Sorry to write again about the ongoing worldwide clampdown against the spread of the Coronavirus.
My inbox is filled with this topic, and likely yours is too.
In my recent post The Coronavirus is Coming for You (March 3rd) I wrote how the largest impact to most of us would be the economic impact.
And with the widespread closings of schools, restaurants, conferences, and large gatherings of all types, this seems to be holding true.
What we’re starting to see is people are asking questions like this:
What are we missing?
While the global shutdown has wide-ranging economic impacts to nearly everyone (via wages or job loss, stock market fluctuations, increased costs of living, etc), ideas like the one above are missing what we don’t see.
We don’t see how the virus hasn’t spread because people chose to stay at home.
We don’t see what effects Trump’s early actions had when he restricted flights first from China and later from the EU.
Were they too early? Too late?
At the time these measures were considered too restrictive by Trump’s critics, and in retrospect his critics now say they were too little.
Instead, without any alternate universe timeline available, we’ll point fingers at who did what wrong or late or too early or without enough funding.
And none of that can be verified because we have no alternate universe to compare this against — but everyone will use these events as political ammunition.
Average, Joe?
Another misconception is people’s comparison of the COVID-19 Coronavirus against the average flu or average behavior of recent highly deadly infectious diseases, such as Zika or Ebola.
Those didn’t lead to a shut down the economy, it’s argued.
Those didn’t cause global cancellations of fun.
These diseases are highly deadly and contagious, it’s argued, and we’ve been able to halt or restrict their spread.
Malaria appears to be even deadlier than COVID-19, annually killing 405,000 people (2018 numbers).
So why is there such an extreme reaction this time?
Firstly, because our (global) success in limiting the Zika and Ebola cases has been the result of a localized shutdown of travel and contact, with diseases that have much more visual and visceral symptoms.
No one wants to bleed out their eyes, and people with those symptoms are quickly identified. Not so with COVID-19’s 14 day incubation period that may just start as a fever and some aches.
In the malaria situation (which is a parasite), it doesn’t spread from person to person, so the impact, while horrible, is localized by the nature of the disease.
Secondly, the average transmission rate, average incubation period, average infectious rate, average mortality rate, average anything for these diseases — they don’t tell us a thing about the current coronavirus.
Knowing that malaria doesn’t spread from human contact, would you want that to be a part of the averaging equation?
Replacing evidence with a mathematical average doesn’t solve any problems. Averages abstract a problem into a theoretical equation that by definition doesn’t match the reality of any single situation.
What about Immunity?
I still maintain that the virus will continue to spread until we’ve all survived it, or perhaps until a vaccine is available. Like the measles, the COVID-19 coronavirus is not going to just disappear.
We’ve all been asked to help “flatten the curve,” to slow the rate of infection, to allow for enough medical supplies and staff to be available.
Available for what? Available for when COVID-19 does reach everyone, including you and me. Because “flatten the curve” doesn’t change the numbers, just the timeline.
The largest impact to most people will be an economic impact, but we’re all likely to get the coronavirus at some point. COVID-19 seems to spread too easily, people aren’t accustomed to restricting their own freedoms, and humanity is an interdependent social species.
We’ll survive it and come out better than ever, but that requires to see what isn’t being reported, and requires that we adjust our lens to a different timeline than panic and the news media allows for.
Be well, and live in love,
Jeffrey