Have you ever experienced a natural or man made disaster? What was your reaction to it?
Answers
Answer:
The cause of the covid pandemic had been assumed to be natural. But US President Joe Biden recently ordered American intelligence agencies to investigate the question of its origin. If the report they submit does not comprehensively rule out the lab-leak hypothesis, the pandemic could witness a mutation of a different kind. The source of Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes covid, could mutate in our understanding from ‘natural’ to possibly ‘man-made’, a momentous shift.
The world has seen many disasters. They can broadly be classified either as natural disasters, like earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and floods, or man-made ones like wars, genocides, oil spills, nuclear accidents and factory explosions. Although health scares like HIV or Ebola are spread through human interaction, their origin has always been attributed to a natural source. The root cause of a major disaster switching suddenly from a natural phenomenon to human agency is quite unheard of.
Disasters are usually viewed as a collective experience. So how the community’s collective experience of a disaster changes if its root cause shifts in popular perception should be an important consideration for policymakers. In many countries, like India, more than 80% of the people are yet to be vaccinated. Will people’s willingness to get vaccinated or readiness to face a possible third wave change if the covid pandemic is seen as a man-made disaster? It’s a question