emerging and future technologies, and the list goes on.

In short, we can, and should, build on present successes in wind, solar, and power storage technologies to quickly migrate any future prospects of the next global pandemic. In order to accomplish this, we will need to transform both our social and economic systems, and move beyond the platitudes to actionable results — one which we are as a species, operating in balance with our global ecosystem we call earth. This balance is defined by a global clean (zero emissions) energy economy no longer dependent on the costly (social, environmental, and economic) destructiveness of fossil fuels.

When we eventually come out of the long dark tunnel of the COVID-19 pandemic we can hopefully hold on to that sense of our shared humanity and fulfill the opportunities for corrective change which are all around us. COVID-19, a tiny virus The message is clear, if we are paying attention: live in balance with the Earth on which all life depends – or – continue on our current path and suffer self-destructive consequences.