Build back better, the new normal, change. They were words we tried to define during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. They all represent some form of recovery.Recovery is easier to imagine where infection and monitoring symptoms are concerned. Defining the word, however, is complex and daunting, especially when we measure COVID’s social impact: the children who grew up indoors, the students who were educated in virtual classrooms, the adults who had to contend with the mental toll of working from home.
Back in 2020, several think tanks were already formulating recovery plans for when the pandemic would abate. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) policy response tied recovery to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. We had to build back better, the OECD said, by acknowledging that habitat loss and dense population centers had allowed the virus to spread faster. All countries had to invest money in quality jobs, housing, transport, and health care for all, in equal measure.
That same year, the International Monetary Fund convened professionals from around the world, who agreed that while the scale of the crisis was unprecedented, the response of most countries was nevertheless a “self-inflicted economic catastrophe.”
There was nothing new in the crisis, they claimed. The world had long been broken: wage workers were poorly paid, misinformation and disinformation ran rampant, populist politics was slowly ruining democracies, there was no coordination or long-term planning within and across country systems.
The pandemic had simply made economic inequalities more apparent. Only those who forcibly blinded themselves to the plight of the poor would see nothing.
Recovery, then, meant being willing to solve all these problems: to accept that some jobs can be done online, that government and business institutions should be given the responsibility of supporting people, that we need to find ways of supporting ourselves locally instead of relying on imports to keep supply chains running.
These ideas were echoed across different opinion pieces in the years that followed. Dr. Joy Furnival of the University of Manchester, researchers writing for the Journal of Safety Science and Resilience, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development added that we need to truly understand the vulnerability of our many communities, and acknowledge the power of community activism and volunteerism.
Years later, however, the world is still broken by wars, bombings, lack of safe and efficient public transportation, and a continuing reliance on cars, fossil fuels, and imports. The voice of civil society is constantly silenced. There are so few, if any, initiatives that foster collaboration among government, businesses, and people. Our students are struggling with reading, writing, and listening.
What does recovery even mean now?
It was a question that was partly answered last week, during my appointment with Dr. Victor Gozali of the Makati Medical Center. Gozali was one of the very first COVID patients. His story has been documented extensively online, but it feels different when one listens to him talk about his struggles in the first days of the pandemic.
He had watched as his colleagues were wheeled into intensive care; some had even been intubated while they were awake. When his turn came for infection in March 2020, he received medicines meant for other sicknesses, in doses that felt experimental, in isolation. There was so little known about the virus then, so much new research emerging every day, that doctors were fighting to keep up with both the tide of patients and knowledge.
In his solitary room, Gozali said, he was feared by near-faceless nurses in hazmat suits; and yet, he had never felt more holy. He heard three to four Masses a day, watched the Pope on TV, prayed through every painful swabbing session, breathed through the fluid in his lungs.
His COVID tests were negative by Easter. He called his recovery “a miracle,” the sign of a greater mission to come.
As he spoke, he laughed, with smile bright, face glowing. He remembered all the details, he said, of his ordeal; he had never forgotten what he had gone through, would always remember the sights and sounds of a hospital filled with both the surviving and the barely alive.
He was neither imperious nor snobbish—only joyful.
Maybe that’s what recovery is really like, and it’s something we have to learn from those who survived the early days of bearing witness to society scrambling for sense and order.
Recovery is not some abstract “moving on” as though we learned nothing about our personal weaknesses and those of the society we’d come to accept. It’s not some over-righteous “just pray it all away” as though we had no power to take action.
It’s being filled with joy at the thought that we are alive because there is work yet to be done.
There are wrongs to right. There is a broken world that needs fixing. There is a mission to be fulfilled.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu