Does ‘duty of care’ have borders?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made us ‘wonder’ about so many things in life. Countries’ borders were closed to limit the spread of COVID-19 to and from neighbouring countries; our personal borders in terms of space were forcibly retracted with only our usual housemates/family that lived with us, if we were not living on our own. That is now for those of us who were not frontline workers – they were thrown in at the deep end, fighting a foe that nobody understood at the beginning, and being overwhelmed with patients that they could not distance themselves from.

And yet, within months, we managed to reach out virtually over the closed personal/provincial/country borders to other parts of the country and the world, to colleagues, students, school children, even doing virtual shopping. Life carried on in a different dimension that became our new normal – we learned that we can successfully work, host meetings, and teach on virtual platforms without charging around like crazies to get to our destinations to do so. We attended very successful virtual conferences locally and internationally which offered us the extended benefit of access to conference materials for a while after conference ended. So, many positives originated as a result of the pandemic that would not have occurred had we not been forced to shrink our boundaries.