What have we learned from the Covid-19 pandemic?

- The fact that if China and India really wanted, they could significantly reduce their pollution.

China and India are some of the top countries in the world when it comes to pollution and harmful emissions.

During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, ie. during the strictest and most widespread lockdowns in those countries, significantly unusually low levels of emission were measured in both countries. Satellite imagery measuring pollutants showed a significant reduction of emissions in large parts of China. In the northern parts of India the Himalayas became visible from many cities for the first time in decades (the Himalayas had been for several decades completely and permanently hidden by heavy smog.)

This goes to show that large amounts of pollution are not something inevitable. If these (and many other) countries really, really wanted to significantly reduce their emissions, they could. This pandemic proved that quite well.

- Closing borders is not as impossible as suggested.

For several decades now, especially in Europe (and especially in the Nordic Countries), there has been a massive social engineering campaign that has force-fed the population the notion that not only is immigration the right thing to do and extremely beneficial, but moreover it's something natural and inevitable, and trying to resist it is not only immoral but also foolish. It's as foolish as trying to stop the Earth from rotating or earthquakes from happening. Moreover, not only is it inevitable and foolish to even think to try to stop it, but if we ever tried to stop it, there would be scary international sanctions because of scary vacuous "international agreements"! You know, all these "international agreements" that remove all self-determination and self-governance from us. If we ever tried to close our borders and stop immigration, all the other countries in the world would punish us with sanctions. Therefore the only option we have is to keep our borders open and keep taking in immigrants. Because sanctions.

Yet, when the Covid-19 pandemic started, there seemed to be zero problems in closing borders as tightly as they can be. For example in Finland for several months the only people allowed to enter the country were Finnish citizens returning to the country. Everybody else was banned from entering. Borders closed. Nobody gets in.

Didn't seem so "impossible" and "unthinkable" to me. In fact, it happened quite easily, pretty much at a moment's notice, when the Parliament had unanimously voted for it.

- Globalism can be dangerous.

International trade has existed for millenia, but it's only during the past century, perhaps century-and-a-half, that it has really exploded, with more and more large companies becoming multi-national corporations (having branches, subsidiaries and offices in many countries), and the amount of cargo and people moving all around the world increasing exponentially. International travel by the millions has become commonplace and normal.

Many epidemiologists have warned that this will have the side-effect of making serious pandemics a lot more likely and common. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimate of up to 100 million people, was, perhaps, the first warning that globalism can have its negative side-effects in the form of dangerous pandemics.

While Covid-19 might not be exactly as deadly as the Spanish Flu was, it's a warning of things to come. There's nothing to say that in the future an even worse version of influenza or coronavirus, or some other virus, isn't going to appear which will kill hundreds of millions of people from all around the world, thanks to millions of people traveling all over the globe every year.

- It has exposed totalitarian governments in disguise.

I don't really understand what the deal is with the United Kingdom and its former colonies, but there seems to be something really strangely inherent in its governmental culture that makes it incredibly and surprisingly totalitarian.

This feels very strange because the United Kingdom was, in essence, for centuries on the forefront of modern libertarianism. It was the country that, arguably, invented the precursor of modern Constitutions (namely, the Magna Carta). It was one of the first countries to legally ban slavery, and the country that almost single-handedly stopped the trans-Atlantic slave trade by military force. It was one of the major players defeating Nazi Germany, and one of the principal countries drafting and signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Thus, it feels very strange how totalitarian its government is. The United Kingdom is pretty much in effect a totalitarian police state, and the Covid-19 pandemic has once again brought to light this fact. The British police enforces pandemic restrictions to absolutely ridiculous extents (such as sending patrol cars to arrest someone at a remote beach, miles away from another human being, and harassing and arresting numerous people who were doing nothing wrong, not even by the lockdown rules). They seem more interested in harassing people who aren't being any danger to anybody than arresting actual criminals (especially those of a particular religion).

This is not restricted to the United Kingdom, though. Its biggest former colonies, namely Canada and Australia, are even worse. For example Canada is essentially kidnapping people and forcefully taking them to undisclosed secret locations without telling their families where they are, or allowing them to communicate with the outside. Many women who have been hijacked like this have reported sexual abuse at these locations, by other hijacked people and even by staff. Somehow this is apparently not an egregious breach of basic human rights.