The Times Kuwait Report
Another blessed Eid-al-Fitr under the ominous shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, is just a few days away. More than a year into the health crisis, and despite the rollout of vaccination programs around the world, the virus has not shown any signs of abatement, neither becoming less virulent nor losing its potency to infect people. If anything, mutant strains of the virus have emerged that are proving even more infectious than the first wave, with infections and fatalities increasing exponentially over the past year.
Last May, when Eid-al-Fitr came around, Kuwait had reported less than 15,000 coronavirus cases; today, a year later, the numbers have gone up to nearly 283,000. In terms of deaths attributed to the pandemic, the numbers have gone from less than 150 in May 2020 to more than 1,600 by the first week of this May.
Despite the angst caused by these frightening statistics, living for more than a year under the dark and life-threatening cloud of the virus have given people the strength to cope with the pandemic. They have shown remarkable resilience in the face of adversity and demonstrated the versatility to spring back, adapt and move on with their lives.
The month-long period of fasting from dawn-to-dusk that culminates with the Eid-al-Fitr festival, is perhaps an apt display of this buoyancy of the human spirit. Fasting daily for a month not only strengthens one’s piety, it reinforces willpower and helps build endurance and ability to overcome challenges. Fasting also introduces people to what the poor and the deprived members of society experience daily in their lives.
It leads people to be thankful for their blessings and invokes a desire in them to help those less privileged. The immutable message reinforced by the Eid celebrations is that all of humanity is one family; helping even one member helps build a stronger and more resilient society; and, causing harm to one individual leads to hurting everyone in the long-term.
Every adversity we face, every challenge we encounter, including the ongoing pandemic, reiterates and rams home this message of the need for solidarity and for assisting one another. When faced with adversity people can choose one of three potential outcomes: They can remain broken; they can attempt to get back to where they were before the calamity struck; or they can choose to thrive from the adversity and end up even further ahead than where they were before the affliction.
On the individual level, option three is clearly the best choice and it is available to all of us by simply using adversity as an opportunity to help others. By assisting others in their time of need, we give the misfortune that we confront a new meaning, and it endows us with the means to help vanquish it by lending a hand to those unable to help themselves. By this definition, people have on the individual level shown remarkable resilience to spring back from the adversity during the ongoing pandemic.
For more than a year of living with the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been demonstrating this resilience by supporting, assisting and inspiring each other with their individual and collective resolve to overcome the adversities they face. Collectively as a community we have also demonstrated our determination not to be cowed by a virus, and to persevere and prevail in the face of any challenge that threatens our joint existence and progress.
Lockdowns, curfews, and border closures in response to the COVID-19 crisis; restrictions on movement and public gatherings; restraints on all services except those deemed essential, have all combined to take a heavy toll on business activities resulting in financial and economic repercussions from which the country has yet to fully recover. Nevertheless, people and businesses have, for the most part, learned to accept the extenuating circumstances, adapt to it and to move forward with hope.
For instance, many retailers have vamped up their online presence and internet shopping is now said to be a thriving new retail front. Data from Knet, the country’s shared electronic banking services company, reveal that restrictions on movement of people due to the pandemic, have expedited the move towards online shopping and spending. Online spending grew by 123 percent in March, pushing the amount of online transactions to KD790 million, or 36 percent of total spending — a huge leap from the 12 percent of overall spending just two years ago.
On a similar note, despite educational institutions remaining shuttered for more than a year now, students, teachers, school management and parents have learned to cope. Learning, teaching and evaluating student performances have in large measure moved from the physical to the virtual world. In the same vein, last year’s Eid, held against the backdrop of the same virus and the consequent restrictions imposed on mobility of people and gatherings, has apparently given people a precedent on how best to spend the upcoming festival and five-day holidays.
People have learned to seize any occasion that provides an opportunity to relax, and delivers a respite from the daily foreboding coronavirus statistics. Incidentally, in a highly telling critique of the limited entertainment and leisure infrastructure in the country, more people choose to travel abroad to relax even during brief breaks, than come home to Kuwait.
Latest figures from the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) show that a total of 21,000 people — mainly citizens, their first-degree relatives and the ‘all-important’ domestic helpers who are permitted to exit and enter the country — are planning to travel during the five-day Eid-al-Fitr holidays. Of these numbers, the overwhelming majority (76%), or more than 16,000 people, are preparing to enjoy the brief holiday abroad, while only around 5,000 are planning to come home for the Eid holidays.
For those who are constrained to the country by the bans and flight restrictions in place, some leisure venues, including VOX cinemas in The Avenues, have announced that they will be welcoming visitors during the Eid holidays, under strict health and safety guidelines.
Obviously, people have learned, or are learning, to adapt to the evolving and challenging situation, and to make the most of any event or occasion that provides an opportunity to gather and celebrate as a family or as a community. Whether through limited direct physical contacts or via online video or audio gatherings, and meetings, people have been interacting with each other at every available opportunity.
The fact that entertainment spots are slowly beginning to open up and people are choosing to travel despite the disquiet surrounding the pandemic, is not only an indication of the glimmer of optimism in the air, following the large-scale rollout of vaccinations in the country and the region. It is also an attestation of human resilience in the face of continued adversity. Resilience has often been described as the process of positive adaptation that evokes responses to overcome adversity and which lead to positive outcomes. Experts say the key to positive adaptation that builds resilience among individuals is to take adversities that confront us and learn ways of processing them differently, so they support rather than hinder us.
However, from a socio-ecological perspective, resilience is not simply an individual’s responsibility; it is a shared social responsibility that involves individuals as well as society and the larger global community, cooperating and coordinating with each other to ensure the common good of humanity. The concept of ‘building back better’ that is being touted around by several countries is based on this third approach. But when viewed through this prism, our collective global resilience and response to the pandemic leaves much to be desired. For instance, when it comes to global vaccinations, everyone is aware that no one is fully safe from the virus until everyone is safe.
Yet, the ground reality of vaccinations paints a different picture. Vaccinations against the virus are currently our only bulwark against the spread of the infection, but unfortunately there exists a distinctively disproportionate distribution of vaccines worldwide. Rich developed countries have not only vaccinated a large portion of their population, but are also reported to be hoarding vaccines for future potential eventualities. At the same time many poor developing nations have barely been able to vaccinate even a small percent of their population due to the dearth in availability of vaccines.
To highlight this discrepancy in vaccination, one needs to look no further than the United States, where more than two million people are being vaccinated daily. Now compare this with South Sudan, where so far less than 1,000 people have been vaccinated in total. The vaccine disparity is not only glaring evident and morally unethical, it is also an indelible blotch on our collective conscience as humans. We need to urgently rectify this situation or continue living with this shame and the threat of a never receding pandemic.
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