In no particular order.
1.
The Human Factor
Human instinct doesn't want to quite accept that there is a pandemic or, if there is, that it isn't somebody's fault somehow.
On the first, I'll admit a lot of skepticism early on about the seriousness of it myself, but the stats are now large enough to make things undeniable. Included in those things that are undeniable is the fact that the disease is mostly a killer to the elderly, but it also kills in younger demographics.
So, yup, it's a genuine big problem from everyone's perspective.
Part of that is grasping statistics, which people don't like doing and generally don't do well. The death rate is heavily weighted towards the elderly, this is quite true, but the overall statistics are really alarming. Even if the death toll remains at the overall "low" rate, the infection attack rate is what makes it so deadly.
There have been a lot of comparisons to the flu. But the problem with those comparisons is that they compare only one statistic, the infection death rate, and not the attack rate. The flu has a much, much lower attack rate. . .normally. The 18-19 flu was deadly not only because of its death rate, but it's attack rate.
The attack rate is the number of people the virus successfully infects. Estimates really vary, but one estimate is that 30% of Americans will get Covid-19. Nobody estimates that 30% of Americans will get the flu this year or the common cold. So, even if we take the 3.5% overall death rate and think, gosh, that's not that bad (unless you are one of the 3.5%), it actually is as that translates into about 3,750,000 dead in the United States.
Angela Merkel predicts that 60% of the German population will come down with Covid 19. I haven't kept up with it, but that would mean something like 900,000 Germans dying. If that same attack rate applies to the U.S., the death toll will be around 8,000,000 or so.
I'm not saying that will happen, but it could happen. Still, wrapping that attack rate and death rate around people's minds is hard to do. A comparison might be made to AIDS, which was transmitted in an entirely different fashion and had a very low, accordingly, attack rate. It couldn't attack most people. But it's death rate was 100% at first. People only grasped the death rate on it, with the attack rate being harder to conceive of.
In spite of all of that, dying from a small unseen virus is something that's really difficult to grasp. Therefore, people either assume that the attack rate is like the death rate and panic, or they grasp the mortality rate and assume they aren't at risk. And of course the inevitable "conspiracy" theories begin to circulate as nobody wants to believe that they might die due to a shear random event like picking up the virus at work, school, or at the grocery store.
2
. Modern Conditions Suit Infections. . . and if this one doesn't get a bunch of us there's one that will.
We might beat Covid-19 yet this season and we'll beat it sooner or later, but there's something out there that we won't be so lucky with.
There may come a day when we can beat any virus, but we're not there. Some had theorized that AIDS would bring that day to us, with so much research going into beating the virus, but it hasn't. And we are likely a long ways from that day.
That means that a virus will evolve, or we'll run into it, that is a super killer, like the Black Plague, or AIDS, that has a high attack rate and lots of people will die. It's not if, it's when.
And part of that when is controlled not only by simple inevitability. . . i.e., it's happened before and it'll happen again, but also by our having built an economy that we not only don't like, it just isn't good for us. This is one more way that it isn't good for us.
Packing people into closed buildings to live and work is putting them in a petri dish. People don't like it, but viruses do. Why are we doing that?
Now, make no mistake, there were plenty of nasty diseases that were around in more primitive and agrarian days. The plague was a killer in an agrarian era. Smallpox was too. But with the exception of the plague, outbreaks tended to be very regional. In the modern era with the absolute triumph of industrialization and capitalism, we've boxed up most people and set ourselves up.
We don't have to keep heading in that direction.
3.
Culture matters, and is hard to beat.
These diseases get their start in Asia for cultural reasons, which nobody wishes to admit. Asian markets feature the living hosts of everything necessary to cause diseases to break from one species into another. Until that's stopped, and nobody is really making an effort to stop it, annual outbreaks of new nasty diseases are inevitable.
Put more bluntly, COVID-19 is a virus that cycled through bats first, and on to us through a market munchy contact, or through pangolins, an endangered ant eating species that are smuggled into China in spite of their rarity due to the common and absurd belief in China that darned near every endangered species on Earth has some medicinal quality. Scientists aren't sure which it is, although looking at the data, I'd guess bats.
People hate it when something like this is said, but year after year Asia is the point of origin for some horrible infection and year after year its caused by the same thing, living cheek to jowl with your food and barely cooking it (as in the case of flu that routinely jumps through pigs and ducks to humans) or by eating things that probably are really, really on the edge of things as food. China, which has massive social control, as well as Vietnam for that matter, could do the world a huge favor by getting people to knock this off. But as its a cultural thing, they're not going to do so. The Chinese are essentially more comfortable with epidemics than they are with telling people "don't eat nearly raw bats".
