covid 19 Lessons for mordern living ( speech for three minutes)
Answers
Answer:
This is very long. You can choose few lines from this.
Explanation:
Last week, I read a poignant account from a man whose wife had just died from Covid-19. 'Anything good I could say about this would be a lie. She’s dead, and I’m quarantined. That’s how the story ends.'
But for those who survive this pandemic, which should be 99% of the humanity, this will not be the end. For them, the post-Covid-19 world will bring lasting changes that would have been considered impossible earlier. The virus and state-imposed lockdowns have wrought changes that are not just temporary. They will change the world as we have known it most of our lives. We need to learn from the lessons already arising from the disease and shutdowns, and adopt changes that will take us to a better world.
The foremost lesson is how to better prepare for the next pandemic. Weeks before its outbreak in China, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum (WEF) conducted a high-level simulation exercise for pandemic preparedness, ‘Event 201’ on October 18, 2019. They found that governments, businesses and public health leaders were all woefully unprepared. Covid-19 has revealed the need to devote resources for future epidemic prevention, and create cost-benefit models to evaluate the timing and various types of shutdowns to save lives without excessive economic disruption.
Nurses, doctors, and social workers, the frontline fighters in the battle, have the highest risk of exposure to the virus and have suffered high fatality. In the post-Covid world, countries need to create healthcare systems that protect and insulate health workers in foolproof ways. Telemedicine and virtual medicine have been used to a limited extent in many western countries. These need to become universal, used even in the poorest countries that can least afford to suffer a loss of medical staff in the next epidemic.
From Beijing to Delhi, the shutdown has cleaned the air of pollutants, reducing respiratory diseases too. Suddenly, the snow-clad Dhauladhar mountain range of the Himalayas can be seen from Jalandhar. We must not go back to our old polluted ways when the shutdowns end. We know that traffic pollution and congestion can be greatly reduced through work-at-home strategies, and the use of technologies to hold virtual meetings where the participants can be hundreds of miles apart.
Housemaids, construction workers, bus drivers and many other categories of workers cannot function online. But professionals can. New technologies should be developed to enable manual workers to work with equipment that allows social distancing.
How would employers monitor if workers are actually working? Two-way camera systems will make it possible to monitoring the performance of workers and detect absenteeism.
One study estimated that a third of America's workforce could work online from home. The Indian proportion would be much less. But the shutdown experience will push corporate India to innovate ways to cut travel, meetings, office space and other activities now considered routine. This will reduce the need for expensive commercial space, airline and train journeys, and hours of commuting time.
This will not only cut costs, improve efficiency and lower prices. It will yield major social benefits, of which the environmental ones stand out. Fewer people commuting to work means a huge saving of fuel and reduction of road dust. It means less pollutants, especially from vehicles idling in traffic jams.
Covid-19 has forced the educational system to move online as far as possible. In the US, online courses provide an opportunity to hugely reduce the $1.5 trillion student loan problem. Almost half of student loans for attending private universities and three-fourths of student loans for public universities go for paying rent and other living expenses.
Online university education will enable college students to stay at home with their parents, saving on rent, transport, and other living costs. The sudden switch from classroom to online classes has affected quality. But if this continues for one more semester, the quality of online classes will match with classroom teaching.
In India, high-quality online education can replace third-rate education in third-rate colleges. Virtual classrooms can be expanded without concerns of physical space for number of students. Large online classrooms can be further broken into smaller groups of students with trained teachers who can facilitate online discussions. Access to international online education would give competition to even high-quality Indian online education.