The beauty of Covid-19 (ode to trust).
A few thoughts on the apocalypse. Aka, the 5 reasons to thank this coronavirus.
Self portrait in a deserted Barcelona, March 2020.
2 weeks down this quarantine. My third-floor apartment begins to feel like a boat.
I miss the ground. A run at the beach. A beer with friends. I need a haircut.
The past days have been a steady ping pong between saving my company from bankruptcy and keeping my family & friends close. Nonetheless, I feel like there must be a sense in this worldwide dystopian lock-down.
In line with the latest mindfulness hype, my first thought is to trust nature. Easier to say than to think while my family is sending panicking signals from the heart of the northern Italian red zone. As events and markets shut down, one after another, sinking our revenues at Xceed from €1+M/month to €0.00 overnight.
Let's be clear, I'm in the lucky queue. None of my closed-ones has shown symptoms and my thoughts can only go to the millions of people affected or fighting this plague around the world.
Still, I believe that everything happens for a reason. And that no crisis comes without new opportunities. It's a natural cycle. Our species has been here before. So here are five reasons to keep our mind positive throughout the apocalypse. Five lessons this invisible enemy gave us, and why, paradoxically, we should thank this coronavirus for the ages to come.
1. We need a global, public and free health care.
As we all learn again how to wash our hands and how psychosis acts on masses, the one thing COVID-19 is really teaching us is that health knows no rich and poor.
Today's world is too interconnected to put up an emergency wall (even for those willing to pay for it), and we, both spectators and actors, are passing through an historic moment. One where the wealthiest people are suddenly in need to get their own expensive treatments to the poor ones, not to get infected themselves. One where it is everybody best interest for everyone to get the best health care possible.
An intensive care unit of a designated hospital in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 6. (China Daily/Reuters)
The storm will pass, humankind will survive, but the most of us, who will still be alive, will have to rethink health care with a new species-centered approach. This is some sort of revolution, of darwinist ringtone. More and more treats will come through the form of invisible viruses rather than global-power wars or ethnicity threats.
So, how to adapt beyond nationalisms? The virus already gave us the clue. There is no such thing as borders, after all. We are all connected, and the only way to be prepared for the next pandemic (it's just a matter of when, not a matter of if) will be through education and quality health care without frontiers. Both the epidemics themselves and the resulting economic crisis are global problems. They can be solved effectively only through global co-operation, and, as utopian as it may sound today, this world needs global health care to keep going forward. Crazy enough, it'll have to be free for all.
2. Remote working actually works.
Last year, before the world met this new type of coronavirus, we decided to integrate unlimited vacations & remote working into our company's DNA. I cannot underline enough what an incredible and tangible advantage this decision gave us when the lock-down hit us. We woke up one day and were immediately ready and trained to work this social distancing environment out. What's even better, seeing everyone's motivation just confirmed what we thought: a team is all about trust.
At Xceed, on our first day of quarantined work, we started the tradition of taking one cup of "coffee”all together.
Companies, or better their top-level managers, are well known to lack trust towards their employees (will they spend the paid remote time watching Netflix?) and while this has been changing over the last couple years, we were still far from clearing this gap. But here's the beauty of emergencies: they fast-forward historical processes. Decisions, that in normal times could take decades to deliberate, are passed in a matter of minutes and become a fixture for the generations to come.
The unstoppable process of engrossing freedom for workers, originally a "tech startups’ thing”, is now being applied to legacy industries and public entities that would have never thought of implementing it any time soon. Paradoxically, not even the most effective virus could have spread so fast overnight. Bear in mind, remote working is just a medium. The real lesson learnt will be about belief. Putting full faith in employees is not a matter of choice anymore, and enterprise must now realize that they will not survive this virus without every organization's most basic (but often forgone) component: trust.
3. Global warming is real (and we are not ready for it).
Someone must be screaming "I told you!" right now. Scientists, epidemiologists, politicians, virologists and activists have all been warning about an imminent catastrophic pandemic for years. I myself remember having this same exact discussion with a friend i met in India, just a month before the coronavirus case burst out. Meanwhile, the USA, cut 591 staff positions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the last 3 years, right after being told of this high-risk warning.
