Covid-19 reality:Will our lives ever be the same?

Tinashe Nyamushanya

Youth Interactive Writer

Although I prefer not to worry about the future and focus on the present, it is an understatement to mention that none of us know whether life will go back to normal, as  the pandemic has changed certain aspects of our lives.

Those changes will stick with us for years to come and how we conduct our daily activities from now on.

I have collected some of the thoughts of the brightest minds and combined them with my thought as we look at whether life will ever be the same for us youths in Zimbabwe ,post Covid-19.

 There are quite a number of possibilities when we discuss this issue and they depend on the reaction of the societies and the governing bodies in the after math of the pandemic.

The hope that is there is that the disruption caused by the pandemic be used to rebuild and produce something positive for all. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems and the world of work. 

The economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic is devastating: tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty.

The Covid-19 pandemic has reminded people and societies today of a world they forgot, a time when long and relatively healthy lives – even life itself could not be taken for granted.

The pandemic has been affecting the entire social relationships and family and shaken some relationships. Mobility restrictions created by physical distancing and other measures, have left people painfully aware of how much their well being is linked to others and how much they take for granted the ability to be with others. 

Social integration likely makes a difference in people’s capacity to cope during the pandemic, but the distancing measures also reveal and alter the quality of relationships. 

This also poses an interesting dilemma: feelings of loneliness affect the immune system, while at the same time interacting in the population could result in an infectious disease. 

The pandemic has not only severely impaired the ability of people to be in close physical face-to-face interaction with other humans, but has in turn blocked the intense human need for touch, preventing hugging and constraining other physical displays of affection and connection.

In addition, the pandemic and the policies used to combat it have had immediate labor market consequences. 

Unemployment has increased exponentially. Apart from analysing the distribution of unemployment risks across age groups – as well as for different subgroups defined by gender, race, and nativity – life course researchers will be particularly interested in tracing how the short-term consequences of the pandemic’s economic crisis are translated into long-term effects. 

Prior research on economic recessions and depressions repeatedly demonstrates that earlier unemployment begets later unemployment and leaves a lasting mark on income. 

For some, unemployment is a shortlived experience, while for others it becomes the starting point of a longer-term process of labor market exclusion.  The effects of unemployment on various aspects of individual and family well being are most severe when it is prolonged.

For us the youth, it appears the future of working is finally at our doorstep and has arrived  faster than one can comprehend. 

Lockdowns during the pandemic have seen us transition from traditional face to face learning with the teachers to learning on online platforms and also some of us who are employed , have found the joy in working from the comfort of our homes.

The digital age is going to stick on , both in the educational fields and the working field and along with  the risks associated with it. 

A friend, James Manyika, notes that the digital age will evolve at an exponential rate and it has been a trend that has been there but had not been fully embraced by our economies. Other structural changes may also accelerate, including the re-organisation of supply chains and further explosion of cross border data flows. 

It is not wrong to say that most of us have unknowingly become germophobes. Virus screening in everywhere we go and is most likely to become part of our lives.Our service delivery systems have been tested in Zimbabwe and need to be developed. 

Covid-19 represents a massive global crisis that behavioural and social scientists must study from a life course perspective.  The pandemic creates a pressing need and unique laboratory to analyse how institutional structures, socio demographic composition, types of stratification, and other dimensions of societal differentiation and regulation generate different responses to a common threatening external shock – and, in turn, how those responses alter the organisation and experience of the life course in a given society. 

e must continue to monitor which societal changes will be temporary and which will be longer lasting and even lead to permanent systemic change.