Last week I watched a fascinating Virtual Veritas Forum, Coronavirus and Quarantine: What Big Questions can we be asking?
It brings together a range of perspectives. My only concern is that it is very USA-centric.
Springboarding off that discussion, here are some questions I hope will receive attention in the coming years.
A fascinating and challenging aspect of these questions is that they need to be addressed with multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary approaches. The crisis brings together issues that span microbiology, public health, mathematical modeling, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, ethics, philosophy, and theology.
Many of the questions need to be asked and discussed at multiple scales; e.g., by individuals, institutions, cities, nations, and globally.
Some of the questions have been grappled with by many smart people and societies for decades or even millennia. But, broader modern society often does not discuss them.
I list the questions in random order.
How do epidemics start, spread, and end?
How do we manage risk, balancing near certainties and ignorance?
How do governments balance the ``common good'' with protecting individual freedoms?
How do you balance medical, financial, economic, and social considerations in allocating resources to patients?
When is the ``medicine'' worse than the ``disease''?
How do you balance the future needs of the young with the current needs of the elderly?
Will the current chaos and uncertainty in the Western world make us more empathetic and willing to learn from those in the Majority World who live with such calamities on a regular basis?
What do such events reveal about human nature: values, morality, mortality, rationality, relationality?
How do you balance fear, despair, lament, hope, optimism?
Why does God allow suffering?
In what sense are calamities such as this a reflection of God's judgement? or of God's mercy?
What are appropriate responses (from the theological to the practical) of Christians to events such as this?
Why are we so afraid of death?
I welcome your own questions.
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In full scientific detail, how did COVID-19 patient zero get infected?
ReplyDeleteHas humanity morally progressed over the centuries?
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Will we ever see toilet paper on supermarket shelves again?