During the COVID-19 pandemic, I busied myself as a delivery driver, using it as an opportunity to overcome depression. But for most people, it was a painful time when life came to a halt and they had to endure ‘Corona Blue’. In Professor Choi Jae-cheon’s book, Ecological Transition: For a Wise Life on Earth, he argues that COVID-19 is part of a historically recurring pattern of pandemics, and from the perspective of the climate crisis, humanity is already at a critical juncture, facing a ‘23:59’ existential crisis. However, looking back now, the COVID-19 pandemic was a period filled with countless questions and peculiarities. I’ve summarized that era—when all citizens wore masks, practiced social distancing, recorded their movements via QR code check-ins, and were quarantined through contact tracing—from the perspective of a delivery driver, under the banner of South Korea’s ‘K-quarantine’.

Emergency disaster alerts still arrive on phones, but in the early days, even a single confirmed case could shut down shopping malls or halt school attendance. Whenever large-scale cluster infections sparked major outbreaks in 2020, citizens minimized outings and relied on online shopping and delivery services. There was also an incident where a Coupang logistics center closed due to a confirmed case. From the center’s perspective, even a few days of shutdown caused massive economic damage from discarding perishable goods, not to mention the operational chaos of having to process the accumulated backlog all at once afterward. Fortunately, the terminal I worked at remained unaffected, but seeing other terminals nationwide halt operations for days due to confirmed cases meant I always had to work under constant tension.

App Tracking, familiar to performance marketers, is a technology that analyzes which ads customers saw before converting, and whether they installed and launched the app. Advances in IT technology enabled marketing teams to analyze market responses in real time. The government’s method of tracking confirmed cases was similar. It analyzed the movements of people exposed to infection risk to identify contacts and encourage self-quarantine and testing. However, the limitation of app tracking is that when a customer encounters multiple ads and finally clicks the last banner, it becomes difficult to analyze the qualitative interest process that occurred earlier. The same applies to COVID-19 prevention. While the last contact person could be identified, it was impossible to control for the possibility that the individual had already been in contact with asymptomatic carriers, weakening their immunity, or that they themselves were asymptomatic carriers spreading the virus. Just as repeatedly exposing customers to ads across multiple channels in a campaign eventually wears down their patience and leads them to click the purchase button, I wondered if our bodies also become more susceptible to infection after repeated exposure to carriers in various locations, eventually resulting in a ‘positive’ diagnosis. In fact, the argument that mRNA vaccines themselves might be an unproven means of influencing the human immune system gained considerable traction at the time.

It remains unclear how outcomes might have differed had we not announced case numbers, enforced contact tracing, or mandated self-quarantine. It’s also confusing how to interpret vaccine-related deaths where proving causality is difficult. It’s unclear whether medical conclusions about the virus mutating to lower fatality rates and herd immunity forming are accurate. In early 2022, watching Shanghai, China, lift its citywide lockdown overnight and return to normal after facing fierce public backlash made it difficult to comprehend logically that epidemic control standards are variable, dictated not by medicine but by political circumstances.

Meanwhile, the influence of global pharmaceutical companies in capitalist societies has been beyond imagination. Their ability to negotiate with nations during the pandemic and reap enormous profits made it seem as if these companies wielded greater power than states. As depicted in the Netflix documentary Painkiller, one couldn’t help but wonder if massive capital was destabilizing nations and citizens, driven by the same greed shown by these pharmaceutical giants. I don’t deny the medical system itself, but I believe a balance is essential between public healthcare guidelines and autonomous healthcare where individuals monitor their own health and make choices.

Warnings about ancient viruses reviving as glaciers melt or fears of super viruses might just be exaggerated imaginings. After encountering the perspective that climate is driven more by Earth’s periodic cycles than human influence, I realized the ‘elephant in the room’ pressuring humanity might not actually exist. So today, I decided to take practical, small action within my means. I purchased a planter from the tree-planting startup ‘Tree Planet’ to contribute my small part.