Last week on Thursday, October 22nd, we held our first Connect.ed Conversation. It was the first event of a monthly series aimed at promoting interdisciplinary discussions on current events. For the month of October, it seemed only fitting that we open a dialogue on the topic of COVID-19, as all of us have been affected by it in one way or another.
We began our conversation with a question: Is there, as Mark Jackson, Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Exeter, so decisively stated, ‘‘arguably no more important object of historical enquiry than the fluctuating manifestations and meanings of disease”? By the end of the hour, I think most of us would have answered with a “yes”. As we discovered through our discussion, COVID-19 is not just a pandemic in the healthcare sense of the word; it is also a pandemic of misinformation, racism, and economic inequality - each demanding our full attention. It is a long-overdue call for the blinders to come off. Where else would a conversation about a global crisis begin but on the topic of governments? Given their role in allocating resources in the protection and promotion of their citizens’ interests, governments are arguably the most important player in a widespread pandemic. We discussed the struggle of finding the balance between expecting the government to fulfil the responsibilities they were elected on while understanding that they are also just people like us, overwhelmed at the situation facing them. This theme of empathy was a common thread throughout the rest of our conversation. However, we came to an understanding that there is a level of preparedness that governments and healthcare systems need to maintain. While it is difficult to know the proper course of action we should take in the face of COVID-19, a novel virus, there are ways to learn from past outbreaks of similar viruses. SARS and MERS are examples that could and should have been learned from, even in countries which did not experience those previous outbreaks. There are many reasons for this, including issues regarding misinformation, international cooperation in the healthcare sector, and lack of domestic funding for public health. Regardless, pandemic preparedness is evidently important and, unfortunately, evidently absent in many countries. As such, when the pandemic began, solutions had to be found quickly amidst new rules about social distancing and staying-at-home. Many sectors turned to technology. In our discussion, we looked specifically at healthcare and education, sharing information from our personal experiences in addition to news articles that we had come across. Although we appreciated that short-term solutions can be found in technology and innovation, there was a consensus that we are still a society fundamentally in need of face-to-face human connection. More importantly, however, the turn to technology poses a larger issue - the issue of inequality. Not only are minority and low-income communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 at staggering infection and death rates, but they are also excluded from the supposed solutions due to their lack of access to technology. As one of the participants articulated perfectly, “we are encouraged to see inequality as natural.” Therefore, although it took a global pandemic for many to be exposed to the reality of racism and economic inequality, still not enough action is being taken to work towards eliminating it. Our conversation concluded with an observation about the importance of mindset. It is less about how strict the rules are and more about the way people act, especially where enforceability is little to none. After pointing out how mindsets differ from culture to culture, we descended into an extensive sharing session about how we have personally been coping on a mental health front. We discussed being separated from our families, the frustrations of trying to do the right thing amidst a sea of rule-breakers, and social media’s detrimental role in enabling us to make comparisons about our productivity levels to those of our friends and acquaintances. But as we had brought up at the start, it is empathy that ultimately prevails. We planned and created Connect.ed Conversations with exactly that goal in mind - to foster empathy and understanding through conversation from varying perspectives. Thank you to everyone who joined us last week. We hope you learned as much as we did and we look forward to connecting with you all again at our next Connect.ed Conversation.
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