An Epidemic of Political Malpractice
Eventually, someone is going to write a history of the 2020 pandemic. The central theme will be that it was as much a political as a medical problem. It will be a story of how people with political power made choices in their personal self-interest that facilitated the spread of the infection and greatly amplified its effects.
It began with the local communist party officials in Wuhan. This New York Times piece describes how, after the close call with SARS, a sophisticated reporting system was put in place to identify similar outbreaks and reduce the opportunity for political interference. To the world's great loss, that system fell victim to the instinct to suppress bad news it was designed to overcome.
It continues today with politicians who try to gain or maintain political power by opposing the only available tools of control when there is no cure and no vaccine. Reducing the opportunity for people to infect each other is the only method we've got. It is very disruptive. No one likes it. So it is easy to gain a following by criticizing it.
The virus cannot reproduce on its own. It requires the machinery of the human body to make copies of itself. So human beings are the factories that make the virus.
Humans not only make copies of the virus, they also help it to propagate. The copies populate bodily fluids and ride them out into the world. Some of them will make their way into another human host who is added to the virus-making productive capacity.
The process of infection is so efficient that the growth in virus-producing capacity is geometric. It can cause the number of virus factories to double every few days. The power of doubling is humbling because the numbers get very big, very fast. Half a million becomes 4 million in just three cycles.
The opponents of the bitter medicine prescribed by epidemiology can legitimately argue that the economic consequences of lock-downs will produce bad health effects of their own. It is undeniable that people having less money and losing health insurance will limit access to healthcare and lead to a different set of problems. The question comes down to which set of problems is worse.
Despite the human cost, perhaps it would be best for everyone if the "let 'er rip" approach were tested in a few places so we would have evidence of which path costs more in human suffering. It appears likely that the US may provide some experiments of this type as officials in red states avoid adopting measures or dial back measures that are in place. The citizens of those states will be the nation's guinea pigs, some willing and others not.
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