The COVID-19 pandemic has made it imperative to maintain physical distancing and wear a mask. However, the rising number of cases indicates that these are not adhered to. The worst pandemic in a century can be prevented by adopting the two simple measures. However, changing collective behaviour is extremely difficult and all hope is pitched on the elusive vaccine. As lockdowns kept getting extended, it became evident that life could not be lived in a cocoon. Education and businesses began to be conducted in the virtual space. Acceptance and response to the new system varied with age groups, based on their pre-conditioning.
The responses to the virtual medium that I noticed in different age groups indicated their varied familiarity with it. My 40-year-old daughter showed a 3-D Google image of a lion to her two-year-old nephew. She asked him if he would feel scared if the roaring lion came out of her smartphone. The child said nonchalantly, “The lion cannot come out; if it tries, the phone will break and the lion will cease to exist.”
When this same daughter of mine was two, she would run away to another room on seeing wild animals on television. Her younger sister, already exposed to television in her grandparents’ home, would reassure her that animals in TV remained inside and would not come out. Now, my grandchildren, aged 11, nine and seven, have enthusiastically adapted to their online classes and extracurricular activities. Their easy adaptation stems from video games, played much to the annoyance of their parents, and familiarity with virtual images through 3-D movies.
My first exposure to 3-D images was in the early 1980s while watching a show in Disneyland. My husband and I were quite shocked when insects and birds seemed to fly right into our faces, and we were furiously warding them off. We were familiar with overhead projectors and chrome slides for clinical presentations. Making slides was a group activity that involved my artistic daughter sketching on a chart paper and her father taking photographs, which were developed in a studio and mounted on a frame. Later, it became easy to make slides with a computer, after the initial struggle of typing gingerly with one finger.
As organisations went digital, it became obligatory to use computers in hospitals. The infamous problem of the illegibility of a doctor’s prescription was overcome, though at the cost of losing eye contact with patients. During an outpatient consultation, while peering at the computer, I asked a patient to please talk about his symptoms. Suddenly he stopped the narration even as I told him to continue. “Doctor you are not listening. I will continue after you finish with the computer work,” he said. The patient taught me the importance of active listening. Since the practice of medicine involves lot of interaction, I used to think that online consultations would never work.
The lockdown changed my perception. Doctors could not abandon their patients and remained available by mobile phones.
The informal arrangement soon got converted to online visual consultation and electronic medical records. After some hiccups, both doctors and patients learned the “new normal” of virtual consultation. Webinars were organised by professional bodies that brought together experts from all over the world. After attending such virtual meetings, I felt emboldened to conduct a tree walk and “took along” more than 200 participants in different cities through the tree-lined avenues of Jamshedpur — all in the virtual mode.
Adaptation to change is the key to sustain ourselves professionally, keep up our hobbies and stay relevant. I do make an exception for my mother in her late eighties who likes to fondly hold printed photographs of her great grandchildren. She loathes virtual images that vanish in the blink of an eye.
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