Post Pandemic Perspective: Positive Projections for the New Normal in the Aftermath of COVID-19

Historical Context

Let's explore what happened and has been happening in the after-impact of the COVID-19 pandemic's dispersion to every climate, country, and culture of our underprepared world.

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be associated with the year 2020. COVID-19 is simply the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2019—but entered the world stage in January of 2020. The highly contagious virus began spreading in Wuhan, China. The Chinese government took few early precautions and, as a result, the pandemic spread outside of China quickly.

Though the authoritarian Chinese Communist government put a halt to domestic flights into and out of Wuhan, they did nothing to halt international flights. Those travelers brought the virus to the entire world. In airline traffic alone, the daily service of 2.7 million passengers on 44,000 flights across 29 million miles of airspace gave the virus instant portability.⁴ No country was completely spared.

Under a microscope, the virus exhibits spiked columns, giving the disease a name—corona—as in the corrugated spikes of a crown.⁵ Coronaviruses have been around to the point that they are numbered in a sequence.

The scientific consensus was initially that the virus began in the Chinese wet markets of Wuhan where it came from Chinese food sources—blamed on bats or pangolins. Later reports were that they did not sell bats, leaving the rare pangolin as the target source. A pangolin is scaly anteater (mammal) that is highly sought as a specialty meat in China and Vietnam.⁶ No one is quite certain if either of these Chinese delicacies transmitted a deadly virus to a wet market patron.

We know that the virus spread rapidly in Wuhan and as of March 31, 2020, they reported 2,535 deaths.⁷ But other indications by estimate puts that figure much higher—as many as ten times the reported number. How do we know? China's rate of cremations to death has remained higher than 50% for many years, yet the number of orders for urns during the worst virus weeks indicated a much steeper death toll that what the government reported.

The mammal Pangolin. Photo Courtesy World Wildlife Organization.

Trucks dropped off roughly 2,500 urns on both Wednesday and Thursday local time to one of the eight local funeral homes, a driver told Chinese media outlet Caixin. The news site also published another photo showing 3,500 urns stacked inside the facility. The number of urns that arrived in that one funeral home was far greater than the city's official overall death COVID-19 toll.⁸

Sadly, the Chinese historically do not share the same distaste for death as we do in the Western world. Authoritative regimes rarely do. Just over the last hundred years, Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin ordered deaths that dwarfed those of the more well-known executioner Adolf Hitler.⁹ The civil world that we've known has too many reminders of those that have no regard for lives lost—as the vigilance of terror cells continues.

The authoritative communist regime may have been loath to report the entire story. A further report charged that the virus may have come out of a Chinese laboratory. Still, the Chinese authorities remained unwilling to share detailed information. There may never be an accurate accounting of the source for the virus, nor the number of Chinese deaths.

What is accurate is that these corona-type viruses come from animals. Scientists tell us that the spike-shaped coronaviruses circulate in mammals and birds. Once the outbreak occurred, the Chinese government subverted information as one would expect to dodge culpability. They intentionally underreported the cases and the death toll. World politics became a part of the pandemic process.

The strategic negligence of China's leaders helped make the coronavirus pandemic possible – it has brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and it is filling hospitals and cemeteries all over the globe. It is widely accepted that the unregulated sale of wildlife at open wet markets – like the Wuhan wet market – was the original cause of humans contracting the novel coronavirus.¹⁰

Are there nefarious forces at work? Was the outbreak an intentional act? If so, what is the purpose? Conspiracy theorists point to China's economic goals. Again, we may never know the truth. The virus changed everyone's life and livelihood.

Massive transboundary human damage had occurred because of the negligence of the Chinese government to shut down the previously specified unhealthy conditions outlined by the World Health Organization—with warnings recorded years earlier. The World Health Organization (WHO) came under scrutiny, as well, for misleading early reports that appeared to protect Chinese claims. WHO is funded by most developed nations—the US being the lead support contributor. The $400 million funding by the United States was put on hold pending a full investigation.

Many westerners had never heard of Wuhan, a city with a metro population exceeding eight million. Wuhan is the 39th largest city worldwide—with more than twice the people of the Seattle metro population.¹¹ The wet markets there had been cited often.

China had been the source of other reckless health policies in the past twenty years.

In the years since China carried out its reform and opening up policies and its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization, the 2002 SARS crisis, the 2008 milk production scandal, and the 2009 H1N1 crisis have beset China and countries around the world. The Chinese people might have preferred life-saving health and food safety regulations over infrastructure baubles, but the ruling Party's political stranglehold on society permits it to ignore or stifle the kinds of popular demands for reform that have produced dramatic, life-saving changes in the democratic world over the past century.¹²

By April 2 of 2020, the morbid news worsened. The Chinese government had continued to turn a blind eye to reporting the full extent of what they knew. Catholic News Asia (UCANews) reported:

No corner of the world is untouched by this pandemic, no life unaffected. According to the World Health Organization, nearly a million people have been infected and more than 46,000 have died. By the time this is over, the global death toll is expected to be millions.¹³