THE virus is back where it started. In Wuhan, China. This is the first after the lockdown was lifted.
In north-eastern China, another cluster is adding to Beijing's headache. Even countries praised for their handling of the disease, South Korea and Germany, are also reporting new cases.
All this points to one thing: lives and livelihoods must change. And permanently, too. Here and elsewhere. This isn't a new insight.
It is at least 1,000 years old. Take the here first. Malaysia has generally done well in the way it handles Covid-19.
While praise must be given where it is due, let's not massage the national ego too much. Hubris has a habit of breeding complacency first, and then apathy. Of the latter, there is plenty here.
Ask the environmentalists. And climate change activists, too. Their stories tell of Earth's ancient agonies falling repeatedly on deaf ears. Perpetrators are surely guilty.
So are some policymakers and enforcers. No deep dive studies are needed. Just anecdotal evidence is enough to point to the devastation that has come upon us.
Forests are cleared at the pleasure of loggers. Rivers after rivers breathe their last as they are turned into "landfills" for chemicals and wastes.
Cry they do, only that we do not care to listen. And we treat people like that too. Take the case of foreign workers.
Many of our businesses rely on them, but it appears the reliance isn't mutual. Some employers aren't even willing to pay for their workers' Covid-19 swab tests.
Let alone house them in proper living quarters. Instead, a crowd of them is forced into space that our cattle won't even envy.
It is a story of harvests and thorns. Harvests for the employers and thorns for the workers. Dismal but true. We have known this for long, but Covid-19 has made this explicit. Like it did many of our other failings.
Now for the elsewhere. There, too, the story is ugly. Consider the United States. This is the country with the money and muscle to make the world better, but it won't.
It wants the rest of the world to be a replica of the US. Warts and all. The "you-are-with-us-or-against-us" narrative hasn't changed; only the choice of words has.
The world, rightly or wrongly, looks to the US for leadership. Unsurprisingly, it has failed those who looked that way.
How can it not? It has a president who dismisses climate change as a fiction despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Covid-19 was so dismissed by him as well, at least initially.
Now that it has killed more than 80,000 Americans and infected more than a million, he may be in fiction-fact quandary.
This is what you get when you make events fit the narratives instead of the narratives the events. Europe and other continents do not provide much hope either.
This world needs much repair. So do its institutions. Many NST Leaders have given much space to what this better world would look like.
It is a fair and a just world, a space for all. Not just for a per cent or two. But first, we must stop treating facts as fiction. In a perverse way, we must thank Covid-19 for showing us up.
Ironically, ages and ages hence — if we live that long — we will do just that. Before that, change we must.