Role of the youth to combat Covid-19 pandemic

Covid-19 poses a massive threat to those who are not vaccinated or fail to take proper precautions. From guards to waste pickers to even household owners, no one is free from the barrage of misinformation, which is arguably spreading faster than the virus itself. Amidst all of the chaos, one resource that has yet to be tapped are the youths.

The prevailing opinion among the working population in Bangladesh is that youths are incapable of inspiring social change and impacting our communities. It has been said so often that we ourselves have started to take it for a fact. Even I, during lockdowns, have sought solace in a digitized world created by Netflix to distract myself from the rampant devastations of Covid-19 and live vicariously through the exciting on-screen lives of people my age. As it turns out, I was not alone. According to a study conducted by Unicef on young individuals between 13 and 29, “27 per cent reported feeling anxiety and 15 per cent depression in the last seven days. What’s more, 46 per cent reported having less motivation to do activities they usually enjoyed, and 36 per cent felt less motivated to do regular chores.”

Speaking of sitting idle, according to a survey report released by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), hours studied by students in Bangladesh have been reduced by 80 per cent after educational institutes were shut down.

This leaves the students with a lot of free time, but the nature of this free time is not always healthy. Statistically, depression, drug use, suicidal ideas, social media and gaming addiction stand among the numerous symptoms arising from seeing the world crumble around you and sitting helpless at home. But after a year of mind-numbing hibernation, I was ready to ask myself, “instead of funding the billion-dollar streaming services and gaming platforms designed to eat up my time, why not actually engage in something for the betterment of my community?”

In our culture, poor mental health among youth is often branded as immaturity. As for those my age who have been lacking purpose and inspiration, we know that it is much more than that. My father himself admitted that “youth are like jackfruit; jaggedy and thorny on the outside but sweet on the inside.” Unlike my father, most parents have a one-track mindset regarding their conception of success: scoring high marks on tests. They are not to blame for this because this was what most of their parents expected of them also. But what if we could find a way to provide a new school of thought into the mix? What if we could find a way to not only make our parents proud but find purpose in the process and potentially save the lives of millions?

Well, I realised that as youths, we have the capacity to impact as many people as we want to. If we can motivate ourselves out of the Covid-19 induced rut, we can easily influence our friends and families to do the same.

If each youth per household can be the whistleblower and watchdog in their home, ensuring that masks are being worn correctly, hands are being washed at least 20 seconds at a time, and their Covid-positive family members are quarantining safely, the snowball effect would not only be monumental but effectively stop Covid-19 transmission at the source. NGOs can only provide so much awareness building, and the government can only dish out vaccines so fast. Even as they do, with new variants on the horizon, the only proper way to escape infection is for everyone to do their part in keeping their respective communities safe. Even if our families seem uncooperative, as the next generation of decision-makers, we owe it to ourselves as well as a future society to break out of our senile sloth hood and combat this virus head-on.

For Bangladesh, this is the perfect time for youths to take action because, over a third of our total population was represented by youth. This places us in the ideal position to benefit from a demographic dividend (i.e., a situation where the working-age population outnumbers the non-working-age population). Who knows? Perhaps the intervention of today’s adults-in-the-making will leave a substantial impact on tomorrow’s adolescents who have not experienced a world before Covid-19.

I conducted a whole household and entire community field survey within Mirpur of 27 household owners, 27 youth, 25 guards, and 20 waste pickers. While the baseline survey I conducted within my home and local community has demonstrated a microcosmic representation of the general misinformation which plagues us globally, it also revealed a prevailing sense of negligence that currently exists in the minds of everyone. Upon review,

I have found that the majority of the people in my community verbally acknowledge the threats of the virus but in action, they fail to mitigate its transmission. For example, while all youth claim to be aware of Covid-19, nearly 100 per cent leave the house every few days and 63.3 per cent still leave the house every day without wearing masks. Not to mention, those respondents who need PPE the most lack the finances to afford it.

Immediate action should be taken by schools, colleges, universities, and coaching centers to provide teachers as well as tutors with the proper Covid-19 Prevention Training. This will enable students to learn how to safeguard themselves and their communities from Covid-19 in parallel to their studies. Moreover, local authorities should promote the segregation of Covid-19 infected waste (i.e., organic, inorganic, and infectious) alongside providing proper capacity-building training to waste workers.

And with the widespread use of mobile apps, nothing is free of automation; from food delivery to education to bank transfers, everything has a digital framework. So, why not use this framework to fight this 21st Century Plague by developing a sort of local database that charts out cases of Covid-19 positive persons within a particular area? All stakeholders can join hands to reach out to a broader population base. This activity can be spearheaded by Youth Ambassadors recruited and registered by the government to upload Covid-positive results into the database as well as send alerts within their local community with an interactive map so social distancing measures can be optimised. Youth can also communicate through a moderated server to have scheduled meetings where they can share new ideas to mitigate Covid-19, as well as provide mental support to one another through the hardships of isolation. In this way, the youth can be supplied with government-approved merit certificates for recognition and save their community from Covid-19 at the same time.

The writer is a Young Yale Global Scholar