Any human with functioning ears has heard the utterance of the term Covid-19. Even the ones without functioning ears have become aware of the Covid-19 virus. In the USA, most people have been hearing and dealing with Covid-19 for a year and a half. Through the course of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been many disappointments. From the fact that the virus got this out of control and spread worldwide to the dismal way governments and bureaucracies alike handled the situation, it's not hard to see why people have been upset about it. One thing that has been most unsettling to me in this entire situation is the lack of cohesion that transpired from the crisis.
Many people have hoped for a long time that humans would come together in harmony to fight a crisis that threatens all. A hope that a shared enemy would help bring us together, like how Americans rallied together to fight in World War II and again against the Communist regimes of the 20th century. As we entered the 21st century, some believed (and some still believe) that climate change could be the catalyst that brings cohesion to society and bands us together against the common enemy. For now, this has yet to be the case, and I don't know if climate change will ever be the driving force of harmony in the world. So, when Covid-19 made its grand entrance into existence and took center stage in March of 2020, once again, there was hope that this could be the common enemy needed or social cohesion.
This hope was a valid thought in March 2020, and for the two weeks that public health officials and governments convinced everyone to stay home and help flatten the curve, it seemed like we may have found our common enemy, yet as we all know from what would transpire next, that was far from the case. Divides were cast, and soon ideology grouped people based on their risk tolerance towards the virus and how they felt society should handle it. Since we were already living in polarized times, elites drew the line, and virology was also a matter of political allegiance. To this day, this remains a tangled web that seems unlikely to come undone without cutting the knot out altogether. The question still lingers though, why didn't Covid-19 bring us together?
To answer this question, it takes an understanding of the enemy itself. Looking at Covid-19, the severity of the virus, and the potential fallout that can occur if you have caught it, there are clear indicators as to why this did not bring us together. First, we can look at the pure experience of having the virus. There is no one way that someone gets sick and experiences Covid. Some people are asymptomatic and live life as joyous as they usually would, not even realizing they are carrying and spreading the virus. However, other people find themselves in desperate need of medical attention, bound to respirators clinging to any breath they can take. Since there is such a divergence of how the virus affects people, it becomes clearer why people have differing opinions on how serious to take the virus.
It's not to say we shouldn't take the virus seriously at all. Still, to the same extent, when the case-fatality rate is lower than your probability of dying in a car accident, then it is easy to see why the threat of Covid didn't bind us together in solidarity against the common enemy. For example, let's say we are dealing with a Black Death type of scenario where 1 in 3 people are dropping dead from the virus, then you would see a more solid effort to mobilize and defeat the virus. Since this isn't the case, society and individuals alike are basing their actions on the virus's actual risk. One other thing to remember in all of this is that most deaths have been within older demographics. Although the Delta variant may prove to be more harmful to children than previous variants, it still looks like the elderly will get hit the hardest. This difference in mortality based on age is another reason we didn't sound the alarms earlier and louder. Unlike the Spanish Flu, which equally affected the extremely young and extremely old, we are dealing with a situation where children are relatively safe from harm and minimally affected when sick with the virus compared to older populations. This difference means that parents did not worry about the virus the same way they would have if direct evidence of the virus detrimentally impacting mass amounts of children existed. If it had, we would have seen a mass effort to mitigate the harm to children and a stronger case for why society must eliminate the virus.
For all these reasons, and I'm sure there might be more, Covid-19 was not the common enemy that humanity needed to bring it together. While I still believe that crisis can help society find common ground and work together, I have learned one thing from the pandemic that dictates if we are willing to do so. The only way a crisis will bring us together is if the situation is immediate and has a high probability of death for all or a high chance of disrupting the status quo for all. While it doesn't have to be all humans literally, it does have to affect most people for the crisis to be compelling enough for cooperation. This belief can be concerning, considering a crisis of this magnitude is not a desirable proposition for humanity. Any student of history knows that disasters come and go. What is left to be determined is how society will react to the disasters.