Covid 19 Impact Quotes

Whatever grace might 'trickle down' from the higher regions of a given society to the lower is no more essential than that which rises and converges from the opposite direction.

I wish we changed before we had to. COVID-19 brought so many changes to the world that will benefit everyone. We needed the wake-up call.

Even the tiniest chunk of code, like Coronavirus (COVID-19), may cause a major disruptive impact on the global operating system, something that was suddenly revealed to the public awareness in early 2020.

That day was also the first time a case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in South Korea, which promptly began an orderly regime of testing that limited the immediate impact of the virus. In contrast, Trump that night addressed the growing threat with his customary salesman’s patter. “We have it totally under control,” he said. No, they didn’t, and Trump’s feckless indifference in those early days cost thousands of American lives.

You go through life hoping to have a chance to make a difference,” says Smith. “I’m just grateful to have the strength left to have an impact.

While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

The current coronavirus crisis continues to have a significant impact on the economy, employment, and people’s lives in general. And, as many meetings are now conducted on Zoom, Skype, or some other cloud-based video conferencing service, it is even having a psychological impact for those fortunate enough to be employed.

We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.

If I've learned one thing in my years of studying the social impacts of disease, it's that we live in a world where we're connected, for better or worse, to the people in our human community by the microbes that we share between us. And in times of contagious disease crisis, if we fail to recognize our shared connection, we are most certainly doomed, because our fates hang together, yoked by tiny particles that threaten us all. Scores of historical figures-both famous and infamous-have taught me as much. By learning the stories of those who lived before us, by educating ourselves about the worlds they inhabited and the viruses and bacteria that lived in, with, and through them, we can learn how to emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever before and well prepared for the next new disease we will inevitably face. If we don't learn from their examples, however, I foresee a world adrift, damned by alienation from its own history, a victim of self-annihilation cued, rather than caused, by the novel coronavirus.

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans66 when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children.67 The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens.68 America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.

Staying at home during this COVID-19 lockdown period is an opportunity to go within ourselves, with less distractions to search for our true calling, to search and find as to what contribution can we make to humanity and make the world a better place. We finally have an opportunity to be with ourselves, or by ourselves  because during this lockdown period we are quieter, not out and about everyday shopping, socialising, eating, drinking, going to shows and team sports, being on the treadmill of life etc. We can during this period give ourselves an opportunity to reflect, renew and know ourselves. You have a choice to make now during this lockdow period as to what kind of a person you want to be from now on, also and what kind of future you want to build.  And that, begins in your very homes, with how you treat your family members. This will move in to the post lockdown period as to how you will treat your friends, neighbours and people in your community and general public. How you conduct yourself (with everyone around you) is influencing all of us as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng and also reflect as an image of Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to the general public. We all feel you and are impacted by your thought streams and actions. Decide to contribute your talents to society to better your community and people around you. And when your society and peole around you are better, you will be fulfilled and you would have contributed to building a better world for all. We need to stay focused and true to the vision that we hold for how we want life for Ba ga Mohlala and Banareng to look over the coming decades, even hundreds and thousands of years to come. Together, we will create a new better word for Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng. We must be patient, dedicated to our vision and mission and never, ever give up. Together let us to create the path of an empowered future.

It can be stated that the post-pandemic future for innovation and entrepreneurship will be different. Whatever entrepreneurial and innovation activities that are happening during the pandemic outbreak, are likely to have a lasting impact on society. The current indication of entrepreneurship initiatives and the benevolence gives us a clear cause of adapted business environment even in the post-Covid-19 world.

In other cases, the reasons for forgetting are more prosaic, more epidemiological, more related to numbers: the particular pandemic disease was not fatal enough (2009 H1N1 influenza), or it did not afflict enough people because it was not infectious enough (MERS), or it burned out too fast (SARS-1), or it afflicted a confined subgroup of the human population (Ebola), or it was brought low by a vaccine (measles and polio), or by treatment (HIV), or by eradication (smallpox), allowing most people to simply push the disease out of their minds. While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.

