November 2025 marks the sixth anniversary of COVID-19, the deadliest pandemic in modern history, which brought humankind, with all its advanced systems, science, and technologies, to a complete halt. Even the most developed nations, with superior healthcare, appeared helpless, no better than rural hospitals in poor countries.
But does one even discuss COVID today? Do newspapers in India recall it? Do political parties talk about it in their manifestos? Are our schools teaching it as history yet? It's only been six years, yet the memory of that catastrophe is rapidly fading. According to several estimates of excess mortality, around 4 to 6 million people died in India alone. This was the highest number of deaths in independent India's history. But the disaster has become a chapter in our shared memory that we choose to ignore, and it fades more and more each year.
We buried it deep because remembering would force us to face an uncomfortable truth: the virus didn’t strike humanity on its own. Rather, our collective philosophy of life set in motion the very steps that unleashed it upon us. And once it started, at least half of those deaths were due to human indifference and unpreparedness.
Some countries in Europe rebuilt their health systems from scratch after COVID, but others moved on, unwilling to contemplate their failures. In India, we saw migrant workers walk hundreds of kilometres home, children miss two years of education, and crematoriums run out of space. Yet today, not a single major policy reform addresses pandemic preparedness. The oxygen shortage that killed thousands has been filed away as merely ‘unfortunate’.
It is time we looked back, not in fear, but in honesty, to ask what the pandemic revealed about us, and what we chose to forget.
The first known case appeared in late 2019. Within months, 14.9 million people would be dead. The world economy contracted by 3% in 2020, its deepest plunge since the Great Depression. But these numbers mask the real story: the deaths and economic devastation struck the poor with disproportionate cruelty.
For almost two years, normal life was suspended. Humankind lived in the shadow of death: families torn asunder, economies frozen, mental-health crises surging. Millions kept scrolling their phones, horrified by the growing number of bodies. Seeing bodies burned in piles or thrown into rivers made death seem inevitable. The oxygen cylinder and ventilator became symbols of how powerless we all felt. Lockdowns led to crippling loneliness and a looming epidemic of mental-health issues.
People lost faith in governments, organisations, and even science. False information and polarisation made the situation even worse. The crisis forced people to think for a short time about what work, relationships, and success really meant. But as soon as the limits were lifted, consumerism came back with a bang. The reflection was fleeting; we had learned nothing.
Six Years On: What Have We Learned?
What does the world look like after COVID? What has changed? The answer is uncomfortable: very little. What species returns so quickly to delusion after staring death in the face? We have not learned that we are not separate from nature; whatever we do to harm it rebounds on ourselves.
Deforestation has continued to push wild animals out of their natural habitats and into human spaces. We choose to ignore that COVID-19 itself likely emerged from precisely this kind of ecological disruption: a virus jumping from animal to human because we had destroyed the buffer zones that once kept us apart. We have returned to destruction by chopping down forests to raise farms for meat, malls, grocery chains, and amusement parks. The pandemic taught us that when we invade the jungle, the jungle's pathogens invade us. Yet we continue clearing forests as if that lesson never happened.
Climate Change: The Next Pandemic
The Paris Agreement, signed by world leaders in 2015, promised to keep global warming to 1.5°C. But emissions have kept going up. The average global warming on the Earth hit 1.55°C by 2024. This sped up the melting of glaciers and made it more likely that ancient ice-bound diseases would be released. One coronavirus shocked the world, but millions of others may still be sleeping, trapped in ancient ice, ready to be released. We speak of melting glaciers releasing ancient viruses as if it's science fiction. But the permafrost is already melting, and we're drilling deeper into areas that should be wild. We won't be caught off guard by the next pandemic; we'll dig it up ourselves.
After the pandemic, billionaires' fortunes soared, while millions lost jobs and small businesses were wiped out. The chasm between labour and capital expanded. Agriculture and meat industries took ‘recovery’ as a pretext to raise prices while quietly increasing their inhumane practices towards animals and workers. With inequality widening, the hunger for profit found new forms of expression.
And what of those who suffered most? The migrant workers, the daily-wage earners, the street vendors haven't forgotten because they can't afford to. While the privileged speak of ‘post-pandemic growth’, millions still haven't recovered what they lost: savings depleted, children's education interrupted, small businesses shuttered forever. The pandemic revealed not just a health crisis, but an ethical one: some lives are considered expendable. They remain trapped in an aftermath the privileged could afford to forget.
