The people of the world are awfully busy coining the choicest bitter words to condemn the year 2020 only because it witnessed a pandemic due to an unruly virus. The social media has as many amusing anecdotes and jokes to show 2020 in the worst possible light. So much news coverage across 2020 has focused on the Covid-19 deniers, the defiantly mask-less, the clueless spring breakers, the anti-lockdown protesters, and the politicians who should have known better. What has been unprecedented in human history is the fact that millions of people worldwide were smart and responsible and did their best to comply with shifting public health guidelines in the face of an invisible enemy.

Strange, as it may sound, the whole global load of the crowned virus weighs less than two grams that knocked out nearly one billion human creatures each weighing an average 40 kilos, young and old put together. All the same, avowed positivists saw countless bright sides of the outgoing Gregorian year. They say people would never have become stronger than ever before if the coronavirus hadn’t happened.

The living planet is a much healthier place today, its flora and fauna much healthier and happier than the whole last century. The deadliest among the predators called ‘man’ is being taught a couple of lessons to maintain the trans-species equilibrium.  The evidently unruly virus took the human race by surprise. It is a slippery and elusive one hardly recognisable with the available clinical acumen and devices at hand. The havoc it heaped across a full year is no unknown story.

People got to know a new title for a ultramicroscopic pathogen, ‘corona’, meaning crown for its loathsome spikes that cling to host human cells more easily than ordinary flu viruses. People also learned that this pathogen was not a DNA- but an RNA-based one.

Medical experts and scientists took time to come up with a reasonably-effective treatment protocol just to contain the virus.  Thus, many human lives were lost. But for the first time in human history, they came up with vaccines in record time. The most horrific 40-year-old AIDS virus hasn’t seen a vaccine yet; but corona has forced mankind to make at least sixteen vaccines by now. Unlike the AIDS virus, corona does not grant much time to keep life going. It kills most afflicted within a fortnight. AIDS takes between 5 and 15 years to kill a normally-healthy human.

The RNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and more elsewhere including India have arrived with a success rate of 95 per cent. Until 2020, no vaccine had ever been developed, trialled and approved in under four years. Corona vaccines came within twelve months.

2020 too was interestingly a year of the woman. The US elected its first female Vice-President. Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Arden led a nationwide effort to eradicate the virus and become the world's most Covid-resilient country. Taiwan got a female President, Tsai Ing-wen.  Angela Merkel in Germany and Sanna Marin in Finland also won praise for their early responses. Amusingly, the male leaders, by contrast, were not only more likely to flounder in the face of a pandemic, they were also more likely to get Covid themselves through reckless behaviour, as Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump all demonstrated

Carbon dioxide emissions fell by a record seven per cent in 2020; they are very likely to rebound in 2021 and beyond if we don't remain civilised. As traffic dropped everywhere, so did pollution.

The Mayor of Paris, another smart female leader, cruised to re-election by promising to eliminate half of all on-street parking spots and prioritise cyclists. Next up: turning major avenues into pedestrian zones and creating pedestrian ‘children streets’ around schools. Barcelona has just announced similar plans. Melbourne, Detroit, Portland: They're all on board with the Paris-style plan for ‘15-minute cities’ where that's how long it takes to reach all the basic stuff you need on foot, on bike or via transit. Electric cars are speeding growth, not surprisingly. Declining oil demand is the most desired outcome across many countries.

Globally, 10 per cent of all cars sold in 2020 were EVs, a 28-per cent increase on 2019. It isn't that the world is getting greener in satellite photos; that's just the planet's plant matter doing us a favour and soaking up more of that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Most people may not have noticed that 14 nations owning 40 per cent of the world's coastline just banded together to create the world's biggest ocean sustainability initiative. Coastlines are now as clean as Antarctica. Surprisingly, the pandemic ushered in a ‘wet food market’ in Wuhan and has forced indiscriminate flesh eaters to rethink on treatment of other species that goes far beyond its point of origin.

China's Wildlife Protection Law now applies at sea for the first time, reducing its vast fishing fleet's massive footprint.Food trader ‘Impossible Foods’ reported its first unexpected profit quite in May; its ‘I-can't-believe-its-not-beef’ product is now being sold in stores across China and the US with fake pork coming soon.

Other food businesses also took advantage of a faltering US meat supply chain with a new round of investment in non-meat trading. There is news of their stock price rising.

The best-ever thing to have happened is the ‘work-from-home’ culture. That one can perform magnificently on a location away from the stereo workplace has proven to be a boon for the productive mankind. The internet passed its ultimate stress test. Of course, such a radical shift would not have been possible without apps like Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime, Skype and the whole gang.

More videoconferencing took place in 2020 than at any time in human history for work and for socialising; and, amazingly, with a few small exceptions, the infrastructure held up. It's a myth that the internet was designed to be decentralised in order to withstand a nuclear attack, but we now know for a fact that it can survive a global pandemic.

The virus is trying to make a comeback, in vain, with a new strain. Little does it know that vaccines respond to the basic structures without fail. Cloaks and covers will never work. Corona is vanquished for all times. The only unalterable negative thing about corona is that it made ‘positive’ the most dreaded negative word forever!