Economists describe the precise endogeneity problem outlined here as simultaneity. Lockdowns affect potential deaths, but potential deaths can also impact the adoption of lockdowns. There’s a two-way causation. In this particular case, then, the endogeneity problem might be a source of bias that leads to an underestimation of the effectiveness of lockdowns in reducing deaths, at least in the near-term after lockdowns are implemented.

What was the new research he was referencing? A research document that claimed to show benefit to masking based on reviewing a collection of studies, which somehow ignored all of the randomized controlled trials showing no effect from masking. These kinds of glaring omissions have been a continuous problem among scientists desperate to justify the implementation of masks despite the gold standard of evidence indicating they would be effectively useless. One randomized controlled trial did occur during 2020, conducted by researchers in Denmark. Those researchers’ objective was clearly stated: “To assess whether recommending surgical mask use outside the home reduces wearers’ risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in a setting where masks were uncommon and not among recommended public health measures.”25 Given all of the pre-COVID scientific research, it should come as no surprise that the results showed no benefit to mask wearing to protect against infection with COVID-19. The Denmark researchers’ summary clearly identifies the lack of any significant impact: “The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers.” Thousands of Danes were enrolled in this trial, the most comprehensive effort by any scientific researchers to study the potential effect of mask wearing by the general public. Participants were provided high-quality surgical masks, not the cloth face coverings recommended by many public health agencies. In the best approximation of a gold-standard clinical trial that researchers could design, the results showed absolutely no statistically significant benefit. The findings, surprisingly, received no major media attention, nor did they generate questions for the expert community that now universally embrace masking.

But even against the backdrop of rising death and disease, and an especially cruel impact that the virus was having on Philadelphia’s poorest residents, the steps stirred anger and opposition. On one side of the debate, the Philadelphia Inquirer said the orders went too far, calling them a product of, and a currency for, the unfounded panic that accompanied the flu.

Modeling suggested that timing matters: the interventions had their greatest impact if schools were closed before 1 percent of a local population was infected.41 More systematic studies had found that in the setting of flu epidemics, closing schools for long stretches of time reduced the total number of community cases.42 These steps could also reduce peak attack rates by up to 45 percent among a community, according to the research (and by as much as about 50 percent among children).43 Real-world studies, including surveys done after the 2009 pandemic that analyzed the influence of school closure on transmission, supported these conclusions.

The president was right to focus his attention on trying to get schools opened for a host of reasons, and principally the important role that in-class instruction plays for children. But the White House had failed to hone in on a root cause for why many districts remained shut. The CDC’s guidelines were the single greatest obstacle. I was speaking to the White House over this time period, and some officials there didn’t fully appreciate how much impact the six-foot requirement was having on efforts to reopen schools in the fall. They didn’t connect the lines between their policy goals, the parts of the pandemic plan that impacted those objectives, and the actions of the CDC that frustrated these outcomes. It was a breakdown in policymaking, and the way the pandemic playbook was implemented, that would plague other aspects of our response.

At the peak of the winter surge, we were losing as many as seven thousand patients a week in nursing homes to COVID. About thirty thousand long-term care facilities were impacted by COVID with outbreaks. Less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in long-term care facilities, but by the end of 2020, this population accounted for about 40 percent of all COVID deaths—nearly 175,000 in total.55 During the worst week of infections, the week of December 17, there were 72,586 COVID cases diagnosed in nursing homes.

Dialysis facilities were another site where vulnerable patients congregated and where the impact of COVID was especially brutal. Dialysis patients suffered a higher rate of hospitalization for COVID disease than any other group in the Medicare program.

America’s dismal experience with COVID leaves us little choice but to expand the tools we use to inform us of new risks. In bolstering our pandemic preparedness, our purpose shouldn’t be merely to blunt the impact of the next pathogen that emerges, but to make sure that a calamity on the scale of COVID can never happen again, and the US can never be threatened in this way again.

But reality matters. One analysis estimates that, if control measures such as physical distancing had been implemented just one week earlier in the United States, the nation would have seen 61.6 percent fewer reported infections and 55.0 percent fewer reported deaths by May 3, 2020.65 Although responsibility for the pandemic cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of any single person, group, or institution—and the United States was not the only country to downplay early-warning signs of the virus—one of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic is that some of the worst outcomes could have been avoided had our predicament been acknowledged and acted upon at the appropriate time.

recent research found that individuals who had been reinfected with COVID-19 had a larger risk of hospitalization and death than those who had only been infected once. They were also more prone to develop new and persistent health concerns, including lung and heart problems, weariness, gastrointestinal and kidney disorders, diabetes, and cognitive anomalies.