This a well known copy-paste prefix to the global warming threat. We were not ready for Covid-19, and we are certainly not ready for all the natural and biological disasters that global warming will cause. The difference is this time we don't have the "this only happen in movies” excuse. And that this virus gave us two key lessons:
A) If we go on like this, Nature will kill us.
B) Stopping this ticking bomb is hard but not as hard as we may have thought.
Up to a week ago, I would have never thought we could fix air pollution or see dolphins swimming in Venice's canals any time in the future. Alright, shutting down multiple industries and locking people in their houses is not really a sustainable way of becoming sustainable, but that's not the point. We got the actual proof that we can make it. We can fix this. And we learnt this not through some online crowdfunding promising to plant trees in a nobodyknowswhere part of the world. This time we have seen the difference that taking our own small -single person- polluting impact does on the planet.
Satellite Images, Wuhan region NO2 density. 2019 vs.2020. (Nasa)
Satellite Images, EU NO2 density. Jan 2020 vs. Mar 2020. (ESA)
Another immediate effect on China's lockdown is that it likely saved tens of thousands of lives by slashing air pollution, as analyzed by Prof. Marshall Burke from Stanford University. Two months of pollution reduction “likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China,” he writes on G-Feed. “Even under more conservative assumptions, the lives saved due to pollution reductions are roughly 20x the number of those directly lost to the virus” Burke writes.
It's our time now, to take this lesson in the right way. Those countries and corporations whose pollution slowed down because of the virus are the same ones whose finances have been heavily hurt by this economic recession. That's why the next challenge will be to improve our environment without crippling our economy. Governments will have to subsidize companies not delay or cancel climate-friendly projects. And what about countries themselves? The reason to boost, rather than to stop, their environmental investments will have to come from us.
4. We started to value things more.
Health, family, friends. I too often felt as they were all given. The fail fast - fail often culture swallowed me down a workaholism spiral of never being satisfied enough for the work done. There was always something new to try, something extra to build, to market, to grow, to develop. This forced quarantine, linked with the feeling of impotence over this riveting virus, forced all of us to stop our everyday patterns for a moment. We have now a chance to heal ourselves from our own overdoses. Work, career, selfishness, appearance, instagram... find your drug and name it as you like.
This is not a movie shot. (John Cameron)
This compulsory vacation without traveling and vices is a bless after all. It's a vacation for souls and it may as well be the only occasion we will ever be given to take this sabbatical time off all together.
This mandatory rehab is a chance for self discovery, for getting strength through calmness. For listening and nurturing nature. For caring about details we forgo in our everyday life. For understanding the real value of a handshake and never taking it as obvious. (random fact I googled while typing this article: the handshake is just a couple thousand years old)
5. We learnt to believe in each other as species.
I kept this lesson for last cause I find it to be the most important discovery throughout this locked-in journey. Last and foremost. We are not like a virus.
We, sapiens, can share information with our neighbor, with our partner, with the rest of the world. We have developed an infinite set of tools to help us spreading ideas (although yes, we often use it for hate and regression rather than progress). We have alphabets, we have universal body languages, we have snapchat, twitter, instagram, whatsapp. These are immense competitive advantages for humans over viruses. A SARS-CoV-2 in China and a SARS-CoV-2 in the US can simply not swap tips about how to infect humans.
That's it. The very best of this apocalypse is to me learning that we are all humans after all. That borders don't exist. That we are in this together. That we don't need to be hiking a mountain summit to say "hello” to a stranger walking in the opposite direction. That we can support and empower our own species just from the next door. And that's the beauty of Covid-19. We needed a harsh slap to get together. To feel compassion, to truly empathize with other cultures and to learn that, in the end, everything happens for a reason.
Margarita and her sister. Barcelona, March 2020. We have been living right in front of each other for over 3 years and never met. There's no day now where we don't jump on the balcony for a quick hello in the morning or for the daily applause to support the virus fighters at 8pm sharp. Today she told me that the elderly should just die and follow the course of nature, letting the youngsters take over. We laughed about it together, and she smiled through her favorite red lipstick, as if this was her daily occasion to escape reality.