You presented yourself to the world end of December 2019. At the time you were merely an insignificant blip on our news page. By end of January you had become one of these ‘far-from-my-bed-shows’: we looked at it, half amazed, half amused (crazy Chinese eating pangolin, what’s new?!). A bit freaky yes, but still, nothing to alarm us and so, we went on with our normal lives. “More people die yearly from the flu. What’s the fuss really?”
Today, April 5th, we have worldwide 1,133,681 confirmed cases, 62,784 confirmed deaths, 209 countries affected and we are still counting. You are no longer an insignificant blip on our news page, you unapologetically dominate our daily news.
You may be tiny, but you sure do deserve your crown. Just look around the world, you got us all on our knees – our economies included. You truly pulled off a magnificent trick: you managed to blindside us , even though we clearly saw you coming. You must have chuckled seeing our arrogance, waving the threat away.
We thought by being the richest and the strongest, we would always be okay. We worked hard to reach our goals, not hesitating to source our needs across our borders and when we saw that the problems we caused elsewhere came knocking on our door, we quickly waved our nationalist flags.
In our never ending pursuit of more, better, faster, we chose to ignore the warning signals Mother Nature sent us repeatedly, thinking we’d still have time. Besides, we would surely deal with it when the problem is really there. After all, we’re super smart, right?
Yes…. we preferred to close our eyes and dance to our favorite tunes on our own little private playlist.
But then you decided to come to our party and you were not picky in choosing your dance partner! You’d tango with anyone of us, gliding from one pair of hands to the next one. “I am here, do you see now?”, you whisper in our ear while tightening your grip to the point we have difficulty breathing. And slowly our eyes are opening.
We find ourselves with a renewed respect for doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. We are silently, somewhat ashamed, acknowledging the valuable work of garbage collectors, school teachers, supermarket and shop workers, maids. We start planting again in our gardens, we rediscover the pleasure of cooking our own meals, we carefully avoid wasting food…..
We have come to the realisation that what is getting us through confinement, is not the money in our bank account nor the swimming pool in the garden. It is plain simply social contact. We feel the need, not only to talk, but to see each other and experience the satisfaction of helping each other.
Dear Covid-19, you sneaky little bastard, I hope you will soon leave. Personally I have never been a fan of dancing the tango, it makes me dizzy. But I do love the feeling of close contact and passion. I truly hope we all will hang on to that feeling long after you’re gone and resist falling back in our old habits of dancing to our own individual tunes with our eyes closed.