Campbell's Commentary - WELCOME TO COVID19. THE NEW NORMAL 101

By Aubrey Campbell

NEW YORK, NY. Tuesday, March 24, 2020 – The Corona Virus Disease (COVID) of 2019, has given us quite a bit to ingest. To put it mildly, this disease that has so far impacted lives and livelihood in some 144 nations, globally, has managed to change the socio-economic trajectory in ways unimaginable before now!

And because there seems to be nothing else on the agenda at the moment and for the foreseeable future, welcome to COVID.19, the ‘new normal’.

I promise not to take up much of your time, at least not today! This virus needs more than six feet of separation because if I’m to make any sense of the countless theories of conspiracy making the rounds day in, day out, the virus did not start in China!

Hear this. It started in China and it is not supposed to be airborne, yet persons, sick, lame, lazy and hearty, are dying by the millions, persons who never traveled to China, let alone coming into contact with persons who traveled to that ‘Super-Country’!

I am trying to read everything in the public space on this disease so that I can take all the necessary precautions but this six-feet thing is not working. Is only one room and edge to edge, the bed is not six feet wide!

Are you with me?

But on a more serious note, I want to know who or what initiated this visitation on humankind, at this time? At this time when folks in Barbuda are being denied the right to the land-space they have come to call their own since they were born.

Hurricane Irma visited in September 2017, and now the government in Antigua is moving to overturn the Barbuda Land Act of 2007, which would now open the land to all and sundry including foreign investors.

And as journalist Melissa Noel, wrote in her ‘eye-opening’ piece, during a recent stop in Codrington, ‘for many Barbudans, this looms as a bigger threat to their culture and way of life than the devastating storm’.

Barbuda in 2017 and parts of the Bahamas in 2019, are two of the recent storm-torn nations in the Caribbean region, bracing for the wrath of the coronavirus, with the total caseload of 144 and counting. As at last Wednesday, the death toll in the region was 6.

Spot-checking the region, some governments are in step with developments, globally, Jamaica among them, thanks to the goodwill of the Cuban government, airlifting medical personnel and medicine into the island.

With a healthcare infrastructure that needs an urgent and very serious overhaul, the government’s approach to prevention, prevention, prevention, is commendable!

Never know I would be able to say that but it’s what it is. I’m going to call it the way I see it!

And, might as well shut the borders if persons are going to be barefaced enough to not want to declare their country (port) of embarkation, knowing all too well that ‘corona nuh partial’.

It must be a really frustrating time for folks in Guyana with one death from five cases of the virus, so far, and a government not knowing if it’s coming or going! It’s now three weeks to the day that nationals went to the polls in regional and general elections and a decision are still pending.

The APNU/AFC coalition that governed up until December 2018, when it lost a ‘no confidence’ vote to the opposition PPP/Civic, and the PPP/Civic that was voted out of power in 2015, after being in power for 20-plus years, both say they won!

The rule of the law allows for only one winner and so, accidentally or by intent, something went terribly wrong in the vote count, just hours after the polls closed in the pivotal Region 4 - Georgetown.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat is headquartered in Georgetown, making for a very bad show for the region, but what is even more bothersome is the stance of the Trump Administration and remarks by the playground bully Mike Pompeo, who is threatening deep and far-reaching sanctions if a particular party is declared the winner of the elections.

In other words, to hell with the wishes of Guyanese nationals to choose their own government!

Read my lips!

Diplomatic visas come with a hefty price tag. Jamaica knows that. Now, Guyana has oil. Venezuela is in limbo and Caricom is trying its best to be the pawnbroker, but this is geopolitics and the new order, COVID.19!

Ever since Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced their COVID.19 protocols, I have been telling my wife, it’s no longer six inches, its six feet. 

She is still taking her temperature!

BTW, yesterday was her birthday. Pray for me!

You have the floor!

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