This is a once-in-a-century field study. So many elements are being tested. The virus’ hypothesis is that it can procreate in the population of the human species at the balanced rate of transmission and mortality that ensures it will survive. We know how to eradicate the disease. We just don’t have the collective will to do what’s necessary. It would require every human being to stay in one place for two weeks or until they recover, without any chance of transmission to even one other human being outside of their immediate household. If we did that, everybody who already had it would recover or not. No more virus.
The virus knows this, and therefore is trying to mutate as it goes along so that its mortality rate is low enough to prevent the human population from wanting to stay in one place for two weeks. If the mortality rate was 30%, even with treatment, the world’s leaders would have a much higher motivation to attempt to freeze movement and therefore contact completely. But if the mortality rate, and just as important, the hospitalization rate, is low enough, then humans might relax their vigilance sufficiently to allow the virus to continue replicating at a sustainable level. The virus is aiming for that sweet spot.
Why would humans relax their vigilance? There is an existential threat to freezing in place that is perceived as equal to the chances of dying from the virus. There’s the mental death of despair, when one’s livelihood is stopped and the government money runs out. And the anxiety of anticipating that occurrence. There’s the death of dreams, when a promising business that founders took years to create teeters on bankruptcy. There’s the death of belonging as we are forced to stay separate from each other. There’s the death of what we took for granted and now know to be nirvana. There’s the death of wealth that is a primal fear of those who have it.
And then there’s the actual deaths that occur as a side effect of the pandemic: suicides, homicides, inadequate health care for people whose needs are secondary to the critical response required in the pandemic, etc. But the fear of death from this virus is increasingly more about the little deaths from shattered livelihoods and dissolved wealth.
Governments are the immune response system of the countries whose populations are being experimented with by this virus. Governments determine the collective anti-pandemic response that is acceptable. And governments are a reflection of their constituent population, whether a dictatorship, an autocracy, a democracy or a kingdom. As long as the population largely agrees to do what they’re told, they will allow their governments to make the decisions. If they get so upset they will risk their safety to make a change, then things change. China’s current one-party form of government is the result of a population joining together to change their form of government, through revolution. America’s government was the result of the same dynamic. We just chose a different form of government.
That’s the other experiment in this pandemic–which form of government finds the right balance between containment of the contagion and economic health of their societies? All governments are challenged to make the cold calculation–how many deaths are acceptable in order to revive the body of our economy? Here’s the thought experiment: If locking down the country completely was guaranteed to save only one life from dying of COVID-19, should we do it? What if that one person was your son or daughter? Brother? Wife or husband? If one death is okay, what about two? And the figure rises until some point where most people would finally say, “That’s too many”, even if none of them were loved ones or friends.
The Chinese government has made its calculation. Sweden has made its. Various states in the U.S. are making theirs. Each region is deciding when to ease restrictions based on the rate of hospitalizations and deaths. If the medical infrastructure can handle the load, then that’s more important than the rate of deaths. If the deaths are declining, or staying flat at what is perceived to be a low level, then the contagion is more acceptable to allow to continue as a result of relaxed restrictions. Our leaders won’t talk publicly in these terms, of course, but you can bet the discussions are being had.
And here’s where the population’s collective will comes in. The governments respond to the voice of the people. In China, they respond with controls, often severe, so that the controlling party has no opposition to its will. In the U.S. the government responds to the polls. If it looks like going one way increases the chances of being elected again, they go that way. If it looks like the other way has a better chance, they go that way. America’s politicians are checking the public pulse continually to find the point where enough people feel it’s time to put economics ahead of a particular number of ongoing deaths, before they make the decision to do so.
That’s not fair. Not all politicians pander that heavily. But in this crisis, we have an inordinate number who do. And one in particular comes to mind.
There are some of us on this planet who don’t think in the confines of national boundaries. The economics, if not just plain common sense, requires that global view. Because no country on earth today can thrive on its own. It takes the whole world’s humans. But that’s part of the experiment as well, i.e., can the human species continue as a life form on planet Earth? Or is our time done? All species have come and almost entirely gone, going back to the inception of life. They go for different reasons. One is that a species can over-procreate and deplete its resources for survival. We’re doing that.
Population correction of a species exhausting its needed resources comes in four involuntary ways, either singularly or in combination: natural catastrophe, famine, war and disease. Self-regulation is not a hallmark behavior of our species, so we get the involuntary kind. These are ways that the natural world balances itself. This virus, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the regional wars, the rising sea level, the lack of food for over a billion of us…perhaps these are the natural world acting to push back the overpopulated human species.
Great experiments in full view for us all to witness. Because that’s what most of us will do: watch it happen. Some will rise up and take action. Pay attention to who does stand up and take a risk to think globally, to lead without parsing. That will be a person who can affect an entire world’s human inhabitants. Can a pandemic produce a leader of such stature…? The final experiment of this pandemic.