What COVID-19 Can Teach Us
The New York Times normally sets a limit on how many articles non-subscribers can read. They've exempted their Coronavirus coverage from those limits.
Like everyone else, I'm glued to the news as this tragedy unfolds. I've been watching stories about the virus move higher and higher on the page. For weeks the Times has made it their top story, and the way things are expected to go, that will continue for a lot longer.
So far -- so far -- my own family has yet to be directly impacted. It's heartbreaking to imagine what it has been like for so many families that haven't been as lucky. When someone acquires the full set of symptoms, it is nasty and dangerous. Around the world, nearly 60,000 have died, says the Times, and with tests hard to get in many places, it's likely those numbers are under-reported. Over a quarter million people are known to have caught the virus, and that number is likely to be dramatically higher in reality.
Recall part of what made HIV so scary: You could be carrying the virus, and spreading it to others, without knowing it yourself, because symptoms took longer to develop. The same is true of this Coronavirus, except that it doesn't require intimate contact to infect another. It can be spread merely by being within six feet of an unaware infected person who coughs in your direction.
It took many years to develop the drugs to defeat HIV. Even today, those drugs aren't available to many who could use them. What prevented HIV from spreading much further was knowledge of how it spread, and what measures were effective to block it. For Coronavirus, it's staying six feet from everybody, trying not to touch your face, and frequent hand-washing.
I recall a comment Bill Maher made on his program about the Coronavirus. He said something to the effect that this virus doesn't "want" (in an evolutionary sense) to kill its host. This is inaccurate, or at least incomplete information. To understand how these viruses work, I recommend this YouTube video, Americapox: The Missing Plague by CGP Grey.
If you don't have the ten minutes to watch it (but surely you do?), the short version is: These are viruses that jumped into humans from other animals. They did not evolve to live in us. It is an accident; these viruses are not adapted to our bodies. An example of a perfectly adapted virus is something closer to the common cold: It only inconveniences its host, spreading on average to one other person before the immune system destroys it. The Coronavirus originated in other species (some research points the finger at a species of bat). Viruses jumping species is a rare event, but we increase the odds because there are billions of us and we keep moving around the planet.
A mere hundred years ago, we had some 1.8 billion people in the entire world, and air travel was still new. Today, there are 7.5 billion people. (We hit 7 billion less than ten years ago.) For a few hundred dollars, a plane ticket will move you thousands of miles. This outbreak is unique, partly due to its characteristics, and partly due to where our civilization stands today.
We had better learn from this catastrophe, because this won't be the last plague we face. So long as there are this many of us, it's just a matter of time. Learning is how we turn heartbreak over our losses into hope for the future.
We should learn the importance of good, and universal, health care. This is not a zero sum game. It's not a luxury, like owning your own swimming pool. If your neighbor can't afford to install a pool, you can argue it's because they didn't earn it. Health care is different: your health is your neighbor's health. Whether you get along with your neighbor or not, whether you feel they "deserve" access to a decent hospital (and they do), you'd best recognize that this is a "rising tide lifts all ships" situation.
We should learn that we can no longer afford poverty. The reason is the same. If stemming the spread of a virus requires people to stay home, and some people feel they must leave the house to work so they can afford to eat and pay rent, the virus wins. It's time to take seriously the idea that access to basic necessities, food and water and shelter (and health care), are rights not contingent on employment.
We should learn the value of science, as it is the tool of knowledge discovery without which our medical knowledge would not have advanced past bloodletting and superstition. We should be reminded that the study of light gave us microscopes, which gave us knowledge of microorganisms such as bacteria. Different disciplines within science inform and strengthen each other. Doctors rely on X-rays and more sophisticated scanning equipment, and everything runs on electricity.
We should learn the value of open and honest communication. Science can only function when people set their egos aside, and seek the truth. The same must be true of all of us. We can't base our decisions on viewpoints we hold sacred. We can't allow "alternative facts". Reality is reality, and does not care what we believe. When people are dying from a virus, that right-wing conspiracy peddlers were recently claiming was a hoax, it should drive this point home.
We should learn the importance of electing leaders who share these values. We can't afford to have a President who's only interested in his own approval, his own ratings, and how much state governors say they like him. We can't afford to have a liar in the highest office, saying whatever it pleases him to say without regard to fact. We need a leader who cares more about us, his constituents, than about himself. We need someone who respects science and its practitioners, who prefers competence to sycophancy, who faces facts and listens to reason, who does his homework and then makes carefully considered choices. We need a leader, too, who follows his own recommendations, who holds himself to the highest standards, who understands that it's even more important that the powerful obey the same laws as the poor.
In the next election, we'll find out how many people have learned these lessons, and how many still have their heads stuck in the sand.
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