As we look to the fall and the promise of vaccinations, herd immunity, and decreased disease prevalence, it is tempting to leave behind the challenging lessons of the last 16 months. However, we have learned too much to just “snapback to normal” as Josuoa Kim argues in his IHE piece, Avoiding the “snapback.”
As Arundhati Roy notes:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
As we cross this threshold, let’s be sure to carry forward the new knowledge and insights from our hard fought lessons.