Pandemic Era Quotes

I’m a pandemic-era teacher, dammit. That basically qualifies me for a presidential

We’ve always had death. We’ve just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won’t happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere – to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.

This could be one of the unexpected upsides of COVID-19 and the lockdowns. It made us more aware and sensitive about the great markers of time: the precious moments spent with friends and our families, the seasons and nature, the myriads of small things that require a bit of time (like talking to a stranger, listening to a bird or admiring a piece of art) but that contribute to well-being. The reset: in the post-pandemic era, we might have a different appreciation of time, pursuing it for greater happiness.[

At best, Henry had only slowed an inevitable, history-shaping pandemic. Governments would fall. Economies would collapse. Wars would arise. Why did we think that our own modern era was immune to the assault of humanity’s most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?

I’m a pandemic-era teacher, dammit. That basically qualifies me for a presidential run.

Things may be falling apart, but the mind that is stayed on God will cause us to stand in the midst of pressures.

It is true that in the post-pandemic era, personal health and well-being will become a much greater priority for society, which is why the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back into the bottle. But it is for those who govern and each of us personally to control and harness the benefits of technology without sacrificing our individual and collective values and freedoms.

As Alenka Zupančič put it, the problem with the idea of the end of the world is the same as with Fukuyama’s end of history: the end itself doesn’t end, we just get stuck in a weird immobility. The secret wish of us all, what we think about all the time, is only one thing: when will it end? But it will not end: it is reasonable to see the ongoing pandemic as announcing a new era of ecological troubles.

The evidence is plain to see all around us: in an era of multiple pandemics that threaten the continued existence of human life on planet earth, we are stymied by imaginary constraints concocted by economists.

We are still in the Enlightenment era, and its “light” is spreading everywhere. The fully enlightened world, the fully civilized world, is indeed disaster. The prospect of modernity without end faces each and all of us.

For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era. In March 2020 (at the onset of the pandemic), a group of researchers published a study in The Lancet that found that confinement measures produced a range of severe mental health outcomes, such as trauma, confusion and anger.[153] Although avoiding the most severe mental health issues, a large portion of the world population is bound to have suffered stress to various degrees. First and foremost, it is among those already prone to mental health issues that the challenges inherent in the response to the coronavirus (lockdowns, isolation, anguish) will be exacerbated. Some will weather the storm, but for certain individuals, a diagnostic of depression or anxiety could escalate into an acute clinical episode. There are also significant numbers of people who for the first time presented symptoms of serious mood disorder like mania, signs of depression and various psychotic experiences. These were all triggered by events directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns, such as isolation and loneliness, fear of catching the disease, losing a job, bereavement and concerns about family members and friends. In May 2020, the National Health Service England’s clinical director for mental health told a Parliamentary committee that the “demand for mental healthcare would increase ‘significantly’ once the lockdown ended and would see people needing treatment for trauma for years to come”.[154] There is no reason to believe that the situation will be very different elsewhere.

win. I thought the bureaucrats who had overseen the Emergency Rental Assistance program deserved a parade. They had to settle for scattered applause. When the ERA program was sputtering in the unsteady early days, it seemed that everyone was writing and tweeting about it. Later, when the rollout was working, it was ignored. Because journalists and pundits and social influencers did not celebrate the program, ERA garnered few champions in Washington. Elected leaders learned that they could direct serious federal resources to fighting evictions, make a real dent in the problem, and reap little credit for it. So, the Emergency Rental Assistance program became a temporary program, and we returned to normal, to a society where seven eviction filings are issued every minute.[31] Imagine if we had met the results of the ERA program with loud cheers. Imagine if we had taken to social media and gushed over what a difference it had made. Imagine if newspapers had run headlines that read, “Biden Administration Passes Most Important Eviction Prevention Measure in American History.” Imagine if we’d worked together to ensure that the low eviction regime established during the pandemic became the new normal. But we chose to shrug instead. Poor renters in the future will pay for this, as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a “messaging problem” when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair. Meaningful, tangible change had arrived, and we couldn’t see it. When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.” The New England Journal of Medicine, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the COVID-19 Era,” May 21, 2020. * It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing.

If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom, reoriented America’s opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6. They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, on his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, on the rise in political violence during his tenure in office, and on his encouragement of malevolent conspiracy theories. Trump joined the ranks of American villains from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Johnson, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace.

In my discipline, we affectionately refer to this sort of box (culture) as a zeitgeist, which literally translates to 'time ghost.' Unfortunately for any of you expecting spooky surprises, a zeitgeist doesn't refer to a literal ghost but is better understood as the 'spirit of the age,' although even this doesn't quite pin down its meaning. Think of any stereotype of any decade in the last century-from the Roaring Twenties, Flower Power of the sixties-any of these could certainly be said to illustrate the zeitgeist of that era. But zeitgeists can also be more specific than this, and its the SSDC that ends up developing a decent portion our zeitgeists, the sorts of zeitgeists that can be doubly hard to see outside of because they define more than just lifestyle practices. They define everything we think we know about our collective identities and our collective realities. Of relevance here is the zeitgeist of 'I know best about my body.' It's a lesson we teach people from almost before they can talk: 'You know your body,' 'Listen to your body,' and so forth. And while these are great truisms to teach our children about consent and empowerment as they grow older, they do come with blinders as they become our culture's zeitgeist. How can we really expect people to do a 180 on this logic all of a sudden in 2021?...It would be more productive of us to ask the broad cultural reasons that people resist such mandates, rather than scolding individuals for not conforming. Only then, I think, can we slowly begin to change our collective zeitgeists to those that encourage ownership and empowerment of our own bodies and also add in a healthy dose of 'Sometimes the body is silent' or 'Trust one's own body in collaboration with trusted experts' or something of the like. Ironically enough, the very denial of any shared realities that I mentioned in Lesson 20 is its own zeitgeist that has been gaining momentum for the last five years or so. I worry that this only allows the virus-or any other pathogen in our future-a foothold. Our divisions are their smorgasbord. How can we plan and strategize if we can't agree that we need to plan or strategize to begin with? This is one of the biggest hurdles we'll need to overcome to ensure humanity's long-term survival. It's possibly one of the most terrifying threats to humanity that I've seen in my lifetime-for if our only shared belief is that there is not shared beliefs, where do we go from there?