Asian governments are also largely authoritarian and a concept of personal freedom has never existed there. For that reason, ironically, Asia is able to more easily handle something like this than western nations are. By their very nature western nations loath restrictions and by the time any are imposed, it's probably rather late in the day.
This is particularly true of the United States, which abhors restrictions. Even normal restrictions in normal times cause Americans to howl. Things like controlling our borders are regarded as grave offenses against human rights. We allow dimwits to avoid vaccinating their children and only try to argue them out of it. Our culture isn't well suited for the development of these sorts of infectious diseases, the 1918-19 flu notwithstanding, but it's ideally suited for them to spread.
Freedom of information is also a Western value and so misinformation is widely circulated as well. We see all sorts of examples of that being done here, including that the Chinese cooked up COVID-1 as a man made virus. No, they didn't. But another Western value of recent years, which is not to thrown stones at any culture other than our own, plays into this as well, that one being that Western nations are penetrating into the jungles and exposing the world to novel viruses. Nope, that's not even close to true as we're largely not doing that and in the West the world is experiencing "re wilding". Moreover, these viruses are new as in new this year as they exist in Asian conditions that allow for their spread and development, but most Western peoples aren't going to tell China that they need to get a grip on this.
Medieval market (public domain due to age). The Great Plague is an example of a disease spread by conditions, in that case the incredibly dirty and densely packed nature of European cities of that period.
4.
Even those who grasp the stats tend to ignore them, particularly by age, habit and occupation.
This is related to the above, but an odd fact of our problem is that its almost impossible to get people to cease some conduct.
This has always been true.
No matter how the risks are appreciated, it's going to be very difficult to convince young people that they're sufficiently at risk to not congregate, particularly as time moves on. For those who have a distinct social habit, no matter what it is, not engaging in it will prove to be difficult over time. People who go to the bar after work, for example, will be doing that soon, assuming they're open. Indeed, the example of illicit and illegal businesses and occupations associated with really horrific diseases shows that it's difficult to stop some activities in spite of the risks associated with them. And for some occupations, closing is just not going to be on the map, particularly occupations that are professional and service related. Personal economies and the nature of their occupations won't allow for it.
The longer this goes on, the more this is true. People staying home for a few days is difficult enough, for weeks, if it came to that, is extremely difficult.
And frankly, while nobody wants to talk about it (but we will below) some occupations actually can't close in our society. That's simply a fact.
5. Quarantines don't work the way that people think they do.
In spite of the way the press would have it, the President of the United States can't really close things up by simple executive order.
Indeed, the ability of the US to do this is remarkably limited. Powers to impose quarantines are limited to areas that laws address it and are allowed under the Constitution. The only clear Constitutional authority to issue quarantines of any kind appear under the war powers section of the U.S. Constitution and actually pertain to rebellion and invasion. In those instances, the US can suspend Habeas Corpus which is generally regarded as being equivalent to declaring martial law.
Having said that, the US has long imposed limited quarantines under the Commerce Clause, which makes sense. As the U.S. has traditionally been regarded as having very broad power to control its borders, at least up until very recently, that's been taken to mean that people and things entering the country can be quarantined at ports of entry, no matter how those are defined, or kept out entirely.
States actually have broader powers than the Federal government to impose quarantines as its traditionally been regarded as a power reserved under Article 10.
Every state has laws regarding this topic and almost all of them are really old. Wyoming's statutory provision clearly is, as it still speaks of railroads as being the primary means of transportation. It states:
35-4-103.
Investigation of diseases; quarantine; regulation of travel; employment of
police officers to enforce quarantine; report of county health officer;
supplies and expenses.
