Corona-Change

Bright Side: The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has a silver lining?!?

Welcome to the Bright Side, where optimism rules and we see the glass half full instead of half empty. This is where we walk on the sunny side of the street…even while we’re social distancing. Yes, even during what may be the worst pandemic of all time, we need to find something positive. But, wait––are there any positive things???

Photo Credit: CNN

Whoa! What happened to this picture of the famous India Gate?

Did someone just put a filter on one side? And how about all those people in the background on that side? Don’t they care about “flattening the curve” to help coronavirus?!?

Well, they didn’t have to worry about that…then. That’s right: one half of the picture was taken in a different time––or as a friend says, BC, “before coronavirus”––in November of last year.

What about the other half? That was taken recently, on March 30, 2020.

But…what does this mean? You see that half that looks like a layer of see-through brown plastic? Well that’s a layer of smog (pollution) from factories, cars, trucks, and planes. Crazy, right?

And the other half? Can you guess why the air is cleaner since the coronavirus came along? Well, if you guessed, “because nobody’s there to drive and fly,” you’re absolutely correct: the coronavirus lockdown, during which everyone has agreed to stay home to keep people healthy, is actually making the air cleaner!

So, is the coronavirus a good thing? No way. But at the same time, there is a “silver lining” to the awful black storm cloud of this pandemic…a little bit healthier planet.

(In fact, if we had cleaned up the planet like this without a pandemic and people being out of jobs, just by working to make things more efficient and clean, expert Dr. Katherine Heyhoe says we’d already be a quarter of the way toward meeting our climate goal (StarTalk 45:55). Wow!)

However, I understand it may be no fun to wait it out at home during this time. Here’s a web comic my sister Callisto made, that might help make waiting it out just a bit more bearable:

 

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