Our city has one of the happiest workforces in the country. We are also the most eco-friendly in the country.
These are two great accolades that should cheer us up at a time when good news is in short supply. But it can be hard to appreciate good news when we are in lockdown, with businesses on the brink and our hospitals close to breaking point, if not in some areas broken already.
In the happy workforce stakes we came third, with Edinburgh in first place and Bournemouth second. I count myself as one of those who is very happy in the job I do. I get to see hundreds of young (and an increasing number of more mature) students starting out on a career path that is one of the most rewarding (and at times stressful) jobs – working with young children and young adults.
The official survey looked at much more than how positive people viewed their job, it also factored in salary, working hours and commuting time.
I moved to Brighton 16 years ago. One factor was the commute I did across London. I taught at a university in the West of London and lived in the South East of London a “short” commute of about 15 miles. But it would regularly take well over an hour for me to drive. By public transport it was nearly two hours.
My move to Brighton, even though I continued to live in South East London for the first year of my new job, cut my commute to 40 minutes even though the mileage more than doubled.
Environmentally, Brighton has its ups and downs. There are constant claims of success and failure over recycling, cuts to speed limits and controversial cycle lanes, but we are still doing better than many other areas. As with all initiatives we can always do better and sometimes even small adjustments to our normal habits can make significant gains.
One thing that I do hope happens as a result of this pandemic is that we reassess our intense consumerism and our way of living. In lockdown, while we can still order goods online and have them delivered, it’s clear our pattern of buying goods is changing. We are buying fewer goods on impulse. Let’s face it people’s incomes have been severely restricted. We are, perhaps, throwing away fewer items and having to make do and mend more often.
We should also take this opportunity to reassess our education system and the purpose of education. Over the past 25 years or so we have shifted towards seeing examination outcomes as the only measure of success in education. But education is so much more than passing tests. Now would be a good time to think again about how we assess children more holistically and not simply focus on memorising facts and memory tests as the sign of a good education.
How we will fare after the pandemic comes to an end only time will tell. There is certainly a ticking time bomb in the area of mental health. The toll taken by lockdowns, restrictions and isolation is yet to be felt in full. For health workers there is certainly a need for careful monitoring and support to be in place. If your day-to-day work involves high death rates, seriously ill people struggling to breathe and you have few, if any, effective treatments to alleviate the symptoms it must have a profound effect on your mental health.
The consequences of this pandemic will be with us for a generation at least. It’s unlikely that we will ever eliminate the virus completely. Corona viruses mutate and evolve and it is probable that we will need annual vaccinations, especially for the most vulnerable, in the same way that we have annual flu vaccinations.
We have only ever eradicated two viruses. The main success was the elimination of the smallpox virus through aggressive vaccination worldwide. The virus does still exist in small quantities in very secure laboratories, so technically it is not extinct.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines eradication of a virus as the “permanent reduction to zero of the worldwide incidence of infection caused by a specific agent as a result of deliberate efforts”. It took 200 years to eliminate smallpox.
The only other virus to be classified as eradicated is one that affected cattle, the Rinderpest virus that killed large numbers of cattle in Europe and Africa.
If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we should appreciate more what do have and be less envious of what others have.
I recall saying at the start of this pandemic that we could, and should, re-evaluate how our society operates and, in a sense, hit a reset button.
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