The department of health shall, immediately after the receipt of
information that there is any smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, diphtheria or
other infectious or contagious disease, which is a menace to the public health,
in any portion of this state, order the county health officer to immediately
investigate the case and report to the state health officer the results of the
investigation. The state health officer shall, subject to W.S. 35-4-112 and if
in his judgment the occasion requires, direct the county health officer to
declare the infected place to be in quarantine. The county health officer shall
place any restrictions upon ingress and egress at this location as in his
judgment or in the judgment of the state health officer are necessary to prevent
the spread of the disease from the infected locality. The county health officer
shall upon declaring any city, town or other place to be in quarantine, control
the population of the city, town or other place as in his judgment best
protects the people and at the same time prevents the spread of the disease. If
necessary for the protection of the public health and subject to W.S. 35-4-112,
the state health officer shall establish and maintain a state quarantine and
shall enforce practical regulations regarding railroads or other lines of
travel into and out of the state of Wyoming as necessary for the protection of
the public health. The expenses incurred in maintaining the state quarantine
shall be paid out of the funds of the state treasury appropriated for this
purpose and in the manner in which other expenses of the department are audited
and paid. The county health officer or the department may employ a sufficient
number of police officers who shall be under the control of the county health
officer, to enforce and carry out any quarantine regulations the department may
prescribe. The regulations shall be made public in the most practicable manner
in the several counties, cities, towns or other places where the quarantine is
established. If the quarantine is established by the county health officer, he
shall immediately report his actions to the state health officer. The county
health officer shall furnish all supplies and other resources necessary for
maintaining the quarantine. Upon certificate of the county health officer
approved by the director of the state department of health, the county
commissioners of any county where a quarantine has been established shall issue
warrants to the proper parties for the payment of all expenses, together with
the expense of employing sufficient police force, to maintain and enforce the
quarantine. For purposes of this act, "state health officer" means as
defined in W.S. 9-2-103(e).
Prior to this event, I frankly never would have guessed that there was a law which allowed the county health officer to issue a quarantine order and hire police to enforce it.
The point is that contrary to what people seem to think, the President of the United States cannot really order the whole country on lock down. That people would think this isn't surprising, as people believe the President has all sorts of powers he doesn't, and in fact modern Presidents have gotten away with a lot of stuff that's flat out illegal as they lack the power to do them.
States, surprisingly can act quite broadly, as this is a reserved power under Article 10 of the Constitution. Not specifically, but just by reference.
Here, however, is a rare example of a panic creating acceptance. Hardly anyone questions what the states may now do, and under the old interpretation of the law the can do a lot. Having said that, but for a period of crisis, it's really difficult to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court of the 60s through the 80s not smugly smacking such powers down. They wouldn't now, but only recently has there been a trend recognizing the more traditional arrangements of the law.
Child Quarantine, Trenton New Jersey, 1916.
6. There is no "American health care system", but there is.
This is related to the item immediately above.
The press keeps talking about "the health care system" as if there is one. But all year we've been told by campaigning Democratic contenders that there isn't one. And noted Democratic columnist Robert Reich just wrote an interesting article simply proclaiming there isn't one, which can be read here:
What we don't have is a national comprehensive system that provides personal care from prenatal to death but a series of private arrangements augmented, in some instances, by government payments that takes care of individuals.
Americans have been extremely resistant to a personal national health care system and by and large the examples of other countries suggest that they really only come in during a time of crisis. Whether this crisis causes that to be the case for the United States is yet to be seen, but that tends to be the way they work. The British national healthy care system, for example, was really a byproduct of World War Two. The German one was a byproduct of World War One.
This isn't to say that there's no "public health" at all, but it covers limited areas and some of them very comprehensively in spite of what people might believe. The US has a large network of government laboratories that work on tests for infectious disease and have been working on this epidemic since prior to its breakout into the United States. We heard very little about this, as they work in the background, and in this instance they ran into a testing glitch that unfortunately put them a critical two weeks behind, at which point they took the rare step of authorizing private laboratories, of which there are an enormous number, to work on tests independently. Normally that isn't done.
And the US does have an effective Center for Disease Control that's part of all of this.
All that does put the US in a good position for learning of diseases and providing tests for them and coordinating a response. It doesn't mean that we have, however, a system that provides treatment for everyone on down, although something of that nature somewhat exists to some degree.
That really started coming in during the progressive era nad was limited to really rural areas. It received a boost during the Great Depression, but even then it never covered a majority of Americans. Since that time, it's existed basically as a public assistance program and oddly enough as a uniformed service of the United States that has a very limited role.
It's large enough that its a reserve of the Navy, showing how it was originally conceived of at the time of its founding, but it isn't capable of really doing a coordinated national response to a health emergency on a rapid basis.
The Public Health Service is active, but it's not as if it's going to field a bunch of doctors and nurses into a hot zone, let alone as series of hot zones. Indeed, in a bit of a reversal of its wartime organizational structure, if hospital beds, doctors and nurses are really needed in numbers on an emergency basis, they're going to come from the military with both active and reserve components responding to that call. The Navy is already deploying hospital ships in connection with this and its undoubtedly the case that if you are in a Reserve or Guard medical unit you must be getting a pile of warning orders right now.
That might be enough, frankly. But we lack a direct treatment system in the fashion that other countries do.
Having said that, Italy does have a system, and it can't be said that theirs really worked all that well.
Which gets to the next point.
People complaining about the lack of supplies, or the lack of response, particularly in the Press don't seem to realize that nobody has responded adequately. That's because there's really no ability anywhere to respond.
Even the most spectacular response, that of the Chinese, didn't keep the pandemic from spreading. And the Chinese are capable of responding in a manner we are not. It isn't as if the Italian National Healthcare Service kept it from spreading, now is it? Nor did the much vaunted British National Health Service either.
Truth be known, no nation stockpiles medical supplies for infections on this rate. But the US is capable of producing them and that will occur rapidly.
7. Some people aren't going to grasp the risks no matter what.
There are those that in spite of everything are really not going to ever grasp the risk.
I'd absolutely guarantee you that if you work in any sizable office that, within a couple of weeks, some parent is going to come in and report how they were awake all night with a sick kid, or how they just visited their sick parent or friend and they'll have no idea whatsoever that they're exposing somebody to something. Even more likely, some mother or father is going to come in with a kid who's running snot from his shoelaces to his nose and you'll hear how it's a shame that little Johnny just wasn't accepted at the day care today. Likewise, plenty of people in the "boss" category are going to come into work deathly ill and simply say "don't get near me" and expect that their position justifies their self made exceptions to the rules.
I guarantee it.
8. Some people are going to overestimate the risk no matter what.
By the same token, there's going to be those who insist that it's pretty much the end of the world, either because they're prone to panic anyhow or they enjoy them.
As noted, there's also a lot of people in the US who have enjoyed planning for a self imagined end of the world now for about a decade or so. It's really odd. "Preppers" have been enjoying the heck out of imagining surviving in their very own Mad Max movie or whatever for some time now, and something like this, because of the press coverage, is really firing them up.
And then most people just don't grasp risks or statistics anyhow. With a national press that also doesn't, and a televised news media that is focusing on nothing else, it's pretty easy to get a panic rolling.
9. There's something really messed up in the economy and in our social behavior that impacts children
One of the things a big crisis does is expose where we aren't doing well, where we've failed to do well, or where we have major issues we need to address. This has done that in regard to several things, and one of them is the massive decline in attention to children that has taken place over the past fifty years.
More than one school district has had to wring their hands in agony over shutting down as those districts contain large numbers of children who eat breakfast and lunch at schools. That they have to depend upon that is absolutely criminal.
It's the responsibility of parents, or at least it should be, to feed, cloathe and rear their children. But over a fifty year period we've attacked that as a society and have made schools wards of children in a plethora of ways that should not have occured, should not be occurring, and should cease as soon as they humanely can.
This started, in a way, with an entire series of events that were well meaning, demonstrating in brutal form the maxim that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" series of programs instituted a massive public involvement with providing for children with the concept that this would life them up out of the poor families they were born into, into the middle class. At the same time divorce laws were reformed to make it increasingly easier for married couples, including ones, with children, to divorce. The introduction of the pill, combined with the polluted influence of Playboy, also arrived more or less at the same time such that sex outside of marriage went from universally disapproved of, even if it occured, to approved of for men, to simply approved of.
The combined effect of all of this was to create a situation in which at first children with divorced parents became common, to one in which fathers simply abandoned children entirely. Current its not at all common for young women to have children with the father completely out of the picture, and most particularly out of the picture economically.
As this was occuring, the societal programs we noted above operated such that there was a move to help feed, not feed but help feed, children who came to school hungry. That's an admirable goal but it wasn't really asked why they were coming to school hungry. Since 1945 American wealth has increased massively overall, so it makes no sense whatsoever that children should be in that state. They are, largely, as their mother is left with a low paying job and the father isn't supporting his offspring at all.
Combined with that, the evolution in employment from 1945 on went such that by the 1980s women working in the workplace went from an option to a necessity. Even now there's a lot of absolute blather about women and careers built on the previous blather about men and careers. Most people find to their ultimate disappointment that careers turn out to be jobs and there's been a real loss of sense about what that was all about. The entire "career" emphasis that applied to men early on was really aimed at first at trying to convince them to maximize their economic potential as breadwinners for their anticipated families, and even as recently as 20 or so years ago you would still hear the urging that you should "get a good career so you can support a family". Right about the same time as women having careers went from an option to mandatory that changed to the nonsensical line that you should get a good career to "fulfill yourself", even though, with rare exception, that just won't be happening. At the end of the day, it's going to be a job.