Except that Trump is not crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline—these two features are at the very roots of his success. His followers’ basic stance is that of a “cognitive decline”: of denying the true impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, of global warming, of racism and sexism in the United States; of believing that if there are any serious threats to the American way of life, they must be the result of a conspiracy. Out of this decline emerged a substantial radical-Right movement, whose class base is (as in Fascism) a combination of lower middle-class white workers afraid of losing their privileges and their discreet billionaire enablers.

Preface to the Paperback Edition The coronavirus, a severe acute respiratory syndrome, has unleashed a pandemic since the original publication of Epidemics and Society. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is still too new and too poorly understood to allow us to assess its ultimate impact, but its broad contours have become sufficiently clear, and several of its features relate closely to the themes of this book. Like all pandemics, COVID-19 is not an accidental or random event. Epidemics afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other. Microbes that ignite pandemics are those whose evolution has adapted them to fill the ecological niches that we have prepared. COVID-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses. At the same time, demographic increase and frenetic urbanization lead to the invasion and destruction of animal habitat, altering the relationship of humans to the animal world. Particularly relevant is the multiplication of contacts with bats, which are a natural reservoir of innumerable viruses capable of crossing the species barrier and spilling over to humans.

The Great Resignation was big. Millions of people around the world quit their jobs rather than returning to the status quo of their working lives before the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global lockdown. The pandemic only accelerated trends that had been building for most of the century. Over the last four decades, the half-life of learned skills has dropped from 30 years to fewer than four, in large part because of the accelerating pace of change driven by the tech revolution. According to noted business visionary John Seely, this trend will continue to accelerate in the years ahead. While employees were forced to work at home, the reason they could work at home was thanks to technological breakthroughs like Zoom, smartphones, ultra-high-speed broadband, and more.

COVID-19 outbreak made them a norm of public life. Many also wore helmets and carried melee weapons. Together, the crowd of around four hundred brought traffic to a standstill—by now a regular occurrence in the City of Roses, as Portland is known by. As usual, the police stayed away. They knew whom the streets belonged to. Working as a journalist with a phone and a new GoPro camera, I slowly made my way toward the front of the crowd. Some of the protesters recognized me. They glared and whispered in the ears of their comrades. Luis Enrique Marquez looked right at me. The 48-year-old Rose City Antifa member has been arrested so many times at violent protests in Portland over the past few years that he no longer bothers to wear a mask. Still, I ignored the stares and continued forward. By this point, the crowd’s chants had changed. “No hate! No fear!” they began shouting. Before I made it much farther, someone—or something—hit me hard in the back of the head. I was nearly knocked to the ground from the impact. Never having been in a fight, I naively asked myself in the moment: “Did someone just trip and fall into me?” Before I could turn around to look, a sea of bodies dressed in black surrounded me. In the background, I could still hear the crowd chant, “No hate!” Ironically, all I saw next—and felt—was the pure embodiment of hatred. Staring at an amorphous mob of faceless shadows, I froze. Suddenly, clenched fists repeatedly struck my face and head from all directions. My right knee buckled from the impact. The masked attackers wore tactical gloves—gloves hardened with fiberglass on the knuckles. It’s likely some of them used brass knuckles as well. I put my arms up to surrender, but this only signaled to them to beat me more ferociously. Someone then snatched my camera—my evidence. I desperately tried but failed to hold on to it. The masked thief melted into the crowd, a function of the “black bloc.” Another person ran up and kicked me twice in the groin. Someone bashed me on the head from behind with a stiff placard or sign.

A more contemporary example is COVID-19. It’s too soon know the full extent of its impact, but a number of businesses, including retailers, airlines, hotels, universities, and commercial real estate properties, which may have previously considered themselves “unsinkable,” will be “sunk” by a tiny virus. To avoid a similar fate in the future, every business must understand that resilience is often as important as efficiency and profits, and that long-term viability isn’t always defined by financial success—sometimes it is defined by the ability to survive.

