Just like any pandemic, COVID-19 will not last forever. However, it will serve as a catalyst for disruptive changes in spheres with no immediate link to this virus. The world has accumulated a great number of problems, so a trigger was all it took to plunge the world into crisis.
The world has been living in a state of shock since spring 2020. Hardly anyone could have anticipated the events that resulted in lockdown orders for billions of people, brought the global economy to a standstill and rendered most of the international organisations irrelevant. The international community was not motivated to coordinate its efforts effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic. The imbalance between the causes and the effects is striking. What seemed a fairly ordinary virus with a relatively low fatality rate seriously affected the interconnected world in almost all its aspects.
The scale of the crisis induced by the pandemic can be attributed to the fact that it was in perfect alignment with the trends that took shape long before China reported its first infection case.
Social distancing and isolation are the only effective remedies. This is simply how nature works. One cannot fail to be impressed by how everyone was mentally prepared to follow urgent policies to barricade themselves from the outside world. The ideas and rhetoric that have been polluting international relations over the past 30 years instantly faded away, signalling an end to what seemed like unsolvable disputes and answering a number of essential questions.
There is every reason to believe that this will not be the case. In a crumbling world, countries will have to face up to regular shocks of this kind. Moreover, they could become a routine, albeit dramatic, occurrence.
