“Don’t attach locations or ethnicity to the disease, this is not a ‘Wuhan Virus,’ ‘Chinese Virus’ or ‘Asian Virus,” the World Health Organization wrote in a February 2020 bulletin. This was funny in a way because the last pandemic of this scale was called ‘Spanish Flu’ ( the disease did not even originate there) and more recently there was MERS or Middle eastern respiratory syndrome. Not to forget the fact that Ebola was named after a river in Congo. Lyme in Lyme disease is a geographic location.

If calling COVID 19 a China Virus is Racist and unfair. So was the case with other diseases. But one significant difference between them and COVID 19 is that China has been very secretive of the virus and has been reluctant in carrying out transparent investigations into the origins of the virus. China did exactly what the world expected it to do. Hide any useful information. Arrested the guy who tried to warn others about the disease and left him to die. So, irrespective of the argument on weather associating the virus with Wuhan is bigotry or not, Chinese government is responsible for all the deaths that happened in the first wave of infections. Let’s call it for what it is. There of no need to mince any words here.

But since then, for every wave of infections and every variant of COVID 19 going around, we and we alone are responsible. By we I mean the great citizens of the world. Most people blame the governments for not doing enough. But this is not an earthquake or a tsunami for the government to send in a disaster recovery team and quickly fix it. It’s a disease that transmits trough proximity and can be contained by self restraint. To put in simple words, if everyone in the world stays where ever they are and puts in an effort to live with the minimal interactions required to survive, everything would have gone back to normal long time ago.

But we are a species that isn’t able to eradicate AIDS. A virus far more easy to avoid. Why is it so? We call ourselves the only cognitive living organism in the world. Why can’t we restrain ourselves for a few days/weeks/months? I have hardly moved my ass in more than a year. It’s not easy. I too crave a vacation outside the 4 walls of my house. But I’m just trying to fulfill my share of social responsibility.

Is it the instant gratification that humans are now habituated to? Is it the over compartmentalization, politicization and polarization of news feeds? Is it utter disregard and lack of value to others lives? May it is one, may be it is everything. Except for a handful of countries that actively against vaccinations or use of masks, most have been at least trying to inoculate citizens and are advising caution. But this is all they can do. Ironically, this is not a new problem. Part of it is ignorance, part of it is apathy and part of it is desperation.

Funny enough each of these parts are associated with a different set of people. But it all boils down to greed. Lets imagine a world without equity. A world where every organization is not at the gun point called Share Value and is forced to show quarter on quarter, year on year improvement in revenues and profit. Lets imagine a world where everyone doesn’t need to get a pay hike every year. Imagine, even its hypothetical, a world without loans and credit cards. Wouldn’t it reduce the number of desperate people and desperate companies?

We have slowly been brainwashed into valuing non-essentials more than essentials. In Nature, there are lots of experiments. Some work and others don’t. The natural selection process had previously helped weed out everything that did not work or would not work. But the Homosapians have changed the rules. We do not contribute anything to Earth, we only consume and we are not that smart about out future as well. The issue of melting polar ice caps and global warming always divided people when there was no room for argument at all. Its just the Oil companies want to stay rich, that is why they find new stupid, dumb reasons against renewable energy. Sometimes they are do it through phony research funding, some times they do it through lobbying. This is best explained in the dystopian comedy Idiocracy.

Look at the logical way to price something. Its the cost of manufacturing + cost of logistics + Profit Margin. This is how most of the essentials are priced. But what about Non essentials? Coke is cheaper than Water in many countries. You take water, add a bunch of things to it and a shit load of sugar, then market it like crazy and still end up selling it for less than the cheapest ingredient involved in Manufacturing? How can these numbers ad up?

They have build a very powerful maze for common people where no matter which route you take, you will always end up where you started. Most people do not have enough savings to sit out of their job. So, not sure if and when we will get out of this cycle. Until we do that, we may not even get out of this pandemic.