ACROSS AMERICA — A year ago Thursday, everything changed.
The World Health Organization declared the global coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Restaurants and bars shuttered, companies and government agencies sent the employees home to work, and the U.S. economy went into a free fall as millions of people lost their jobs, temporarily or permanently, and small businesses quietly died along with more than 528,000 Americans.
It's been a terrible, heart shattering, destabilizing 12 months.
But not everything has been awful.
We're hard-wired to respond to emergencies and disasters with compassion and empathy, said Sandro Galea, the dean of Boston University's School of Public Health.
"Most people behave in a pro-social way after disasters and emergencies," Galea said in an email to Patch. "People do try to be compassionate when they can, after taking care to achieve basic self-preservation."
But this disaster has a wrinkle, and it's political.
"The first step is self-preservation. Then comes action to protect others," Galea said. "In some ways, that is not surprising and probably biologically programmed. The question is what is considered to be 'self-preservation.'
Read the full piece here.