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When the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, was recently admitted to hospital with COVID-19, spending a few days in intensive care, a number of British politicians and journalists talked about how the virus was the great leveller. Everyone from street cleaners to world leaders could get the disease; no-one was immune, therefore, we must all follow the same social distancing guidelines. But as Iñigo Aymar of Oxfam has pointed out, COVID-19 is not so much the great leveller, but the great revealer.

In just a couple of weeks an invisible virus got the world economy on its knees and made 2020 the year of postponement. Not only concerts and conferences, sports and theaters have been suspended or postponed. Even pivotal UN meetings have been postponed and among them the UNFCCC COP 26 in Glasgow. A meeting that should have at its best ramped up the ambitions to cut the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Incredible amounts of money have been thrown in by different governments of the world to keep the economy from a total collapse. And no one seems to be against it.

Countries affected by COVID-19 are gradually lifting confinement restrictions that were introduced to contain and mitigate the spread of the pandemic. We are slowly, but surely, limping back to normalcy. Although it is too early to declare a victory against COVID-19, the spread of the virus is abating in many countries. But if we drop our guard, it is likely that the virus will regain a foothold in the weeks to come. Vigilance and patience will be needed in these pressing times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the political, economic and social life of a troubled world, already suffering by the financial crisis and imposed neoliberal austerity measures. With this current crisis, a strange unity has risen; a unity in fear of illness and death, anxious uncertainty for the future and collective mourning for the tens of thousands of deaths.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in physical distancing, it has not made us any less of a global community. On the contrary, these troubling times have revealed just how connected we truly are. We have all been forced to find creative ways of staying connected whether it is from the smallest unit of a nuclear family to large transnational companies.

May God's comfort and love be with you who are holding up every day in the midst of the coronavirus. We lost our normal lives very quickly and we are experiencing limitations of human being in the face of such a sudden disaster. The number of confirmed cases and deaths that flow out of the news every day seems unrealistic, and this painful reality puts us in deep frustration.

Television, FaceBook and WhatsApp chats bring news from Manila, much of it disheartening. In the early stages of the pandemic with nearly 1,500 cases as of this writing, the Philippines has already lost 12 frontliners to COVID-19 (comprising one-fifth of total fatalities), one of them a young Methodist doctor. This is disastrous for a country that has only 1.3 doctors per 1,000 people (in part due to the exodus of medical professionals to “greener pastures” abroad).

While reading Psalm 46, I noticed a very interesting introduction to the poem. It read, ‘To the leader. Of the Korahites. According to Alamoth. A Song.’ (NRSV) My curiosity peaked. An alamoth could be a soprano instrument or a direct reference to young female singers, (that is – virgins). Intrigued, I read a few commentaries and the preceding psalm, which also references alamoth, albeit in the context of a wedding feast. I wondered whether the two poems, ascribed to the same family of writers and maintaining that peculiar introit, could once have been one psalm.

While facing this new pandemic, it begs the question: Is it not just another disease, so why all this fuss? Are there not many other epidemics and pandemics that are killing more people?