We in New Zealand, are among few nations on the planet which have relatively come out almost unscathed as compared to rest of the world. What a traumatic time we have been through. The world is still in grip of this contagious virus and till the time of writing this article, number of infected people world-wide is staggering over 3.2 million and number of dead over 225,000. Some scientists are claiming that number of infected people could be over a billion-mark, looking at the condition of some poor and vulnerable countries which do not enough infrastructure to do even the basic tests. The only soothing news in the otherwise gloomy scenario is that around a million infected people have recovered also from this virus.

Though this virus started from China in November 2019, before spreading all over the world, the worst effected country in world is the superpower America which has more than a million people infected and around 60,000 already dead due to Covid-19 virus. China, where it all began, did the biggest blunder of hiding this pandemic outbreak news from rest of the world until it became uncontrollable. If China would have timely informed World Health Organisation about this virus, the world would have been a much safer place today than. Unfortunately for some reasons WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom tried to defend China on few occasions including claiming that Corona is not a contagious virus. This misinformation gave scope for suspicion to many about the functioning of WHO. What ever the reason of the spread of this virus maybe, it is still a matter of investigation, but the entire world has paid a very big price for the recklessness of one country.

The economies of many countries world over have already crippled due to the lockdowns, to contain the spread of virus. Some countries are at risk of collapsing and others may take decades to recover from the losses due to the complete halt of all economic and industrial activities. Apart from loss of lives in several hundred thousand, millions of people world over have lost jobs. According to some conspiracy theories, this virus is man made and has been spread deliberately by a country to derail the world economy. If this rumour really comes out to be true than the consequences of this will be beyond our imagination. The verbal war of words has already started between world’s largest and the second largest economies and threats and counter threats are being issued every day. We hope that better sense would prevail, and people of the world would thwart any effort of adding anything silly to our already existing miseries.

In the hindsight, the lockdowns imposed in most countries of the world to stop the spread of deadly Covid-19 has come as boon in form of healing of Mother Earth. The industries world over are closed, the entire air and road traffic put to a stop and people world over could add nothing to the pollution due to being confined inside their homes worked wonders to make this world almost pollution free. The Government in India spent billions of rupees to reduce air and water pollution without much success but a strictly enforced lockdown has done miracles, pollution levels have come down dramatically, holy river Ganges’ water is drinkable now and you can now see the great Himalayan ranges from a distance of 250 kilometres in Punjab. Even a rare hole in the Ozone layer, spreading over a million square kilometres area, created by the low temperature at the north pole has been filled because of reduced pollution and self-healing by nature.

I think, we all humans need to learn lesson from the pandemic calamity that we need to reduce our desires and demands and start to differentiate between needs and wants. If we really want to live in a peaceful, problem free and pollution free world, we will have to start it from our own homes now.

-Yugal Parashar