How Parkinson’s Law is affecting our lives

 It’s been more than 4 months since our honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown on 22 March, that is more than a quarter of a year.

It’s been for these 4 months, most of us are sitting at our homes cursing the virus and hoping that everything gets back to normal as soon as possible. But with the global corona cases reaching more than 14 million (as of 18th July), we have to concede that there lies no hope of controlling this pandemic, other than a vaccine.

A vaccine is the only ray of hope for the world suffering from the pandemic, but why are we so optimistic of a vaccine being developed so early. According to various reports, vaccines generally take more than 10 years to be completely developed and costs more than a half a billion-dollar( just for development, excluding production and distribution costs). Each vaccine has to go through many phases of trials before being finally approved for the widespread use and each stage of the trial usually takes at least 2–3 years to be completed. We still don’t have a vaccine for some diseases (eg HIV) which have led to millions of death worldwide. The fastest vaccine developed until now took more than 5 years to be completed still, we all are optimistic enough that a COVID-19 vaccine could be developed in a year, that is more than 5 times faster than the fastest vaccine developed till date.

image from weforum.com

What makes us believe this? Why thousands of scientists across the world are burning the midnight oil to achieve something which until now seemed impossible.

The answer to the above questions is quite simple,” Parkinson’s Law ”

According to Parkinson’s law, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” and this simple sentence is the science behind why we all believe a vaccine could be developed in a year.

We, humans, had never experienced such a pandemic before, more than 100 countries inflicted a partial or a complete lockdown to contain the novel coronavirus but only a few have been successful in doing so. This lockdown has led to severe economic recession( one of the worst since the great depression of the 1930s) and has impacted many individuals mentally.

Never before we were in such a dire need of a vaccine before, so there was enough time for scientists for researching a potential vaccine, and as the time wasn’t limited the work expanded to fill the available time.

Studies have shown that the inverse of Parkinson’s Law is also true, that is, “Work contracts to get completed in the given amount of time” and this is what we are experiencing now. With the whole world being in a standstill, the time is limited so scientists across the globe are trying their best to come up with a vaccine for this deadly disease which has led to more than 600,000 deaths worldwide.

I stand in support of all the doctors, healthcare workers, scientists who are working selflessly to save us from this deadly virus.