One way is to start from the recognition that nation states seem unlikely to give an international agency the power it needs to overrule nation states. So if countries have all the power, they have to find some way to use it in the common interest. If the WHO cannot tell a big country what to do, other countries will have to. Which might work, especially as they are all trading partners. A global government, as governments are usually understood, is not likely to work. Complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam says that when social systems get too complex, old-fashioned hierarchies, with one guy (it’s usually a guy) in charge, don’t work anymore because one person can’t get their head around everything. Hierarchies are already devolving into global networks as the real power structures in many areas of global concern, writes author and governance expert Anne-Marie Slaughter, especially things that can be managed by networks of experts. So we need a network. We now have an annual meeting at which WHO member states tell the WHO what they want it to do. What if we also had a more constantly convened, high-level council of countries to deal with global threats, that could demand that individual governments act on big deals like suspicions of incipient pandemics and other problems that could have impacts far beyond one country? And what if it was advised by a network of scientists-on-call, like the one the WHO now convenes for emergencies?

The ability to make machines can be used for more effective food production, distribution, clinical cures and better health. On the other hand, the same ability can be used to decimate species including human beings. The record of science taking a solo flight by discarding values in recent times has not impacted our technical progress, but it has resulted in the unprecedented loss of human lives in wars, extinction of species, ecological imbalances and irreversible damage to the environment.

The parliamentary public accounts committee, however, would later be less complimentary. The committee chastised the Treasury for waiting until mid-March before deciding on economic support schemes – despite the warnings from medical chiefs from January onwards. The MPs on the committee found that the government’s economic reaction to Covid-19 had been rushed and, in the process, neglected many sectors that needed help. This would have a long-term negative impact on the economy, it concluded. The sheer scale of the government failings were ‘astonishing’, the committee said.

Wolfers puts it this way: let’s suppose that social distancing overall works to save hundreds of thousands of lives. If the pharmaceutical sector had developed a pill that had the same impact as social distancing in terms of saving lives, people would have probably been willing to pay a lot for it. This would show up as a big gain in GDP. But social distancing, as a nonmarket activity, does not show up in GDP, despite similar benefits. Even if not everyone were willing to pay for it, the GDP gains of the social distancing pill would at least somewhat have offset GDP losses elsewhere.

Death too is just a number. In these Covid Times, a score. Times when you become numb. De sensitized. Having seen so much. Another death fails to move or have any impact. It is just a number

I PALE HORSE 1 THE VIRUS NOW known as Hendra wasn’t the first of the scary new bugs. It wasn’t the worst. Compared to some others, it seems relatively minor. Its mortal impact, in numerical terms, was small at the start and has remained small; its geographical scope was narrowly local and later episodes haven’t carried it much more widely. It made its debut near Brisbane, Australia, in 1994. Initially there were two cases, only one of them fatal. No, wait, correction: There were two human cases, one human fatality. Other victims suffered and died too, more than a dozen—equine victims—and their story is part of this story. The subject of animal disease and the subject of human disease are, as we’ll see, strands of one braided cord. The original emergence of Hendra virus didn’t seem very dire or newsworthy unless you happened to live in eastern Australia. It couldn’t match an earthquake, a war, a schoolboy gun massacre, a tsunami. But it was peculiar. It was spooky. Slightly better known now, at least among disease scientists and Australians, and therefore slightly less spooky, Hendra virus still seems peculiar. It’s a paradoxical thing: marginal, sporadic, but in some larger sense representative. For exactly that reason, it marks a good point from which to begin toward understanding the emergence of certain virulent new realities on this planet—realities that include the death of more than 30 million people since 1981. Those realities involve a phenomenon called zoonosis. A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. Pondering them individually—for starters, this relatively obscure case from Australia—provides a salubrious reminder that everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere.

COVID19 will have a deep and lasting impact on the world we live in. Our world will get clearly divided into two eras – Pre COVID19 and Post COVID19 era.

COVID-19 represents the single greatest inflection point that global society has experienced. How we manage through this pandemic and its aftermath will impact the course of humanity for decades to come.