The year 2020 will be known as the year of the following: Covid19, Coronavirus, Lockdown, Quarantine, or just simply, "The Virus."
If someone had told me in 2019 that in 2020 I would be washing my facemask, I would have looked at you perplexed. Why would I be wearing a facemask so regularly that I would need to wash it?
When news started spreading (no pun intended) at the end of 2019 that a highly contagious virus was wreaking havoc in Wuhan Province, China, most of the world figured it was an outbreak like others. We have gotten used to pandemics appearing in the news cycle every few years. You remember SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, and others? Outbreaks would occur, but they would be isolated to a small group of countries, and leaders managed to get them under control within a few weeks. The world became so used to these outbreaks that when a more serious one like Covid19 erupted, we did not take it seriously until it was too late to stop a worldwide spread.
Public health officials, epidemiologists, and philanthropists whose focus is preventing the spread of contagious diseases, were not the least bit surprised by Covid19. In fact, they have been telling the world for years that a global pandemic was inevitable. There have been major outbreaks worldwide since the beginning of recorded history. It only makes sense that as the population increases concurrently with global commerce the human race becomes more and more susceptible to contagious diseases. Even with robust healthcare systems, childhood vaccinations, and effective public health initiatives, it is obvious that not every disease can be anticipated and prevented. The human organism is fragile.
The Black Plauge of the 14th century wiped out between 75 million and 200 million people. The Spanish Flu infected 500 million people worldwide in the early 1900s and killed between 17 and 50 million. Ebola caused a global scare when it spread in West Africa and some isolated spots internationally between 2013 and 2016. No matter how advanced a society is, it is always vulnerable to large portions of its population being wiped out by a contagious disease.
And these diseases were all transmitted from nature to humans. There are diseases that can be manufactured in a laboratory too! International treaties have been ratified to prevent the manufacture and proliferation of biological warfare agents. We ban biological weapons for the same reason we ban chemical weapons - the amount of suffering caused by the weapon is so great that it cannot ethically be allowed as an option for one group of people to fight against another.
When we fear something we write about it, tell stories about it, make art depicting it. Our fear of pandemics has permeated popular culture. The 2002 movie 28 Days Later was a post-apocalyptic horror movie about a highly contagious virus called "the rage" that decimated the entire population of England. The novel Inferno by Dan Brown is about a mad scientist who believes that in order for the human race to persevere, its population must be winnowed down. The mad scientist in Brown's novel believes that the world had be come too peaceful, too good at preventing pandemics and wars, and that population growth is the greatest threat to human existence. He creates a virus that will kill every third person it infects, on average. A famous book about Ebola called The Hot Zone brought that deadly disease to everyone's attention in the 1990s. Mobile games have been created where the player can try to spread a disease across the world as quickly as possible.
Artists who depict pandemics in popular culture remind me of the kinds of movies and novels that were created about nuclear warfare during the Cold War era. Dr. Strangelove. War Games. I remember a Twighlight Zone episode about a bunch of people preparing to board a spaceship to escape to a nearby planet to avoid the fallout from a nuclear war that had already begun. When the passengers asked which planet they were headed to, the captain replied that they were going to a place called Earth. The viewer assumes until that moment that the setting of the episode is on Earth and that the humans are trying to escape to a nearby planet that has been discovered. It turns out the "people" the viewers are watching are really aliens that look and act just like humans, but think that Earth will be a more peaceful place. Of course, the eerie thing about this is that Earth was struggling to contain its own nuclear tinderbox between the USA and the USSR, among other countries. After WWII up until the 1990s, the world was preoccupied with Communism vs Capitalism; nuclear power vs nuclear power; East against West. It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the falling of the iron curtain, the breaking of the Berlin wall, and the September 11th attacks in 2001 that the world shifted its focus from nuclear war to terrorism.
9/11 caught the world by surprise even though there were clues that an attack coming from radical Islamists could happen. The world was still slowly moving out of its old Cold War mentality. Prior to the Cold War, it was about how big and agile your land army was. Vietnam disproved that conventional wisdom. Then the Cold War showed it wasn't the size of your army that mattered, but the size of your nuclear arsenal. Suicidal terrorism stemming from radicalized Muslims was not something we had been used to thinking about. Even if the intelligence communities in Western nations had taken seriously all of the clues leading up to 9/11, who is to say they would have responded any differently than they did? Instead of carefully reflecting on what mistakes were made and how 9/11 could have been prevented, the US government invaded Afghanistan, enacted the Patriot Act, created the TSA, expanded the powers of the NSA (spying, warrantless wiretapping, PRSIM, Snowden, etc.), then invaded Iraq. Years and trillions of dollars later, we can reflect on our decisions since 9/11 to determine which actions were effective, and which ones were counterproductive.
Here we are at a 9/11 type moment with Covid19. We finally see how a highly contagious disease can cause so much damage to the world population and the economy. Were there warnings that could have prevented Covid19 from becoming the monstrous problem that it did? Will we overreact to it the way we did after 9/11? It seems we are heading in that direction.
Already lawmakers in the US and UK, and probably other nations, are passing laws designed to track citizens more closely in an effort to contain future outbreaks. Will we have forced vaccinations? Will we have to identify ourselves as being virus free? Will we blame China for the outbreak and cause us to go to war with them? How we learn from this experience is up to us! We have so many resources at our disposal to help prevent or minimize the impact of a future outbreak. Let's focus on making carefully thought out policy decisions and avoid the knee-jerk reactions that we had after 9/11. I would recommend efforts to create universal health care, universal basic incomes as a way of avoiding major disruptions to our healthcare and economic systems.
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