Corona Daily 000: Afterword

Considering the speed at which the sub-microscopic agent had travelled the world, I felt the pandemic would become a big story. On 26 March 2020, while taking a shower, I decided to write 500 articles on 500 consecutive days to cover this once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) event. Not having experienced a pandemic before, I had no idea what it was that I planned to write. Intuitively though, I felt the world was in for a cataclysmic shock that would produce an overwhelming amount of material. Daily reporting seemed like the only way to do justice to the scale of the crisis.

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Indeed, it proved to be an omni-crisis. Even during the World Wars; some nations, towns and villages were spared. Not this time. Covid-19 has entered every country, affected each individual on this planet in a variety of ways.  

My Corona Daily Capsule was disproportionately skewed towards American news sources. To a lesser extent, British newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, BBC and the Guardian have the financial muscle, a global network of offices and qualified journalists. No Asian or African media comes anywhere close. It’s not their fault. Print media in particular is a rapidly declining business, and most countries lack the money to produce objective, quality international reporting.

Not that NYT or Economist is top-class because they are in English language. Google now allows us to read any newspapers in a language we understand. By way of hyperlinks, over 1,000 newspapers and academic papers have featured in this series.

The aim was to curate and analyse trustworthy sources. I don’t have television, and don’t use WhatsApp. A responsible writer should not only give sources, but also judge their credibility. My big thanks to the five newspapers above for making the Corona Dailies possible. Sat in my chair, I “exploited” them as if they were my employees. (I was happy to pay them the subscription charges for working for me).

In this series, I have reported stories from over 100 countries. Ironically, I read some stories about India first in The New York Times, Economist or BBC. Most human stories are universal anyway. A hungry person is a hungry person, a school closure affects a child no matter where, and grief affects all races and nationalities.

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Some readers have urged me to continue the corona dailies till the pandemic ends. (Season two? Negative numbers for countdown?)

For storytellers, the pandemic has ended. In the first hundred days, I was spoilt for choice. There were days when I had five or six stories to choose from. In the last month, I had to invest longer hours to find a single subject. Most coronavirus stories are becoming repetitive, something I wanted to avoid. Why talk about cases, deaths and vaccines every day? There is no readability there, only data.

And that is the great news. Coronavirus is no longer novel. As a writer, my worry was not when the pandemic would end, but when the stories would end. The number 500 was about right.

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I must thank Mena, my wife, the first reader and editor of my writing. For each of the last five hundred days, she didn’t go to bed until my blog was posted. That is a big commitment even for an Indian wife.

Many readers sent me messages today saying they had read each of the 500 articles. In this age of Twitter, that is a monumental accomplishment. (In terms of word count, the 500 articles together are equivalent of three full-length novels.) I want to thank all my readers, known and unknown. Special thanks to Jyoti Ronghe and Becky Payne for giving me feedback on nearly all articles, and to Shirish Patel for being a super-spreader of my writing. Such engagement from readers works as a tonic for a writer.

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The End

© Ravi Abhyankar, 2021