I’ve spent the last 16 hours getting back to Europe, my home and per @WHO now „the epicentre of the pandemic“. Via almost empty airports and half-empty planes I‘ve now arrived back in Berlin, a city shutting down schools, clubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, museums.
Seeing this, it‘s hard not to marvel at the awesome power that 30,000 letters of nucleic acid have unleashed, what a little set of genetic instructions can do to this fragile, interconnected world we‘ve built.
The possibility was always there, of course. Many of us have written about it over the years. And yet, looking back little more than 10 weeks ago, when China announced a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases, it is hard to grasp how fast this tiny virus has changed our world.
But there‘s another way of looking at this. After all we‘ve CHOSEN to shut things down. Where the virus has one set of instructions that it ceaselessly carries out we are able to adapt and - maybe,hopefully - to learn. That’s an awesome power too. We’ll need it, we should use it.
There‘s been plenty of our worst qualities on display in this #covid19 pandemic already (and there will be plenty more): greed, ignorance, selfishness, cruelty. We won‘t be able to tune that out. And I don‘t want to. Indeed, it’s my job as a journalist not to do that.
But I decided on my way home that I will try to reserve some time on sundays to find and share positive or practical things in the midst of all this. It’ll be good for my mental health if nothing else and will hopefully amplify the voices of those who represent our best impulses.
So to get this #SarsCoV2Sunday started, I‘d love for you to share what you have seen other people do or have done yourself - big or small - to adapt to this new world we find ourselves in, especially if it is for the benefit of other people.
Here‘s one I saw today: a journalism colleague who plans to post a few workouts every week that people can do at home with no equipment to stay fit. #sarscov2sunday
Here‘s a prepared page for that to print out in German. People can put down their names and phone numbers if they are willing to do grocery shopping or other things to help out people at a higher risk from #covid19 in the same building h/t @A_Schillhaneck gruene-ts.de/wp-content/upl…
Concert from @igorpianist livestreamed every evening at 7 pm Berlin time. #sarscov2sunday
Several people shared this thread for #sarscov2sunday
Another nice idea for #sarscov2sunday:
Also a nice way to mark #SarsCoV2Sunday
And maybe this is worth trying if you’re missing your daily commute ;) #sarscov2sunday
