A chance for a better world

On Saturday night, “God” tweeted: “I had one job.” The tipping point has been reached.

The end of life as we knew it began in China on November 17, 2019, in a cover-up that has sickened the world. Coronavirus and the disease it causes, Covid-19 — which emerged in central China and is referred to as the “Wuhan virus” by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — is likely to kill many thousands of people worldwide over the course of this year.

There is no vaccine, and probably won’t be for a year or more. France is now grappling with rising mortality among people aged under-60. Children, so far, are rare among the infected. Total global deaths now exceed 6,500, with cases detected in 140 countries.

In making essential changes to deal with the spread of Covid-19, we have an opportunity to remake our world. We can prove to ourselves that when crisis hits, we are able to act, en masse as communities and nations, to ameliorate the worst impacts of our worst behaviour. We will find that we can make changes necessary to stop and even reverse the consequences of our own actions. Then perhaps we will start to look anew at the crises we have created — climate change, environmental devastation and species extinction topping the list for urgent, irreversible action. And finally do something about them.

First, however, we need to face some facts about the crisis upon which change — political, social, economic, cultural, diplomatic, behavioural, professional, personal, familial — will pivot. This pandemic will define 2020. If we’re smart, it will define our future, too.

Chief medical officers from Britain, the United States, Australia and Israel, teleconferencing in the presence of Australia’s science-averse Prime Minister Scott Morrison, late last week heard that 60 per cent of Australians will be infected. The government’s concern is to keep infections to between one million and two million per month, with the peak expected in June, the southern winter.

These figures can be extrapolated worldwide. Banks are onside to support small businesses, which are expected to bear the brunt of the coming recession. The military has been called in to help with, for instance, production of masks at Australia’s only factory, boosting output to five million a month to help slow the spread. Armed forces involvement in public security cannot be far off.

While few will say it publicly, China is the culprit, failing to report the Wuhan outbreak for six weeks, when, according to one senior Australian official at the tele-meeting, “it could have been contained”. Ever thin-skinned, the apparatchiks of the Chinese Communist Party, adept at self-serving lies and fudged figures, are blaming the US for a “germ warfare” campaign as they try to deflect attention from their own culpability. Sending medical supplies to Italy is another transparent propaganda ploy “doomed,” as they say themselves, “to failure”.

South Korea is testing 15,000 people daily, and reporting a morbidity rate of 0.6 per cent, around 10 times that of a bad flu outbreak. America lacks testing capacity and a fully functional public health system. Britain is mired in mixed messaging. Afghanistan — sandwiched between Iran and Pakistan, both client-states of China’s and struggling to cope — will likely see the illness threaten its hoped-for peace with the Taliban. Africa has seen off epidemics before and, as confirmed coronavirus cases rise, countries that experienced and survived Ebola are wisely falling back on lessons learned.

International travel is fast being curtailed, plans are being altered and halted. The exigencies of our recent economic realities, including the so-called gig economy characterised by short-term contracts or freelance work with no benefits, are the cruel excesses of the corporate greed that dictates modern working life. The lack of national health care systems, as in the US, or curtailed and creaking systems as in Britain and Australia, are rightly being exposed as part of the problem. Isn’t access to healthcare a universal human right? So where is it?

In this crisis, the general ineptitude of politicians worldwide has been breath-taking. With little respectable or competent leadership at national level, communities will need to unite in grass-roots attempts to minimise the reach of the epidemic. Perhaps the Big Society has finally found its moment.

Italy has shown the way to the rest of Europe, with a national shutdown that has only tightened in the past week. Britain, now thrustingly out of Europe, is flailing amidst its own bluster. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, rather than shutting schools, putting a stop to panic buying, and calling off the Cheltenham Festival — a gathering of 251,000 people over four days last week — told Britons they are about to lose loved ones. The mind boggles.

God is right: if the task was to create a uniquely beautiful and compassionate sustainable world, then mankind was a big mistake and He has failed the deity test of omnipotence. God has proved to be not so great after all. And if the constancy of war didn’t prove it, this mess should.

Here in Britain, middle-aged irrelevancies like Piers Morgan have unrelentingly abused the children trying to draw attention to the consequences of centuries of uncontrolled greed, ignorance, and the abuse of the world’s resources: air, water, wildlife, indeed everything above and below ground. Growth and profit, which have underpinned the global economic system, have reached their limit. Are you washing your hands, Piers? Staying home to avoid infection and infecting others?  This is what those children have been warning you of.

As global recession looms, we may well see the rise of economic diplomacy, all but destroyed by the ignorant would-be autocrat in the White House, and the end of his ill-advised trade wars. Self-sufficiency is likely to come back into fashion, with a fall-back to local production, shorter supply lines and truncated production timetables. China has shown itself to be an unreliable manufacturing partner, as factories dependent on its components face closure. And that’s after China decimated industry and production worldwide of everything from soap to tracksuits to airplanes since joining the WTO last century. Time to bring it home.

The global financial system is a web of intertwined national economies, which will need stealthy diplomatic navigation that has, in the age of Trump, evaporated amid his hubris and self-regard, ignorance and refusal to learn his brief. Coronavirus could prove to be his nemesis and seal the end of his lumpen and damaging presidency.

Expertise, downgraded by Trump’s know-nothing acolytes, as well as by his imitators from Australia to the Amazon, could again become a currency valued by citizens who have felt lost, mis-led and duped as this crisis has taken hold.

China’s horrific habit of hunting, poaching, killing, eating and turning into bogus “medicinal remedies” the world’s wildlife will have to change. The country’s communist rulers promised, after spawning the deadly SARS virus in their ghoulish wet markets, that things would change. They didn’t then. This time there is no choice.

Respect for all life forms and our environment, along with an economic reckoning that extends basic services including health and education to all citizens of all nations, could be the least of the good to come out of this year-long test. Out of crisis should come opportunity, and the chance here for much-needed reform should not be squandered. We owe it to ourselves, to each other and to future generations to stay well, get well and heal our planet. This might be the only chance we get.