By: Kainat Saif
The socioeconomic impact of this lethal virus varies from country to country. One thing, however, remains common: destruction. Pakistan alone projected a rise of 33.7% of the poverty level.
I am aware that I will be accused of comparing chalk and cheese. Back then E-commerce hadn’t seen a hike but oh thanks to this deadly virus Covid-19. The digital sector and online shopping boomed at a high level. People started to spend more time surfing the internet. The young people involved in digital startups started to earn more and the ones using their inventions somehow at first enjoyed, then bored and eventually felt depressed. The concept of e-schooling was there but for now, this proved to be a cost and time-effective procedure to educate students for some, and for others, it’s a goodbye to schools forever. However, after online education young people started to hate zoom meetings and conference calls. Impact on mental health had wreaked havoc.
Consequences of covid-19 not only involve social life but also affect financial constraints. Stay-at-home policies could seed an increase in what is better known as deaths of despair. Social distancing, Lockdowns, and restrictions on travels had enslaved youngsters in cages with very little activity. Life is stagnant and this sedentary lifestyle with heavy layoffs is adding insult to injury.
The effects of catastrophes are never gender-neutral, and COVID-19 is no exception. To young girls, Economic crises hit women harder than their male counterparts. Here’s why: tend to earn less, have fewer or no savings, are disproportionately more involved in the informal economy, have less access to social protections provided by the government, are more likely to be burdened with unpaid care and domestic work, and therefore have to drop out of the labor force, and make up the majority of single-parent households.
No one is ready to have a conversation about immunity inequality. If we talk about the Vaccination drive, here too youth are to be vaccinated at last. The vast majority of youth say they are more than willing or have gotten vaccinated, however, they are nowhere on the priority list of the government of Pakistan. This is clearly medical racism and here the rule of equity shall prevail.
The way forward is that states and nations shall work on the principle of “Anti Fragility”: Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, we may not see a return to the status quo and primitive ways of doing things locally and globally. What Type of international order should we foresee? What would be its impact on state-society relations? More significantly, what would be the impact and consequence of this pandemic on the strategic behavior of countries; will it change the existing design of amity and enmity across regions/globe?
For starters, the search for answers to these fundamental questions needs to be the recognition of the non-success of the system to distribute on its promise to improve the lives of millions of people in all nations.
The writer is a law student and can be reached at [email protected].