Reverberations
O Brave New Normal World Book Two: Living with Coronavirus
The government proposes something and it gets disputed right away….in March and April people were so afraid they were complying and they didn't contest the rules as much. But now people see that as cases are increasing the death rate is remaining low and they wonder why they have to do all these things.
- Professor Yves Van Laethem, an advisor to the government of Belgium
spoken on 6 October 2020
The pandemic unleashed a strange half-world - not the comfortably familiar one we all knew and loved, but one in which we had to tread carefully and remain vigilant. Subsequently, it became a game of risk management that created tensions between the political desire to return to some form of normality and the need to protect lives. Inevitably, this conflict of interests led to confusion, confrontation and (sadly) deaths. Despite some catastrophic misjudgements at the governmental level, we ourselves must also shoulder some of the blame. Social media added fuel to the fire for those who chose to challenge the official guidance as an infringement on their personal freedoms and rights and preferred to interpret events as evidence of institutional conspiracies. Amid this mayhem, our planet was suffering. It was estimated that one million of our eight million species on Earth are threatened with extinction – some within decades. A report by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London revealed that animal populations globally had plunged by 68% in more than twenty thousand populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish in the last fifty years.
Book Two of my series covers events between March 2020 and December 2022. It is a layman’s perspective of the ramifications and interconnections that emanated from the crisis, covering not just the immediate catastrophic impact but also the longer-term corollaries of the pandemic - some of them still affecting our daily lives even now. This particular book looks at some of the mistakes made in trying to control the pandemic - including care homes, lockdown regulations, international travel and testing and tracing. But against this backdrop so much else was going on that affected our lives. Among those were Brexit, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and inquires into past disasters such as Hillsborough, Grenfell Towers and the Manchester Arena bombing. Our own role in these affairs was at best incongruous. Not only were we an increasingly destructive force in the struggle to save our natural world, but the pandemic shed unwelcome light on some of our ‘opportune’ behaviours in the uncertain climate coronavirus created.
It is available in softback print at £34.99 and can be obtained via my AuthorHouse web page at O Brave ‘New Normal’ World (stevegleadhill.com) or on Amazon. Alternatively, you can get the book or ebook (£2.99 via Amazon Kindle) by keying in O Brave New Normal World which will display both Books One and Two. You can also contact me with any queries or views via my email (steve.gleadhill@gmail.com).