“Doomed, we’re all doomed!” is the booming exclamation of Private Frazer, of the BBC series Dad’s Army. He’s a dour, wild-eyed, trouble-stirring Scottish undertaker. And he is wrong. Joking on tragic matters aside, the answer to the question on Covid-19 is, obviously, “No.”
Humankind will not be wiped out. During the last big pandemic – the 1918-19 Spanish Flu – over 50 million people died, out of a worldwide population of 500 million. So far in 2020, we expect 1-2 million deaths from Covid-19. These add to the 56 million deaths registered every year from other causes. Even if that number increased 10-fold, It wouldn’t mean “doom” any more than the ongoing death rates from cancers, averaging at 16 million every year. The fact is that it is our doom to die from something at some point.
Even if a vaccine emerges – something which is probable though by no means a guarantee – a legacy of deaths may persist for a very long time. The World Health Organization estimates that between 290,000 to 650,000 people die from the seasonal flu worldwide every year, with 3-5 million getting severely ill. Some of our current flu strains seem to be direct descendants of the Spanish Flu of one hundred years ago. Sadly, that’s perhaps the legacy we had better get used to.
The short term economic impact of COVID-19 has been a disaster – the single biggest impact on the world economy for 300 years. It’s just as well that the world economy was in reasonably good shape. Just as well we can use the “magic trick” of printing money. Otherwise, this would have been much worse for 7 billion people.
This medical and economic legacy is tragic enough. But I see one other pervasive effect on society: a serious deepening of blame culture. The old blaming the young for not adhering to pandemic guidelines; the young blaming the old for the wealth and privilege divide; the public blaming politicians; politicians blaming other politicians; politicians blaming Public Health bodies; rural inhabitants blaming city dwellers; interracial tensions; new countries blaming old colonialists.
This culture of blame was already prevalent in traditional media, but has become even more malicious on social media, often anonymously. The culture of hate and blame is moving off the streets, and landing online big time. We see the angst from the pandemic accelerating that culture, resulting in ever more divisions in society.
So, if you ask me, the medical disaster from Covid-19 will die down with vaccines and changes in behaviour, so that the health threat will return to an acceptable level. The economy will also recover, with governments printing more money, and businesses exercising resilience. But what is harder to solve is the increase in blame and its impact on society. Maybe we are ‘doomed’ to an increasing blame culture unless we find a cure for that too. Hopefully, we will put as much effort into that cure as we are putting into finding a vaccine, and saving the economy.