When we look into the history pages, we come across many incidents which have shown significant impact on the world. These incidents were either man made or natural. World wars are the examples for such man-made disasters and epidemics like Spanish Flu are the natural disasters. Today, the entire world is suffering from the dangers of Covid 19. At the time of writing this article, Covid-19 had hit nearly 3 million people all over the globe and nearly 2 lakh people had lost their lives. The danger bells are still ringing and the aftermath of the pandemic is highly unpredictable.
When something happens in the world, it is natural that there will be repercussions of that incident. The 9/11 attacks are an example for such an incident. When the attacks took place, there was panic everywhere. It created a horrifying spectacle and changed the perception of the people towards manifold things. People had developed a fear for the air travel and many of them had cancelled their journeys, just because of the fear that was created by the attacks. The apprehension of the people due to attacks, which resulted in the cancellation of their travel, caused a lot of damage to the travel sector subjecting it to great turbulence for a long period of time. The attitudinal shift of people contributed a lot to the decline of the travel industry. People had either procrastinated or cancelled their tours and confined themselves to home. This abominable situation took a significant amount of time to return to normalcy. In the mean time, a considerable amount of damage was done. We come across several such instances in the history, the influence of which cannot be ignored.
Covid-19 is called a pandemic because of its global impact. Excluding a few, all the countries have become victims of this epidemic and have suffered a severe setback in the economic and industrial progress, resulting in the loss of employment and considerable decline in the standard of living. When viewed from a critical angle, we notice staggering facts. As the disease has no proven cure, the only available option for the governments across the world is to impose complete lockdown system and promote social distancing. When lockdown was imposed, many sectors were affected and the problem took a different turn. Many companies, which did not encourage work from home policy earlier, were forced to ask their employees to work from home, which is a clear indication of a shift in the policy.
Production sector is very badly affected by Covid-19, because it requires employees to go to their workplace and continue to work, which is not possible during the lockdown. As the strict implementation of lockdown has become a hindrance to employees to be physically present in the companies, it resulted in zero productivity. Every sector is affected and the possibility of an economic recession cannot be ruled out. The economists are already on the job to assess the global impact of covid-19, besides giving suggestions to the revival of economy.
In this huge repair work, technology has a big role. A lot of data related to Covid-19 is being pooled up at different sources, some of which are authentic and some are not. Big Data analytics can be used to draw insights from the data. For instance, data analysis can provide information on the time taken for the number of cases to get doubled, the age group of infected people, patient gender, patient blood group, treatment given to the patients and several other metrics, which enable decision making.
By unleashing the hidden potential of technology, like in many instances of the past, the pandemic Covid-19 can be defeated and the world can be converted into a safe place once again.
All the points discussed above describe the negative effects of Covid-19 on the world, while there are some positive effects as well. Because of lockdown, there is no mobility in the world, and therefore, noticeable decrement in pollution rates is conspicuous. Cities, where pollution is inexorable, are now becoming normal because of lockdown. Any small change that could not be brought in the attitude of people by any legislation, awareness programs, requests made by the governments and voluntary organizations, is successfully done by Covid19. Now the cities are becoming energetic, nature is getting rejuvenated and flowers are blooming. Thanks to lockdown. So, the preachers of the theory of ‘Force for change’ are gaining popularity. People have long forgotten to respond to mild requests and decent calls. They have developed a mindset in which they do not accept change unless they are compelled. Other positive outcome of the pandemic is that the people have learnt to live with their families and have developed a strong family bond, which was otherwise missing before. There are no accidents on roads, people are not eating outside food, significant change in the approach to personal hygiene, special care on improving immunity, developing new skills are some of the positives emerged out of this tough time.
In simple terms, Covid-19 is dreadful. If the two things – loss of lives and economic turbulence – are kept aside, Covid-19 has done a little good to the mankind and nature in particular. Covid-19 has made a few things possible, which seemed almost impossible before.