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As death knocks, people behave insanely
No more crowded places: A policeman disperses people at a café in Kademangan in Blitar regency, East Java, recently
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o more crowded places: A policeman disperses people at a café in Kademangan in Blitar regency, East Java, recently. Social distancing, which has seen people’s behavior change with many doing their best to keep a 2-meter distance from others, has become a way to slow the spread of COVID-19. (JP/Asip Hasani)
In the past, we only heard about apartheid in South Africa, untouchability in India, Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy.
What we are witnessing now is an unprecedented situation in our human history.
While death in the shape of the COVID-19 coronavirus is knocking on our doors, we are behaving worse than animals. With all that mutual suspicions and discrimination against our friends, neighbors, colleagues and our own family members, shall we still call ourselves human beings?
“I went down to the lobby of my apartment to pick up my mail and returned to my sixth floor using the lift. I was shocked to see the behavior of tenants, including some friends, in the lift. Everybody was suspicious of others. People are not even looking at each other as they faced the walls of the lift,” Heni Krisnha Idayani, a resident of an apartment in West Jakarta, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.
All of a sudden many people have become great actors. Everybody wants to use lift alone. People are ready to wait for a long time to get that chance.
“When the lift comes, if there are other tenants, people suddenly pretend either looking at their phones or seriously looking at a notice board until the lift is gone with other people,” Heni said laughingly.
“If somebody coughs inside the lift or outside the lift, everybody looks at that person angrily and tries to distance themselves from him.”
People stopped shaking hands, hugging and kissing. All these activities, in the past, used to be normal now they have become abnormal.
This might be the same in all apartments, office buildings, buses and trains in Jakarta.
The strange behaviour is mainly because of the so-called social distancing, which the World Health Organization calls physical distancing. President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo personally made appeals on TV for people to maintain a minimum two-meter distance between each other outside their houses.
Jakarta is a crowded city of more than 10.75 million people and it has the highest density of 14,464 people per square kilometer.
“How can we have this social distancing in Jakarta? In North Jakarta and other areas, for example, we have so many crowded areas. Many poor laborers live in small houses and that in shifts. Now everything is closed and people are told to stay at home,” Raju Dhingra, a long time resident of Jakarta, told the Post recently.
“Where is the room in those areas to maintain a social distance of two meters?”
Now the question is: Why we should maintain a two-meter long distance from each other in the first place? Does social distancing really make you safe from the coronavirus?
Many people say it is a perfect way to slow down the rapid spread of COVID-19, while some people are skeptical about physical distancing.
“It [the virus] can theoretically remain viable in aerosols for three hours, can be transmitted through contaminated surfaces and it easily spreads through coughing and sneezing,” lifescience.com website journalist Rafi Letzter wrote in an article about physical distancing on Wednesday.
According to Krys Johnson, an epidemiologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the two-meter long distance is designed to put up a roadblock to the aerosolized and droplet methods of transmitting the coronavirus. But it is just a reference point – not a hard line beyond which you are absolutely protected.
“It’s great to keep that distance between yourself and people you don’t live with in outdoor settings and it should be seen as an absolute minimum for indoor settings,” Johnson told the Life Science website.
However, the latest research shows that physical distancing may not stop or slow down of the coronavirus fully. Then what is the point in enforcing social distancing, which destroys the basic social norms of our lives and makes people panic?
According to the British newspaper The Daily Mail, the deadly virus can spread through the air and remain contagious for hours.
United States scientists from the University of Nebraska, according to the Mail, found high levels of the virus lurking in the air in rooms long after patients had left. They also discovered the virus in hospital corridors outside the wards of COVID-19 patients.
Now it is very clear with this new finding that people may also be infected with coronavirus not just only from droplets from coughs or sneezes but also without ever being in close proximity to an infected person.
It is not like we should stop physical distancing, which may not fully stop the spread of the coronavirus, but is still one of the options available. However, we should not lose hope and try to maintain basic social norms to the maximum possible.
The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting our economy, work, schools, universities, travel, entertainment and social lives. It has created an awkward situation where we cannot interact with our friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members freely.
In the absence of a vaccine and a proper cure, the virus is spreading like a wildfire around the globe.
March 31 was the worst day since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan on Dec.1, 2019. On Tuesday alone, for the first time in four months, 72,179 people got infected and 4,334 people died from COVID-19.
According to the Worldometers website, as of April 2 at 11.30 a.m. Jakarta time, we had a record 936,050 COVID-19 cases globally. The virus has killed 47,245 people so far, mostly in Italy, Spain, the US, France and China.
In Indonesia, the total number of COVID-19 cases, which reached 1,677 on Thursday, has been rising daily since the first case was reported on March 2. The number of deaths surged to 157 on Thursday.
The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said early this week that the COVID-19 pandemic was a biggest challenge to human beings since World War II.
“COVID-19 is the greatest test that we have faced together since the formation of the United Nations,” Guterres said while releasing a UN report on the potential socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday.
“The new coronavirus disease is attacking societies at their core, claiming lives and people’s livelihoods,” he said.
“COVID-19 is the greatest test that we have faced together since the formation of the United Nations. [We need] an immediate coordinated health response to suppress transmission and end the pandemic.”
The governments and people all over the world became helpless to stop the spread of COVID-19. What we can do?
“We do not have vaccines and social distancing is not the final solution. For the time being, we can do nothing except pray to God to end this crisis,” Dhingra said.
