My apologies, this is a little dark, but recent news out of the United States suggests that several states are going to jump the gun and prematurely remove the greater part of the social restrictions that they've been using to control the spread of the coronavirus, as President Trump loudly proclaims his own genius while pointing fingers and deferring responsibility for a slow start on the government's response to the crisis.
This is all happening based on the confident assumption that things will be back to normal in the relatively near future, and all that will be left to do is to punish the innocent, and provide praise and congratulations to the non-participants, as per the list of project phases that I used to have posted over my desk at work many years ago.
Oh you fools.
COVID-19 is a warning, a microbial shot across the world's collective bow that should be taken as a declaration of hostilities. It only illustrates our fragility as a species and our blindness as a civilization.
The current situation is nothing - welcome to Apocalypse Lite. In saying that, in no way do I wish to minimize the toll that the pandemic has taken. It is tragic that, as I type this, almost 200,000 people have died due to the coronavirus, and more than a little frightening in that it reflects 7% of the total global cases, rather than the 3-5% originally predicted. And that number is still rising.
Philip K. Dick once commented* that "the SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. Its not just 'What if --' It's 'My God; what if--' In frenzy and hysteria."
So then, my God; what if? In frenzy and hysteria.
What if the mortality rate for COVID-19 was 50%? I've read that eventually it will work its way through the entire population, like the common cold - what if it was killing every second person in the world while that was happening?
If COVID-19 had a 50% fatality rate, the people currently protesting the stay-at-home order in some US states would be hiding in their basements with the doors nailed shut, begging to be left alone - or more likely using the assault rifles that they had on display at the rallies to shoot anyone who attempted to get within a hundred feet of those doors.
I recently saw a photo of unclaimed coronavirus fatalities being inhumed in a mass grave on New York's Hart Island** - now imagine 800,000 corpses, half the population of Manhattan, truckload after truckload of bodies being desperately dumped into Central Park until avalanches of rotting corpses spilled out onto 5th Avenue and Central Park West. Imagine every rat and carrion bird in New York State seeking out this unexpected bounty.
Imagine the smell.
Now take that picture across the entire planet. If half the population of China was dead right now, would the remaining half even be able to bury all the bodies? 50% might take us across the invisible line that allows us to function as a society, breaking too many of the links that keep our world functioning.
Donald Trump has declared this to be a war, and he's not wrong in saying that. The mistake is to think that the current crisis is that war in its entirety. Wrong - this is just a skirmish, an affray, a brief crossing of lances before the real battle commences.
SARS killed 774 people in 2003, the 2014 Ebola outbreak killed 11,323, and the current list of fatalities is still growing - what happens next? To paraphrase Winston Churchill, a much greater war leader than Trump could ever hope to be, this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end - only the end of the beginning.
And as such, we should be preparing for the real war, for the virus with 100% mortality that will eventually crawl out of some South American cavern or Tibetan crevasse or Alaskan sinkhole and sweep across the world like a black rain.
Trump wants to defund the World Health Organization - you idiot, you should take the four billion dollars you stole from the Pentagon for the Mexican border wall and spend every cent on building an army to fight the war that may lie in our future: the WHO, the CDC, hospitals, researchers, medical schools, protective clothing, respirators, masks, disinfectants - and yes, body bags, because wars have casualties, and there will be no innocents in the viral war, only victims.
As per the Stephen King novel, we should be preparing to make our stand, and hoping against hope that it won't be futile, as so many last stands are.
- Sid
* From the introduction to The Golden Man, a collection of short stories published in 1980. The introduction provides a wide window into Dick's personal life, and is perhaps better than some of the stories.
** Karli was tragically accurate last year when she expressed her concerns about being in Manhattan during an apocalyptic event.
No comments:
Post a Comment