In the Bigness of Things

The earliest cases of the COVID-19 caused by a novel coronavirus were detected in January in China this year. But it has been only 7 weeks since the pandemic swept through the entire world, pockmarking map of the globe with red-blobs of varying size on almost every country. It isn’t the first pandemic to afflict the human race. Ancient Greece suffered from one deadly pandemic during the Peloponnesian War back in 430. It killed two-thirds of the population of Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia and Greece in an era when medical science was not even at its rudimentary, incipient stage of development. Since then, there has been a long list of causes that developed into full-blown pandemics, including Cholera, Plague, Measles, Flu that carried the prefix Russian, Spanish and Asian, SARS and, closer to the date, the HIV and AIDS. Each of these caused destruction of human life on a scale greater than the present calamity. And yet, it appears that COVID 19 has the potential of leaving a far bigge...

The ongoing novel Corona Virus crisis gives us clues, and our response in the months to come will settle the question  COVID-19 has posed several questions. One among them is whether liberal democracies have adequate robustness of structure and ideology to deal with unprecedented pandemics and Black Swan events. This question has gathered traction after comparisons have been drawn between the efficacy of China’s response vis a vis that of the developed countries of the West, including the US. Could it be that totalitarian regimes are better placed to combat disasters and thus serve as more protective custodians of the well-being of their people as compared to democratic regimes? The Novel Coronavirus was first detected as pneumonia of an unknown cause in Wuhan, capital of China’s Hubei province, in December 2019. The disease spread exponentially. By the end of February 2020, it had afflicted 80,000 Chinese and killed nearly 3000. It was beginning to appear that the all-pow...