I’m quite sure that everybody here knows about COVID and all the bad things that come with it. You have to stay home, you can’t shake hands, you have to wear a mask if you want to go outside, you have to frequently wash your hands, people are losing their jobs because of the lockdown, and more! The majority of your time thinking about COVID would be about the bad things from this virus. But there are many good things about it as well! These good things are going to help us in the long-term. In this blog, I’ll focus on the two best things that have come from this pandemic. 

One of the best long-term benefits of this virus is the reduction in pollution. This was probably the most obvious. Traffic from cars, flights, trains, and other forms of transportation has largely reduced. This is in turn has greatly reduced the amount of pollution. In China, for example, it’s estimated that at least 78,000 would’ve died due to pollution. But instead, 4600 people died due to COVID. This is happening in many other places too. Within the first week of lockdown, India’s air pollution has dropped to the lowest it has been in the last 20 years. When my mother went to India in January, the airport runway was barely visible when her plane landed in Dehli. But now, Delhi has clear skies. People in Dehli can now breathe fresh air and have a much lower chance of a variety of diseases that are much more dangerous than COVID.

Another long-term effect of COVID is going to be the digitization of everything. People are starting to see that it is largely possible to do the majority of IT jobs from home. Google, for example, is going to let their workers stay home until July 2021. They might one day conclude that there is no need to go to the office the majority of the time. This going to reduce the amount of pollution(people will be commuting less) and it’s going to save a lot of money. This will in turn allow for Google and other IT companies to allocate less money to office costs and more money for innovation. 

Overall, COVID has done a lot of bad things for everybody around the world. But benefits like this are a nice silver lining to an otherwise terrible situation.