novel coronavirus pandemic revealed that America’s entrenched socioeconomic reality made life an agonizing choice between health and economic survival.

The ultimate alternative we are facing is: should we strive for a return to our (old) normality or should we accept that the pandemic is one of the signs that we are entering a new “post-human” era (“post-human” with regard to our predominant sense of what being human means)? This is clearly not just a choice that concerns our psychic life, but one that is in some sense “ontological,” concerning our entire relation to (what we experience as) reality.

Henderson coauthored a paper in 2006 that refutes the Glass work and the CDC guidelines. The Henderson paper states, “Historically, it has been all but impossible to prevent influenza from being imported into a country or political jurisdiction, and there has been little evidence that any particular disease mitigation measure has significantly slowed the spread of flu. . . . The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations . . .) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration. . . . Travel restrictions, such as closing airports . . . have historically been ineffective . . . and will likely be even less effective in the modern era.

The majority of the people in this current era understand after Covid-19 pandemic that life is unpredictable.

We are already starting to see signs of a post-antibiotic era, with the emergence of infections that are untreatable by all classes of antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance is an invisible pandemic.

People are often missing from the nostalgic view of nature, an omission detectable in the pandemic-era observation that “nature is healing.” Obviously, there is a difference between a healthy ecosystem and one stressed by people and pollution. But beyond that, a Westerner’s attempt to arrive at the idea of how things are “supposed to be” is usually fraught, because it doesn’t take into account who is doing the supposing. Indigenous groups are sometimes said to be more attentive to an ecology’s changes and temporal cues: flowerings, weather patterns, and migrations. Yet it’s too easy to read this as passive adaptation, a total lack of footprint, rather than active construction and collaboration with the nonhuman world.

old ladies once again shared their needles and the cats weren’t the only cats licking people

Back in late March 2020, standing in the Rose Garden -- hundreds of thousands of deaths ago -- President Donald Trump said, "I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we've ever had, and we didn't have death." We've always had death. We've just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won't happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere -- to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.

Para um indivíduo em 2020, todavia, o vislumbre de uma pandemia como essa era fundamentalmente de ordem estética, experienciado com o distanciamento seguro oferecido pela arte — que não deixou de povoar o imaginário das últimas décadas com toda sorte de desastres biológicos e epidêmicos, não raramente fabricando cenários de epidemias vampirescas. Certamente, nosso olhar para essas narrativas ganha complexidade no que atravessamos coletivamente o momento de crise. Uma questão, porém, inevitavelmente se assoma: do que nos fala essa — nada sutil — insistência?

Na era da (des)informação e da globalização, espalhando-se em progressão geométrica tal como o compartilhamento instantâneo das notícias falsas em um mundo intrinsecamente conectado, os próprios patógenos podem percorrer, em poucas horas, o globo; já não mais se deslocam lentamente, pegando carona com os passageiros de caravelas ou caravanas, meses a viajar por mares, rios ou estradas. As pandemias do século 21 — reais e ficcionais— são intrinsecamente subjugadas ao lado perverso da era da internet e dos aviões a jato.

One further detail. What would explain the peculiar sudden dips in atmospheric CO 2 between 200 and 600, 1300 and 1400, and 1500 and 1750? Those dates happen to match major human diebacks from pandemics—Roman-era epidemics, the Black Death in Europe, and the devastation of North American native populations by European diseases. Each time, forests grew back rapidly over empty agricultural land and drew down carbon dioxide.

We are in the era of the ‘Great Lies’.

Some spent years undermining Pfeiffer’s theory, and others—among them many of the most brilliant scientists of the era—took off after other alleged villains, spending untold thousands of man-hours in the crucially important but thankless task of proving themselves wrong.

We will need more of mental resilience; innovation, creative thinking and social connect to overcome and thrive post the COVID19 outbreak crisis.

Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth. During the Era of Wild Flavor, the range, scope, and amount of wild animal cuisine consumed would increase to include virtually every species on land, sea, or air. Wild Flavor (yewei in Mandarin) was considered a way of gaining “face,” prosperity, and good luck. Eating wild, Greenfeld explained, was only one aspect of these new ostentations in upscale consumption,

We are in the era of mutant killer viruses.

While our purpose was not to predict particular news headlines, we did at one point (see chapter 10, “A Fourth Turning Prophecy”) offer five hypothetical scenarios for how this Crisis era might accelerate toward its climax: a terrorist WMD attack on U.S. cities using airplanes; a “tea party” fiscal rebellion triggering a fiscal meltdown; a Russian invasion of a former Soviet state; a pandemic requiring martial law; and a succession threat triggered by a state’s refusal to follow federal law. Back when we wrote the book, many readers told us these scenarios seemed utterly implausible.