It’s closing time in Italy, China remains on lockdown, there’s a case in Tasmania, there’s a second death in the US, the shelves are emptying of essential supplies, the stock-market is tanking…
My it all comes down pretty quick, doesn’t it?
We can’t quite believe it’s happened, but here it is. Maybe not the plague, maybe not even ’70s swine flu redux, but here it is anyway. SARS, MERS, COVID-19.
We started with a line reading, progressed to a walkthrough. What’s this? First rehearsal? Dress rehearsal? Final tech run through? Or is it curtain up?
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We’re all trying to grasp that it might be here, the event, but it’s hard to do so. Even as basic social life begins to be disrupted, transformed, suspended, the jokes, the irony, the commentary continue to fly through cyberspace.
People are buying up all the toilet paper, then people are tweeting photos of the empty shelves, the comedians are working up their material. This will go on I guess, absent a decisive and sudden scything, a shift in death numbers outside of China, at which point a decisive political and social shift might begin.
That sudden lift in western death numbers may never happen. The high numbers at the outbreak site of Wuhan may simply be a consequence of COVID-19 circulating for weeks or months in the local area, and the 2-4% mortality rate thus accumulating.
But while the Chinese outbreak was limited due to the efficiency of a totalitarian state apparatus, after initial bungling due to a totalitarian state apparatus, the entirely avoidable Western breakout — especially in the US — has been bungled due to the inefficiency of a trashed liberal state apparatus.
So it’s out there, spreading rapidly — with a higher transmission-rate per person infected. Between two and four, it is said, whereas earlier viruses were 1.5 persons or lower.
Suddenly we’re all looking at surfaces, conscious of how much our hands touch things, touch our face, how much of the world is crappy, cruddy, dirty. Yet at the same time we can’t seem to bring the sense of emergency into the centre of our lives, to start to take the political action that the virus suggests is necessary.
That’s not only if it’s a false alarm, but especially if it is so. What a godsend it is if this is just the rehearsal. What an opportunity to actually find out what we need to do to western states to future-proof for these events.
But it’s an opportunity we won’t take of course. Last month I noted that if the virus occurred here first:
…. de facto private hospitals would have instituted a first layer coverup/inaction to cover their bottom line/KPI standing; doctors who objected would have been threatened with the sack, and possible civil proceedings; the health department would have responded sluggishly.
Most of that has come to pass in the US already. Infected and non-infected US citizens were evacuated from Japan on the same plane; there aren’t enough test kits for them; they were allowed to scatter without being quarantined; government doctors were muzzled.
It was revealed that in 2019 the Trump administration had sacked the pandemic response team established by Obama after the Ebola crisis. Experts estimated that the spread would be made rapid by the lack of US sick leave and basic health care for the poor.
The administration’s frat-boy acting head of homeland security, whose name is Chad Wolf, could not answer basic questions on the infection rate of flu.
The supine White House press corps let Trump joke his way through a rare press conference. Trump said the virus would simply disappear “like a miracle”. The right began to portray it as a hoax, and that Democrat warnings were wishful thinking about a million dead.
Soon we’ll find out that private sector subcontracting played a role in the screw ups. And on it will go.
There is no need to believe it will happen much differently in Australia — unless the US debacle actually focuses the minds of the small number of rational people remaining on the right. Only after a day or two did so-called “pushback” against the president begin.
And it’s a measure of how incapable we are of busting out of existing frames of politics that we talk of “pushback”, when the state apparatuses are plainly incapable of addressing a collective risk on its own terms.
Grimly funny isn’t it?
For decades we have spoken of the problem of climate change and the “lag” effect: that there are no immediate, absolutely irrefutable consequences for climate change denialism which would show the dangers of business-as-usual.
And here it is! Here it bloody is! The chances of living or dying dependent on the actions of an efficient, reflexive, state, combined with an open society and a courageous mainstream press corps.
All that is absent, the disease is spreading, the fragility of globalisation has been exposed (more of that tomorrow) and still we go on.
Well, let’s see where we’re all at in three weeks time. When the next wave of whatever is going to happen happens.
Or doesn’t. And nothing changes. We are the species that claims to dominate the planet, yet we appear to be incapable of exercising collective control.
Meantime, with globalisation we have turned the planet into a giant petri dish, which maximises virus’ opportunity to mutate and spread. Viruses run the joint, we just live here. For the moment.
For the way we have lived, is it closing time everywhere?
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Blimey – beside the GFC there was more downside to globalisation? Did those glossy brochures mention all that?
Surprise, surprise! A system that evolves over time based on a design principle of satisfying the infinite greed of a small proportion of total system users, with no thought for anything else, does not always result in a system design that is optimal in terms of resilience or efficiency.
The system of global trade and interdependency that so many neoliberal economists applaud is something that no self-respecting engineer would want their name associated with: an immensely complex network with many, many single points of failure that render the whole edifice extremely fragile. Worst of all, no ‘Plan B’ if things go pear-shaped.
And yet the greedy remain in control and the system resists any and all attempts to redirect it towards anything remotely more egalitarian.
Perhaps we are seeing the solution to Fermi’s paradox playing out.
Just to add to the U.S. led ‘business at usual’, feel, the top article at The Intercept is headed;
“How the Senate Paved the Way for Coronavirus Profiteering, and How Congress Could Undo It” , and begins;
“Before a vaccine to combat the coronavirus pandemic is within view, the Trump administration has already walked back its initial refusal to promise that any remedy would be affordable to the general public. “We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” Alex Azar, Health and Human Services secretary and a former drug industry executive, told Congress….”, and mentions shortly thereafter, with heavy dollops of irony, particularly the transnational JV dollop;
“Gilead Sciences, a drugmaker known for price gouging, has been working with Chinese health authorities to see if the experimental drug remdesivir can treat coronavirus symptoms. World Health Organization officials say it’s the “only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy.” But remdesivir, which was previously tested to treat Ebola virus, was developed through research conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham with funding from the federal government.
That’s how much of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and development is funded. The public puts in the money, and private companies keep whatever profits they can command. But it wasn’t always that way. Before 1995, drug companies were required to sell drugs funded with public money at a reasonable price. Under the Clinton administration, that changed….”
The powerful continue to underestimate Mother Nature.
Covid-19 does not recognise governments or their rich benefactors, they are an irrelevance.
Yes, but in the US the wealthy can afford the health care- the poor? Meh
As the dictum goes, predictions are notoriously difficult particularly about the future. It has however been most interesting to see who jumps on the panic bandwagon and who seeks and heeds competent counsel.
These outbreaks sometimes really take and sometimes fizzle out. Presently even in China more than 99.9% of people are unaffected. The situation has allowed for some largely uncomparative and unwarranted Iran bashing on one hand and politicised griping about the US health system which has far greater chronic problems on the other.
To me it’s another example of the vagaries of the non linear dynamical systems that surround us. There seems little reason so far to compare today to 1919 – a terrible pandemic that came and went in several waves inexplicable even today.
The best thing I’ve done is talk to my staid, experienced GP who I’ve known for years. Second best was listening to an epidemiology professor on radio national. Most of us are unlikely to get sick. Those who do will mostly suffer mild illness. Children and most healthy adults are very unlikely to die. The elderly and those with pre existing and chronic conditions will suffer worst.