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COVID-19. A chance to rethink the deeper moral and human issues

17 March 2020
Paul Collins

We’ve heard a lot about the economic consequences of COVID-19, but little about the deeper moral and human issues. While frightening, it’s a unique opportunity to think about better responses to the big issues that now challenge us all.

The virus’s technical name is SARS-CoV-2, or coronavirus 2019, shortened to COVID-19. Coronaviruses, which are common in both animals and humans, were first described in 1931, but were of little interest to epidemiology until late 2002 when SARS-CoV, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, emerged in China and later in 2012 MERS-CoV, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome emerged in Saudi Arabia.   

COVID-19, which is related to both SARS and MERS, is a zoonotic virus, that is a virus that jumps from animals to humans. The exact primary source is still unknown, but it certainly originated in the city of Wuhan, China in late 2019. It probably spread from bats to an intermediate animal source, thought to be illegally-traded pangolins, or Asian ant eaters, killed for their meat and for Chinese medicine. How this transmission occurred remains a mystery. The initial zoonotic, or animal-to-person, infection has subsequently spread person-to-person. It’s the speed of this spread that’s of real concern.

Pandemics have always been with us. The best-known historical plague was the Black Death of the 1340s-1350s which spread extraordinarily quickly, probably from a region near the northern end of the Caspian Sea to the Middle East and then on to Europe. Reliable estimates are that up to fifty per cent of Europe’s population died. Originally, the Black Death was thought to have been caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread from rats to humans by infected fleas, but nowadays there is debate among historians and epidemiologists as to the exact origin and nature of the disease.

Then there was the so-called “Spanish Flu” (which probably originated in an army camp in Kansas), the influenza outbreak of 1918-1919. This particular H1N1 strain infected some 500 million people worldwide and more than 50 million died, more than in World War One. Most of those infected were young, healthy adults under the age of forty. This pandemic was particularly bad in India where up to eighteen million people died.

These details are important because historically they are evidence of the ways in which nature keeps human numbers under control. The hard facts are that nature is a self-correcting system and disease is the most common way it uses to restore balance and keep species numbers in check. With a current world population of 7.7 billion, we face a situation in which human numbers are destroying biodiversity and chewing up resources far in excess of nature’s ability to recover. The risk we face is that nature will intervene forcefully to restore balance in the earth’s life systems; perhaps COVID-19 is part of this restoration. With global warming and massive biodiversity loss, some re-balancing of human numbers is certainly needed.  

Because it de-stabilises us and makes us vulnerable, COVID-19 gives us a chance to re-examine deep-seated issues that we assume are irrefutable, like much of contemporary economic theory underpinning so-called neo-rationalist capitalism with its notions of over-consumption and “infinite” growth in a finite world. Pandemics shake our certainties about what we think are unchangeable or infallible, and force us back to the moral basics.

One long-term lesson from COVID-19 is that it confronts us with the fact that our lives are rooted in the biological structure of the world, that we are not separate from nature, but an intimate part of it. We need to embrace ecocentrism and biocentrism, so that we develop a sense of seeing ourselves as part of the world, rather than seeing nature as something we can use as we wish. Perhaps the most important lesson of COVID-19 is that it reminds us of our sheer impermanence and vulnerability.

It also destabilises us enough to face another reality we constantly sweep under the carpet, over-population. The moment population is mentioned politicians run a mile and we keep putting off confronting the fact that we are consuming resources at a totally unsustainable rate. For sure, social justice and equity between nations is part of the solution, but we simply can’t hide from the fact that there will be 9.8 billion of us by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. Over-population is a reality and, growth fantasists notwithstanding, these numbers are unsustainable. This is vividly illustrated in Sub-Saharan African in countries like Niger where the fertility rate is 7.2 children per woman, with girls unable to finish even primary school.

Until now the pandemic has largely impacted the developed world. Its impacts on the developing world, particularly Africa, seem to have been minimal. But with a population of more than one billion people, Sub-Saharan African countries have minimal health care, with many people infected with HIV, tuberculosis and infectious diseases. It will be hard to maintain social distance to prevent the virus spreading in Africa’s crowded slums and public transport.

Africa remains an unknown for the spread of the pandemic, with Ethiopian WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying his “biggest concern” was COVID-19 breaking-out where there were weak health systems. However, given the fact that most COVID-19 deaths occur among older people, the one advantage Sub-Saharan Africa has is its youth bulge with the median age under twenty, whereas the median in Italy is 47.3 years.

In Australia some of the most responsible responses to the outbreak are coming from large corporations and from government departments that are encouraging staff to work from home and setting up the IT to make that possible. Distinctions are being made between business critical and non-essential meetings, with critical meetings being held via webinar or web conferencing through the internet in real time. Air travel, both domestic and international, will certainly decrease with a welcome drop in the enormous amount of CO2 (1.3% of human caused greenhouse gases) omitted by aircraft.

Some have pointed out that the changes that have been forced on us by the pandemic may well change the way in which large organisations and businesses are run, as people become increasingly at ease with working from home via the internet. The need for large office buildings may well disappear as new ways of working and communicating evolve. This is all very well for large organisations, but smaller business operations will not have the resources to do this, especially when much of their business is face-to-face. Those impacted by the 2019-2020 bushfires need particular support and help. Governments have made promises and are stepping in—with what results only time will tell.

Because of isolation at home and social distancing, the normal patterns of social behaviour are breaking down and we might even have some time for contemplation, thought, and even prayer. With Holy Week and Easter approaching we are reminded that we all face death, but that beyond death is resurrection. I have always though that my namesake Saint Paul was wrong when he said that in the end only three realities—faith, hope and love—will remain and that “the greatest of these is love” (I Corinthians 13:13). Actually, I think that the greatest of these is hope. In times like the present its our greatest strength.

First published on Pearls and Irritations (17/3/20)

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