What we have learned over the last two years or so could pay off for years to come. Not so long ago, Malta had been mired in the pandemic crisis, faced with a threatening economic meltdown and one of the most fraught political transitions in our history. Yet the worst was ably avoided, but dealing with all of this has dominated much of our energy, attention and, for many of us, even our emotions.
This is a good time to take a deep breath and assess the changes that have occurred. While no one would be displeased if we could magically erase this whole pandemic experience, it has been the crucible of our lives for a year, and we have much to learn from it – and even much to gain.
We have learned that family matters more than we realized. The indelible image of the older person living alone and having to struggle – we need to change that. We will probably be seeing more older people home-sharing within families and cohousing across communities to avoid future situations of tragedy. Beneath the warts and complexities of all that went wrong, we rediscovered the interdependence of generations and how much we need each other. The ones who have done exceptionally well are couples in long-term relationships who felt renewed intimacy and reconnection to each other.
Covid-19 has forced us to unleash a revolution in medicine. One of the biggest lessons we have learned from Covid is that the scientific community working together can do some pretty amazing things. In the past it has taken four to 20 years to create conventional vaccines. For Covid it was a record-setting 11 months. The process may have changed forever the way drugs are developed.
The pandemic taught us to understand and realize that self-care is not self-indulgence. Whether it is permission to take long bubble baths, tinkering in the backyard, enjoying herbal tea or seeing noon come while still in your robe, being good to yourself offers a necessary reprieve from whatever horrors threaten us from out there. Being good to yourself is good for others, too. It is important to take our health into our own hands in order not to burden the health care system.
On both an individual and national level, this pandemic has warned us to have a stash ready for the next crisis. The need to augment our savings system to help people put away emergency savings is crucial.
The adage, age is just a number, has a new meaning. This is not just about the pandemic. Our health is directly related to lifestyle – nutrition, physical activity, a healthy weight and restorative sleep. Age accounted for a higher risk, but comorbidities (essentially, having two or more health issues simultaneously) mattered much more; meaning that in future we should be far more focused on avoiding chronic health conditions.
We have befriended technology, and there is no going back. Arguably the biggest long-term societal effect of the pandemic will be a grand flipping of the switch that makes the digital solution the first choice of many Maltese for handling life's tasks. We still may cling to a few IRL (in real life) experiences, but it is increasingly apparent that easy-to-use modern virtual tools are the new default.
Work is anywhere now – a shift that bodes well for the future. One of the major impacts of the new working-from-home focus is that more jobs are becoming non-location-specific.
Trust in national authorities might have been frayed by the pandemic, but it is now slowly being restored. History also provides a guide. In the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed between 50 million and 100 million people, trust in authority withered after local and national government officials played down the disease's threats in order to maintain wartime morale. As we see vaccines and therapeutic drugs slowly gain widespread success in fighting this virus, I think we will start to overcome some of our warped ways of thinking and find relief, together as one, that any public health menace can be overcome. We have to put our faith in other people to get through any such future menace together.
The crowds will return, but we will gather carefully. The Covid-19 pandemic will not end with bells tolling or a ticker-tape parade. Instead, we will slowly, cautiously ease back to familiar activities. For all our fears of the corona virus, many of us cannot wait to resume a public life. Seeing art, attending concerts, cheering in a stadium – even going to class reunions we might have once dreaded – we will do them again. But how will we return to feeling comfortable in groups of tens, hundreds and thousands? And will these gatherings be different?
But perhaps the biggest lesson we have learnt is that isolation is everyone's problem. It does not just happen to older adults; it happens to us all.
Dr Mark Said is an advocate.