Deep in the honeycombed limestone caves of Slovenia, Croatia, and Friulian Italy, there is a fantastical creature called ‘the olm’, also known as ‘the baby dragon’. It was once an ordinary salamander, which probably fell down into the karstic caverns – where it has evolved into an eerie pink creature that lives for a century, eats once a decade, possesses eyes without sight, lives permanently in a larval condition – called ‘neoteny’ by zoologists – and has been recorded sitting in the exact same place for seven years, without moving.
Why do I mention the olm? Because, as I travel the world, I’m increasingly wondering if we humans, Homo sapiens – have turned into a peculiar higher primate version of the olm. As a result of what happened to us during Covid: physically, socially, psychologically.
Consider, first, your memories of Covid. For example, do you recall where we were exactly five years ago? In England, as of early June 2021, the country had just moved into Step 3. That meant indoor mixing was allowed under limits, and people could again sit inside pubs, restaurants, etc. – to eat and drink, albeit with masks, table service and social distancing. However, in the north of England, the Delta variant was brewing around Bolton, threatening the move to Step 4, which was indeed delayed by four weeks.
If you’re anything like me, all this sounds like a garbled news report in a semi-foreign language from a distant planet, of which we know little, and care to know less. It doesn’t sound like something epochal, that happened to us recently, which should be painfully sharp in our minds.
And that’s because we have chosen to forget. We’ve opted to blank out the pandemic experience, because it was so purely awful. From shielding to PPE, from fomites to bubbles to respirators to ‘humming Happy Birthday at the sink’ while we washed our hands, these pandemic-era phrases make us shudder and recall an evil time, and so – as is the human way – we erase them from our minds. What cannot be processed must be purged. Perhaps the olm, in the same manner, has forgotten the moment it fell down the limestone chasms of the Carso.
However, though we have done a pretty good job in forgetting Covid by burying it deep in our psyches, where it cannot be seen, Covid has certainly not forgotten us. Because it really did happen, and, in some particular aspects, it was the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity.
This sounds like a garbled news report in a semi-foreign language from a distant planet, of which we know little, and care to know less
This sounds like absurd hyperbole, until you search for counter examples. Yes, World War One was horrific, but it was largely restricted to Europe. World War Two was much bigger, but again not truly global, and even for those in the middle of it, World War Two often had a heroic, purposeful quality. There were victors. Evil was defeated. That doesn’t happen in pandemics.
Even the Black Death, though vastly more lethal and grievous for the societies infected, didn’t have the whole-world impact of Covid. And of course, the Black Death arrived when the total population of humans was a few hundred million. SARS-CoV-2 hit a global population of eight billion, and it hit absolutely everywhere.
I know this because, since Covid, I’ve been everywhere and I’ve asked people. And from Rwanda to Canada, from Korea to Uruguay to Myanmar, I’ve heard the same accounts – once you pierce the collective amnesia – of misery, sadness, masking, suffering and – most of all – the horror of lockdowns. Covid is probably the first time in human history when all of humanity shares the same singular recent trauma.
So, what has that trauma done to us? How are we like the olm? Let us count the ways, beyond the deliberate forgetting. First, it has made us – I believe – more credulous, maybe more stupid. This dates from the very beginning of Covid when we were all hoodwinked, ludicrously, into believing this novel bat coronavirus, which arose in the only city on earth with a laboratory investigating and pathogenising novel bat coronaviruses, came from an errant pangolin, or maybe a pipistrelle minestrone, and not from the lab down the road trying to make the precise virus which savaged the world.
And when I say down the road, I really mean ‘down the road’. A couple of months ago I visited Wuhan, China. To see where it all began. I stood by the infamous, now-shuttered seafood market (AKA the ‘first superspreading event’) then I walked to the nearest lab that was storing bats for coronavirus research (the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, described in 2020 as ‘Wild West’ for its lax bio-security, by the then head of Wellcome, Jeremy Farrar). That walk took me four minutes. In other words: trust me, it came from the lab. Yet from the get-go we were crazy enough to accept official accounts that told us otherwise, indeed they told us it was a ‘racist conspiracy theory’ to even consider that it came from the lab.
What else has Covid done to us? How else do we resemble the neotenous olm? If you are so minded, there are more uncanny echoes. Lockdown was our cave. For two years we were sealed in the karstic dark, faces unseen, the surface world reduced to a screen-glow. And so we did the olm thing – we let faculties atrophy – we adapted to the dark. We forgot how to do small talk, big talk, any talk. We forgot how to dine, how to date, how to easily interact. We lost attention spans, we got even less interested in having babies. Like the perpetually larval olm that remains motionless for seven years on the trot, I have friends who have essentially not left their homes since Covid, half a decade ago.
At the same time, we developed weird new antennae, strange electrical abilities – like the olm. Consequently, we have reacted very differently to new stimuli: Woke became an actual religion, Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump was re-elected, everyone now believes in UFOs.
It’s a traumatising list, and it may seem unduly harsh – on the olm. So let’s end on a kinder note. Although the olm has degraded senses, it is also a regenerative species. It can regrow lost limbs, maybe lost organs. And it still has vestigial eyes – they just never switch on. If the olm ever re-emerges into the dazzling light of the Adriatic, perhaps the gift of sight, at least for the olm, will belatedly return.
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