A look back at Covid, a few decades later

The balding old man shuffled down the road, back aching, face numb from the cold, swathed in multiple layers of clothing and leaning heavily in his cherry wood cane, feeling woolly-headed. He didn't know where his feet were taking him, but he turned on to a lane which felt intimately familiar to him. The buildings were normal, like the good old days, sans fancy screens and a glass-and-metal exterior. Just good old fashioned red coloured brick work. They reminded him of the way things used to be a few decades ago, before Coronavirus came along and changed the world dramatically. For better or for worse, he didn't know. It had been a mixed ride, but a crazy one. He sighed. That's how you knew you were getting old, when you started counting the decades rather than months or years. Still, he remembered the year 2019 like it was yesterday. He was young, full of energy and hopes and dreams, and the world, to him was one big mysterious opportunity. Of course, he'd had sense and experience knocked into him over the years. He'd stumbled a few times, but mostly muddled through life well enough. As had the world, he felt. Now he moved on, into a newer section of the street. It had a couple of clinics and a hospital, and presently a doctor wearing a face mask came out of the hospital. It was eerily reminiscent of the times of Coronavirus, which was an era like no other. People (mostly) stayed in their houses for the better part of a couple of years, until entire populations were fully vaccinated. That had been a testing time for everyone, but in the end, human resilience had come through. New solutions to problems were found, people co-operated to help the poor and the underprivileged, and vaccines were created and mass-manufactured in record time. Then came the real, lasting change, he mused, as he entered the final, modern part of the street. In fact, there should be tangible signs of the changes now. Yes, here they were. Sanitation rooms, they were called. Despite the fancy name, they were hardly bigger than telephone booths, another one of the things that had long since become obsolete. He was no Luddite, but a part of him pined for them and their downfall from glory. The rooms sprayed you throughly with disnfectant, checked your temperature and other vital statistics and offered you some water, all at once. He marvelled again at the miracles and limitless potential of technology. Legislatures had been uncharacteristically quick and efficient in passing useful laws in the times of Covid-19, and some of this decisiveness had carried on to the years ahead, which saw governments, for once, working constructively with tech giants, passing a series of laws allowing them to collect data from small clusters of people, without revealing individual information. So, now, for example, if people in a particular locality used an abnormal number of keywords like 'fever','cold,'sneezing', etc. in Google searches or Gmails sent to people, Google would alert the local health authorities about a possible flu outbreak in that area. And in this day and age forewarned is truly forearmed. A few days' advance notice can prevent cases form snowballing like Covid-19. After all these measures against another's pandemic, along with better healthcare all over the world especially in West Africa, and East Asian countries shutting down or reforming their wet markets, he was reasonably sure that there would never be such an event again. Not in his lifetime, at least. And there were talks of even that being extended, something about reversing shortening telomeres and thymus glands and whatnot. It was all Greek to him. Or Latin, rather, considering how prevalent that dead language was in science. He smiled ruefully and looked around. He wasn't suprised to see almost everyone with their noses glued to their screens, that held them captive so much of the time, barely even looking at where they were going. These youngsters and those bloody newfangled gadgets of theirs, he mumbled, with equal parts anger, sadness and disappointment. Always fixated on their devices, peering at them with steadily worsening eyesight, they were the embodiment of the physical degradation of the entire human race in the past few decades. As people realised during the lockdown that working from home was actually quite convenient, fewer and fewer people spent time outside their houses. Food got faster and unhealthier, and fit people fewer and farther in between. It wasn't all that bad, he told himself as he passed by a giant screen informing him that the cure for a new type of cancer had been found recently. Even the air was purer nowadays, due to good environmental laws getting passed a few decades back, especially due to the efforts of a certain Greta Thunberg, who was now the Prime Minister of Sweden. Yes, things had changed a lot. But some things never do change, he thought, with a wry smile, as he watched a couple of tired parents trying to deal with the relentless barrage of questions fired at them by their highly enthusiastic young child, and a few youngsters walking by, disparaging everyone and everything from the government to the cricket team's latest abysmal performance. Such familiar sights made him realise where he was, and as he reached the end of Memory Lane, he turned back and smiled, before continuing on out into the real world.