What this has brought about is a perfect storm of a situation in which women with children must almost always work and there are a lot of single mothers left to rear children on their own with jobs that don't pay enough to get by on. That in turn has depressed the wage market in general at its bottom end so that none of those jobs pay well enough to get by on and even couples that are married in which husband and wife are both so employed often can't get by, so the state has stepped in, in the form of school districts, to pick up the slack, which in turn ironically perpetuates the system and which converts it from essentially being emergency relief to being a societal norm.
All that is pretty bad for children and pretty bad for the adults they become later in a variety of ways, but it can't be immediately discontinued. Indeed, threats to the system even in normal times usually bring howls of protests from individuals who now conceive of what amounts to assistance as a right, not all of whom are benefactors of the system by any means.
The point here is that an economic system, or a society, in which a governmental entity, which is what a school system is, is providing one of the most basic elements of life, food, for years and years for children has had something go pretty amiss.
10.
We really can't shut everything down very long.
As grim as it is to ponder, the way our economy works and our society works, we can't really shut everything down for long. Some things have to keep on keeping on.
And added to that, we can't shut most or even a lot of things down without hugely damaging the economy and we can't ignore that and have no way to adjust for it.
Even right now, it's clear that grocery stores have to remain open, making grocery store workers like infantrymen in the front line of the trenches. But how long can anything really remain this shut down?
My guess isn't very long or it'll create a national economic disaster of epic proportions. But then, at that point, you are balancing lives against the economy in some ways. Nonetheless, huge sections of the economy can't really be closed forever.
Indeed, one thing that those comparing this against the 1918-19 Flu just don't get is that the 18-19 flu came about due to, and during, World War One. And World War One just kept on keeping on.
That made the economic impact of the 18-19 flu muted at best. There was already a gigantic labor shortage caused by the war and the needs of the military in every sense, from troops to equipment, didn't pause one bit due to the war. Indeed, at the height of the epidemic Gen. Pershing was informed that the government wished to stop troop transport to Europe due to the epidemic and Pershing refused the request. Troops were loaded on board ships knowing that a lot of them would be sick by the time they got to Europe. Some would die. That didn't stop anything.
Factories kept running. Oil refineries kept refining. Sure, restaurants were closed and churches shut down for weeks at a time, but there was no shortage of employment. If you were laid off from your job at the bar, there was one waiting for you at the arms plant. If a worker got sick on the factory floor, he was sent home, but another one was put on the lathe in his place.
All that's grim, but it also means that the entire world simply kept rolling on in the 18-19 flu. If that meant people died, and it did, they just did. Lots of people were dying at the time in other ways that were deemed to take precedence.
That's not the case now.
Indeed, we haven't had a global pandemic that took people out of work like this one since the Great Plague, but that's not analogous in any fashion. For one thing, the mortality rate of that was gigantic. Truth be known, simple viruses in the same era undoubtedly killed as many people as COVID 19 and no note was taken of them. That was regular life (and truth be known, it was probably regular life in that fashion for much longer in most places than we realize). Additionally, Europe had a feudal agrarian economy in which those who survived the plague simply returned to their prior occupations when they could with things unabated. In other words, if your occupation is plowing Lord Ungaforth's field, a job you share with Ethelred, when you come back, even if Ethelred doesn't, things haven't really changed in any fashion. It'd be a human tragedy, but not an economic one.
Things are obviously different now.
11.
Custom is really hard to break.
I really hate shaking hands and I always have. But in my line of work, I'm finding, I'm highly acclimated to it.
I had learned, when young, that shaking hands originated as a means of demonstrating to another person that you weren't armed, but it turns out that the tradition is of uncertain origin and amazingly widespread. Numerous cultures around the globe do it and even ancient Greek pieces of art show it being done. There are some cultures that don't do it, but they are distinct for that reason. The Japanese, for example, don't do it and they don't like it. That's somewhat unique to them, however.
Be that as it may, as I'm not Japanese, I do it, because I have to. I frankly have never liked handshaking. But it's such a custom that now that we're not supposed to, I find that a lot of people keep on heading towards it or even doing it.
There are a lot of things in this category, and that's going to be a real problem.
Just as the Chinese can't apparently imagine not having a heaping bowl of bat soup, it's hard to stop shaking hands. And beyond that, other things that we're really accustomed to, such as even simply going to work, are really hard to stop doing depending upon how acclimated we are to them. That may prove to be the biggest single reason for "self isolating". You aren't tempted, unless what tempts you is not self isolating.
