Mahfuz Anam

Along with the world Bangladesh also struggled to make sense of the all-pervasive disruptions caused by Covid-19. Again, as the rest of the world, we in Bangladesh struggled to rebuild our society, our economy, our education system, our basic services, in fact every aspect of our lives as far as possible. What we failed to do, as the rest of the world, was to hold on to our human values as we heard thousands dying and saw our near and dear ones perish and we could not come to their aid or even express sympathy in person. It was psychologically debilitating. The very fabric of society appeared to tear away, reduced to family-based islands of desperate and isolated microcosms of society surviving, interacting and somehow living out our lives courtesy the internet, the lifeblood of the virtual world.

As the world economy stood shattered and thousands died in countries that we thought had a robust health system, we did not know what was in store for us. Given the density of our population, level of health consciousness, living conditions and nutritional level and development challenges, we feared the worst. We are usually at the receiving end of nature’s wrath in the forms of floods, cyclones, etc., but this time around nature appears to have worked in unknown ways to save us from the severest impact of the current pandemic.

It remains a mystery as to what worked for us. Was it our early immunisation programme, our peasants’ and farmers’ natural immunity, Vitamin D from exposure to the sun, our lifelong struggle with pollution of all sorts, our natural resilience? We are quite unaware of why Covid-19 did not wreak havoc upon us, and remain happily ignorant. Most other countries would have, by now, conducted a plethora of research as to why, and would have known by now what worked for us and built on that natural immunity to save us from its more lethal mutated variety, which we are now hearing about.