1) “The World Health Organization’s Europe director Hans Kluge said Thursday
the continent is in the midst of what he calls the COVID-19 ‘pandemic paradox,’
in which vaccine programs offer remarkable hope, while emerging variants
present greater uncertainty and risk. … ‘This paradox, where communities sense
an end is in sight with the vaccine, but at the same time are called to adhere
to restrictive measures in the face of a new threat, is causing tension, angst,
fatigue and confusion…,’ Kluge said.” (see note 1).
2) Another article, titled “The COVID Paradox”
(see note 2), says that nobody should overstate the “pain and loss of this era
in human history. … When organisational life is normal, patterns often continue
because they existed before. When crisis happens, however, what was once
intractable becomes open. Cultural norms can be analysed and adjusted. Leaders
who did not have time or appetite for change demand new ways of thinking and
working.” In other words, the pandemic doesn’t bring only misery, but,
paradoxically, it creates also chances for new developments.
3) In another article titled “The Covid Paradox”
(see note 3), the tenor is the same, although the accent is somewhat different:
“While in the short
run, one would arguably return to pre-Covid behavior patterns quite quickly, we
are likely to see more fundamental changes play out in the long run.
The long-term impact of Covid is likely to be far more significant than its
immediate effect in the next year or two. Reactive change tends to feel significant,
but is not necessarily durable, but the Covid experience will produce organic
shifts in mindsets that will make themselves manifest over a much longer period
of time. Covid will be transformative, but not in the way that it was imagined
a few months ago.”
Actually, we have different paradoxes here.
The COVID-19 pandemic paradox in 1) says that the assumed solution of the
pandemic doesn’t bring a solution. This sounds paradoxical, indeed, but I think
that we cannot speak of a paradox here. The present vaccines help to stop only one
strain of the coronavirus, but not possible new strains, so they solve only a
part of the problem, and there is nothing paradoxical in this. We simply need
better solutions, like improved vaccines, and then as yet the restrictions can
be lifted.
Cases 2 and 3 have more the air of being paradoxes,
and in a sense they are. On the other hand, they simply describe normal facts
of life. The difference is that the scale of the pandemic is much larger. When
the road to the left is blocked, we choose the road to the right. When in a
supermarket the shelf with rice is empty, we buy millet or potatoes. Your
attention is drawn to new options and maybe it leads to new behaviour. Nobody
calls this paradoxical.
Nevertheless,
there is at least one a paradox that is relevant in this pandemic: the Sorites
paradox. Sooner or later the number of coronavirus infections will go down, be
it because the restrictions will be effective, or, what is more likely, be it
because vaccinations will end the pandemic, or be it because the pandemic will
end in a natural way. Then the question is: When can we say that the pandemic
has ended? How many patients make the difference between a pandemic and a “normal”
situation in which some people are ill and most are not, and in which the chance
that the coronavirus will spread again has been minimalized? The Sorites
paradox is about an analogous question: How many grains of sand make a heap?
Or, formulated in a way that is more relevant to the present pandemic: How many
grains must we remove from a heap of sand till it is no longer a heap? Remove
one grain and you’ll still call it a heap. Take away another grain, and it is
still a heap. But what, if you have removed, one by one, thousand grains? Or a
million? Do we then still have a heap? At some point, the heap will not be a
heap any longer, but how many grains must be removed until we have reached that
point? Until now, nobody has given a convincing answer to this question. Actually
such an answer doesn’t exist. It is a matter of subjective decision and
definition.
In case of
the present pandemic, we basically have the same question as in the Sorites
paradox. When the number of Covid-19 patients goes down, finally we’ll not have
a pandemic any longer, but when we’ll have reached that point? This question is
important in order to determine when the restrictions can be lifted and to what
extent, but in fact nobody knows the answer. Each country has its own ideas
about it. It is just a matter of policy (making choices) and politics (the
execution of choices); a matter of intelligent guesswork and of establishing
safe standards. It’s better to stay on the safe side and to maintain the
restrictions that must contain the pandemic too long than too short. But being overcautious
in view of the pandemic can be dangerous in other respects, like for the mental
health of the population and for its economic health (which in the end also affects
the mental and physical health of a population). It will be a wise person who
knows what to do.
Notes
1) https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/who-europe-chief-says-region-midst-covid-19-pandemic-paradox
2) https://www.russellreynolds.com/newsroom/the-covid-paradox
3) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/Citycitybangbang/the-covid-paradox/
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