Görlach Global: COVID-19 pandemic overshadows everything

As Christmas approaches, the coronavirus pandemic is causing dramatic scenes across the English Channel. The British Isles have been cut off from the world. And people in Britain's worst affected regions, for instance the capital, London, may not even leave their immediate surroundings.

When UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the new lockdown, some headed for Britain's transport hubs, forming long queues at places like London's St. Pancras train station, in a frantic attempt to leave the country. But to no avail. France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Germany closed their borders to British travelers — a surreal situation, reminiscent of apocalyptic movies.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Meanwhile, Britain and EU member states are preparing for the mass inoculation of their people. Now that the EU has approved the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, inoculations could begin as soon as December 27.

Even so, there will not be enough vaccine doses for everyone. In the first batch, Germany will receive 4 million doses — enough to vaccinate 2 million people, as everyone gets two shots over a period of two weeks. The cohort of people eligible for this first round of inoculations — people aged over 80, hospital and nursing care staff — alone make up 8.6 million people.

Across Germany, major efforts are underway to set up mass vaccination hubs in convention centers, disused supermarkets and so on. There are great hopes this will allow us to eventually resume our normal lives. As such, their creation and operation will become etched into the national consciousness.

Socially distanced celebrations

Christmas and New Year's Eve are fast approaching. In early February, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia will be celebrating Chinese New Year. These celebrations usually lead many people across the world to travel to connect with loved ones.

Aside from the spiritual and religious aspect of Christmas and the Chinese New Year, these special times of the year are all about reconnecting with family members. In China, where many earn a living as migrant workers, hundreds of kilometers from home, this year's travel ban will be hard to stomach. Yet, while the people of China already endured strict coronavirus restrictions last winter, this is a wholly new and unusual situation for people in the Christian world.

Images of Wuhan, the Chinese city in lockdown during the last Chinese New Year, became etched into the Chinese national consciousness. Similarly, images of empty Christian churches, devoid of singing congregations — save for a priest reading the sermon — will become etched in our minds.

COVID-19 overshadows everything

The moral message of this column is not to argue that we all inhabit the same Earth and share the same fate. Even though the pandemic has made it abundantly clear to the very last one of us how alike humans are and that it matters precious little which God we pray to, or what we look like.

The scenes described above matter to us all. We need to change our ways to prevent future pandemics and other apocalyptic events.

After all, how much longer can our minds, families, societies, economies, and world order bare these bleak times? The answers: not another year! So, let's get the vaccination program going fast and then, hopefully, enjoy some respite. The COVID-19 pandemic overshadows everything. Only by collective efforts and better global policy-making can we prevent another, even worse plague coming to haunting us.

This article was translated from German.

The linguist and theologian Alexander Görlach is a senior fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and senior research associate at the Cambridge Institute on Religion and International Studies. From 2014 to 2017, he was a fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard University, and in 2017-2018 he was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and City University of Hong Kong.