So What Happens After COVID-19?
By: Meghan Gause
Tags: Covid-19, Lifestyle, Life, Change, Death

So What Happens After COVID-19?

It’s only going to get worse: Here is why

Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash

This virus is sweeping the globe, claiming lives, tearing apart families, and showing man-kind we are nothing compared to mother nature. With almost 2,000,000 people infected — COVID-19 isn’t finished with us yet. But what happens next? What happens when the lock-down is lifted, and we go back to our healthy lives?

We don’t. We can’t go back — if we don’t change our lifestyles, we can expect diseases to spread at a pandemic level more frequently. We will face a rise in poverty, fewer resources, more crime, death, animal extinction, pollution, the list goes on…

Here are some of the bigger concerns

Factory farming

Do any of you know the degree of filth caused by factory farming? Not only are cows, chickens, pigs, but also other animals being kept in unnaturally small spaces which are not only restraining them of their instincts — It’s also a breeding ground for disease. When diseases spread, they spread fast. Infections can be transmitted via food, air, water, and transported around by the workers. Exploiting animals in such a barbaric way is not only cruel — it’s also the epitome of a large-scale petri dish.

E.coli: Millions of people get infected by E. Coli every year, and one specific strain known to cause UTIs invades the bloodstream resulting in an estimated 36,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone. Researchers that tested over 1,000 food samples from multiple retailers found fecal contamination in 69 percent of beef and pork, and 92 percent of poultry, with a shocking 50 percent of the poultry samples infected with the UTI causing E. Coli. MRSA: The MRSA bacterium, which is responsible for difficult or impossible to treat infections in humans, seemingly came out of nowhere when it was first recorded in hospitals. Now veterinary microbiology studies have proven that industrialized North American pig farms and farmers are to blame, as they commonly carry the pathogen along with a strain that infects humans. With around 9 million Canadian raised pigs being imported into the U.S. every year. Salmonella: just as the feeding of dead animals to live ones triggered Mad Cow Disease, the same practice has caused a global spread of salmonella. Salmonella kills more Americans than any other food borne illness, with over 100,000 Americans falling ill annually by salmonella infected eggs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 1,000,000 cases of salmonella poisoning in America alone can be directly tied to feed containing animal products.

We need to stop the inhumane slaughter and boarding of animals, across the globe. Here are links to show you precisely what you are eating.

What's in your food?

How is your food treated?

Photo by Micah Tindell on Unsplash

Poor Living Conditions

Socioeconomic status is the most powerful predictor of disease, disorder, injury and mortality we have. -Tom Boyce- Chief of UCSF’s Division of Developmental Medicine

Aside from the scarcity of adequate healthcare and the overall unsanitary environment of most inner-communities, there is a hazardous shortage of love and maintenance being allocated in these cities. Regardless of your religious or political bearing, billions of people worldwide suffer day-to-day from an absence of necessities — resulting in a cultural orbit of mental, emotional, and physical abuse.

5 billion people in the world still live below the poverty line, 3 billion are living on less than 1$ day with no access to basic water or energy, and hunger and malnourishment persist for many. Meanwhile, income inequality is rising, leading to heightened tension and social conflict.

The water crisis

For those of you who don’t know what this means, I’ll tell you.

The shortage of safe water worldwide is considerable. Did you know that one in three people don't have access to a toilet? Did you know a child dies every 2-minutes from lack of sanitary water? Did you know 80% of china’s water reservoirs are contaminated? I bet there is a lot you don’t know.

Water is the foundation of existence. And we can’t figure out something as simple as providing safe water? America alone spends $150-billion+ a year on advertising. The amount it would cost for clean water worldwide each year, you ask? $150-billion. How greedy are we that a necessity such as water is less important than advertising? Sad. Even setting aside necessary advertising, there is enough money spent on crap that can go towards the revival of humanity.

Photo by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash

World population

7.7-Billion people. That’s the world population right now. It took about 200,000 years of existence for the world’s population to reach 1 billion — and only 200 years more to surpass 7 billion.

As the human population continues to explode, finite natural resources, such as fossil fuels, freshwater, arable land, coral reefs, and frontier forests, continue to plummet, which is placing competitive stress on the basic life-sustaining resources and leading to a diminished quality of life.

Do you see the problem with that? We are eradicating our planet, and we don’t seem to care. Our natural resources are being depleted; economies are crumbling, poverty is now a norm, our waste management is horrendous, a vast amount of deforestation, and over-farming. These are just a few apparent dilemmas we are facing.

A WHO report shows that environmental degradation, combined with the growth in world population, is a major cause of the rapid increase in human diseases, which contributes to the malnutrition of 3.7 billion people worldwide, making them more susceptible to disease. According to the World Health Organization, “Every three seconds a young child dies — in most cases from an infectious disease. In some countries, one in five children die before their fifth birthday. Every day 3 000 people die from malaria — three out of four of them children. Every year 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis and another eight million are newly infected.” Overpopulation exacerbates many social and environmental factors, including overcrowded living conditions, pollution, malnutrition and inadequate or non-existent health care, which wreak havoc on the poor and increase their likelihood of being exposed to infections diseases.

Photo by NICO BHLR on Unsplash

This article is just a reminder of a few crucial complications we are facing. We can’t go back to our ordinary day-to-day living. Our selfishness got us here to begin with. Don’t dismiss the issues we face because you feel they are too big to change. If we don’t halt what we are doing to our planet, we will cease to exist.

It’s time to change.