Some Consolation

26 Ramadhan, 1441

We're too much protected against the reality of the suffering of others to be able to respond in any way fully to the misery generated by the coronavirus pandemic. That, in its way, is a good thing as the scale of affliction is stunning and we wouldn't be much good to anyone stunned and silenced. I think we all recognise a need to just get on with things in extreme circumstances, which requires something that may seem like indifference in a crisis.

But I also think it's important sometimes to try and take in the scale of it all - and, possibly, see some consolation in the fact that, for the moment at least, some parts of the world that one might have assumed would bear the brunt of the fatalities seem to have done not too badly. I'm thinking here of places like Greece. I lazily assumed in the early days of the pandemic hitting Europe that those nations with the most fragile economies would find themselves unable to cope and become disaster zones of the most extreme kind, so it's been salutary, to say the least, that the US and the UK seem to represent the greatest failures at that level of coping, something I didn't expect.

And I'm hopeful in a small way that Africa might not turn out to be the worst affected continent, which, again lazily, I assumed some two months ago somehow had to be the case. Of course, we're not even close to being able to assemble a full and convincing picture of the grim reality of a situation that is far from played out yet, but as of now I'm hopeful that my darkest fears and assumptions will prove happily empty.