Opinion | The post-Covid era is not coming – not in a world low on trust
- Low trust in government hobbles our response to the pandemic, which further dampens trust, creating a vicious circle. Hope of a breakthrough depends on a recognition of our shared vulnerability
- Hong Kong is not alone in its struggle to return to normalcy
We should know by now that we will not be reopening in a “post-Covid-19” world. We are very much in a Covid-19 world, where herd immunity remains an elusive utopia because vaccine roll-outs have been patchy, to say the least.
Despite all the advances made in science and medicine, governments around the world have made blunders and botched roll-outs, crippling the already fragile public trust needed to fight the fake news monster that is spewing all kinds of ridiculous misinformation into the internet.
We still have people who refuse to mask up and prefer to cling on to conspiracy theories. (Heard that one about how the coronavirus pandemic is all just an elaborate hoax, so Bill Gates can inject microchips into us via vaccines?)
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Man suspected of attacking Asian-American woman in New York arrested and charged with hate crime
For all the human progress made in the past century, we are still stuck in the era of the “Yellow Peril”. The xenophobia of the 1890s, the fear of Asian peoples’ rise to world dominance and the unease about the growing populations of Asian immigrants to the West are all playing out in different corners of the world again.
