Believing in the pandemic
(Pandemic Diary - day 20)
From my journal: 18 March 2020 (Wednesday)
If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know. It’s a fresh spring day, mid-40s on the way to mid-50s, sun shining and birds singing, the sound of a chainsaw in the distance, every so often some traffic noise from the highway or a car going past on our road.
It’s pretty much the kind of day you dream about all through the winter, waiting for it to arrive.
But if you do know, you can’t look at this day and forget what’s really going on around us, because what’s going on is momentous. Governments have decided to take the threat presented by the pandemic very seriously, and the solution they present is life-changing in the near-term for a lot of people.
For me, and I suspect for a lot of people, the “life-changing” part is an exaggeration, because the only direct effects I’m experiencing are pretty minor, like the idea that I won’t be able to eat out tomorrow night, like some cancelled appointments and that sort of thing. It’s inconvenient, but that’s about all.
But for some people, the life-changing part is not an exaggeration. For owners whose businesses must close, or workers who can’t work and won’t be paid, for athletes whose seasons are cancelled, for a long list of others, there are some long-term implications from what is happening right now. And there will be a cascade of effects for all of us, I’m sure.
The surreality of it is that there’s nothing to see.
There don’t appear to be any more sick people around than normal. There are no overflowing hospitals, no lines of sick people seeking treatment, no bodies in the streets. There’s only this leap of faith to accept that there really is a threat out there, and it’s headed our way, and it’s bad. There’s the leap of faith to accept that the stories from Italy are real, and that they really could happen here. It’s a necessary suspension of disbelief, and it must be widespread, ideally universal, and it’s hard to achieve that. And it’s not hard to understand why some people would question it, discount it, not believe.
“It’s a necessary suspension of disbelief, and it must be widespread, ideally universal, and it’s hard to achieve that.”
There’s no certain way to answer that disbelief.
It could be that things really will become bad here, and disbelief will no longer be a viable option. Or it could be that the social distancing and the rest of it will work and we will “flatten the curve” enough that we don’t exceed the capacity of our medical systems, and this will pass and life will return to normal on the other side of it, and there will then be room left for some disbelief, for some discounting of the reaction, for calling it an overreaction.
And it might even be that that it really is an overreaction and the disease won’t really get to us as projected, our hospitals won't fill up, and the whole thing will just fade away. I don’t believe that can or will happen, but it’s not impossible.
“...this will not be the last or the worst of these.”
I choose to return to my idea of this as a wake-up call, an eye-opening dress rehearsal for something bigger that will eventually engulf us. From that standpoint, I think the best way this could go is that there is enough sickness to make it clear that we did not overreact. We need to see overflowing hospitals, and enough death to make it undeniable that this was real. I don’t wish anyone to die, of course, but I don’t think we’ll learn the lesson otherwise. And we must, because this will not be the last or the worst of these.