The Return of Aggressive Consumerism
Post-COVID, tourism, airlines, and hospitality not only regained losses but also inflated prices and profits beyond pre-pandemic levels. In the name of ‘compensation’, consumerism came back with a vengeance. After being holed up in our homes for two years, we booked flights, swarmed beaches, and chased experiences desperately, as if buying pleasure might make the anguish go away. The carbon footprint of aircraft, over-tourism, and cutting down trees for resorts all went up again.
The urge to ‘return to normal’ became a race to consume once more. Malls reopened to cheering crowds. Airlines operated at higher capacity than 2019. Hotel chains expanded into pristine ecosystems. The pause had taught us nothing. It showed that the old normal was itself the disease. Balance did not return; exploitation only intensified.
Unlearned Lessons: The Next Warning
Did the pandemic push us inward, toward reflection? No. We continue to look outside for happiness in things and experiences that people who benefit from our aspirations sell to us. They make money off our lack of awareness, our complacency, and our collective forgetfulness. As a species supposedly having more intelligence than others, we have become the most destructive of all. We make tools that hurt us, cut down trees in the name of progress, and fight pointless ideological wars while disregarding clean air, clean water, good schools, affordable healthcare, income equality, and justice.
The question is not if another pandemic will strike, but when, and whether we'll be any more prepared than we were in 2020. The way we are plundering the planet's resources and forests, we are actively engineering the next outbreak. COVID-19 had a fatality rate of just 1–2%, and it crippled the world. Imagine a pathogen with Ebola's 50% fatality rate and COVID's transmissibility. Our hospital systems would collapse within days. Our vaccines, even expedited, would arrive too late for millions. The social fabric would tear apart entirely. We brag about how quickly we can make vaccines and how well our data systems work, but scratch the surface and nothing has changed: hospital capacity remains strained, public-health funding inadequate, pandemic preparedness plans gathering dust.
Even long COVID, still affecting millions with fatigue, breathlessness, and cognitive fog, has been swept under the rug, deemed inconvenient to acknowledge. These are not recovered patients; they are the walking wounded of a war we pretend is over.
The pandemic gave people a chance to stop and think about how distorted our philosophy of life is, if we define happiness as the purpose of life, and consumption as the means to that happiness. It was a forced opportunity to ask the basic question: Who am I? Somebody born to exploit and consume, and then be unceremoniously reduced to ashes? But as soon as lockdowns lifted, the same malls reopened, planes filled up again, and the search for material resumed. The same mad rush for consumption that unleashed the virus in the first place. The dress rehearsal for civilisational collapse has been taken as an intermission.
A Final Reflection: In the Light of Understanding
So, do we need another pandemic to awaken what we refuse to see? Is an AQI of 500, a level deemed a ‘severe hazard’, not warning enough? We poison the very air we breathe and call it progress. We suffocate slowly and call it normal. It is no longer a matter of intelligence; it is a matter of sensitivity: the basic human awareness that made us seek truth and resist our own destruction.
Where did that sensitivity go? Why must we wait for catastrophe to become conscious? The virus didn't terrify us because of what it did, but because of what it revealed: that beneath our towers and technologies, we are fundamentally chaotic, utterly dependent, and fatally arrogant in our delusion of mastery.
When we treat forests as timber, rivers as sewers, animals as protein, nature doesn't punish us. It simply rebalances, with mankind reduced in the equation. We are the trees we fell, the rivers we poison, the animals we cage. Their destruction is our destruction. When they bleed, it is our own blood seeping into the earth.
We kept asking, "When will the world heal?" without realising it was never sick. The world doesn't need healing. Man does. We are diseased, not with a virus, but with ignorance, endless craving, and incompleteness. No vaccine can cure this. No policy can legislate awareness. It begins only when a human being stops running and looks honestly at what he has become: fear masquerading as ambition, greed masquerading as aspiration, violence masquerading as progress.
COVID was a whisper from the abyss. Climate change is the roar. The question isn't if another pandemic will come. The question is whether we'll still be asleep when it arrives, or whether we'll finally ask: Who am I beyond this endless wanting? That question is humanity's only real defence. No preparedness or policy will help without an answer to that, and we're still too frightened to ask.
Acharya Prashant is a teacher, founder of PrashantAdvait Foundation, and author on wisdom literature.
