Five years since the pandemic

In 2020 the world saw the first pandemic in a century, Covid-19, claim about three million lives that year out of a global population of 7.8 billion. The last pandemic the world experienced before that was in 1918—the Spanish flu—which claimed fifty million lives that year. Then the world’s population was 1.8 billion people.

Life as we know it has changed since 2020, when most of us had to stay indoors for our own safety and only essential services such as supermarkets, local shops, and hospitals were open.

The world of work has changed: prior to 2020, many of us felt we had to have a physical office or place of business to be in business. The pandemic made thoughtful entrepreneurs come up with shared workspaces where you can pay for an office address and even take meetings there without having to commit to a full office space if you can’t afford it. People who sold things in shops turned to Instagram and personal websites to advertise their goods and sell from there instead of paying rent for physical shops. We no longer have to physically go to people’s offices for meetings if we don’t want to, thanks to meeting apps such as Zoom and Google Meet, just to name a few. Apps to make our lives more sedentary have thrived because of the pandemic: you don’t need to go anywhere to buy food or furniture or hire an artisan; do it all from your smartphone.

Many marriages and romantic relationships fell apart during the pandemic. Couples who only saw each other for less than twelve hours a day during the working week were now faced with seeing each other twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: real characters couldn’t hide, and a lot couldn’t take the reality of who their other halves were.

I believe cleanliness is now taken more seriously in Nigeria. The pandemic introduced hand sanitisers to public places such as banks, offices, churches, and supermarkets—places where hand sanitisers never used to be. Our country is still not as clean as it can be, but education about the danger of dirt has been disseminated.

Nigeria didn’t need the pandemic to make us more religious but more developed countries did. Within a year of the pandemic hitting the world, the religious faith of the United States increased by 28 percent; Spain by 17 percent; Italy by 19 percent; Canada by 16 percent; Australia by 15 percent; and the United Kingdom by 14 percent. The extended family closeness, which had been traditionally stronger in Africa, South America, and Asia, now extended to North America and Europe because of Covid. The fragility of life wasn’t lost on people who lived mostly insular lives, more centred around themselves as individuals or just their nuclear families. The immense loss of life during Covid made them appreciate relatives they no longer kept in touch with or kept in touch with infrequently.

Mental health awareness has improved globally, even in developed countries where it was traditionally less stigmatised because those countries have industries where talking about mental health wasn’t something their participants were willing to reveal publicly. In industries such as male professional team sports, athletes kept their mental health struggles largely to themselves because they feared revealing them would make them look weak in a macho setting. Being indoors for long periods of time led to depression and suicidal thoughts in many people because, as humans, we’re designed to be social. After people started to reveal their mental health struggles during and after Covid, it made others comfortable to do so as well, and a ripple effect occurred globally. In Nigeria, where public mental health revelations were a complete no-no, it’s now more accepted to talk about your mental health publicly. Some companies even hire mental health trainers to educate their staff on how to manage it. The internet and social media are not short of many who claim they can help your mental health for a fee. So, mental health has even created jobs.

The pandemic was terrible, particularly for those who lost loved ones. It also made us think of new, improved ways of living.

Obinna Inogbo is the Founder and Principal PR Executive at Worktainment Limited.