The End and the Beginning

The COVID-19 Pandemic reshapes our society. It forces us to adopt changes overnight so that we can continue in our daily lives.  As schools closed their gates, theaters rolled down their curtains, and sports events halted, we have no other choice but to move on. To live.

For more than a year,  we have been fighting against this vicious virus.  We have already adopted many things which in the past we couldn't imagine. Classes in schools are now through different distance learning modalities. Movies, concerts, and even sporting events are now over the internet through various streaming platforms. The implementation of community lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus lead to the rise in popularity of different e-commerce businesses. Instead of going personally to the market, we are opted to buy online. We started to use e-wallets to pay for the goods and services that we avail as we follow strict government policies towards social distancing. We are indeed in a paradigm shift, the end, and the beginning.

COVID-19 Pandemic is just one of many illnesses that transformed societies throughout the known human history. 

In the 1400s, during the European medieval ages, the Bubonic plague swept most of the population of Europe. The direct impacts on the economy and society were a reduction in production and consumption. It caused economic effects that brought the deepest recession in history. The workforce was scarce during that time, many scholars and engineers started developing new technologies that would help cope with the demands needed in the market. For example, the invention of the mechanized printing press by Johannes Guttenberg resulted in the fast reproduction of books that made information and knowledge more accessible and cheaper to the public. These led to the scientific revolution and the age of exploration that changed the course of man.

In the 1920s, the Spanish Flu (H1N1) swept the globe between 1918 and 1919. It infected about 500 million people while killing around 50 million. The death toll might be higher as there was a  problem with under-reporting and the absence of reliable diagnostic tests at the time.

As the Spanish Flu continued infecting more people, many countries started to adopt the concept of socialized medicine and healthcare, and a move to better disease surveillance, better public health, and a more organized collection of healthcare data.  

In 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was first identified after an outbreak in China. It rapidly spread to 4 other countries. A similar type of virus emerged in the middle east in 2012, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV).  It caused two outbreaks in South Korea in 2015 and in Saudi Arabia in 2018, and still has ongoing reports of sporadic cases nowadays.

Through our experiences in SARS and MERS-CoV in the past years, during the advent of the then-called Novel Corona Virus, countries around the globe immediately closed their borders and implemented different community quarantine protocols. It is in response to the World Health Organization's declaration of COVID -19 a pandemic. Existing studies and understanding from SARS and MERS-CoV helped to fast track the development of vaccines and implementation of minimum public health protocols we use to date.