No matter how bad they are, most of the time, disasters tend to be localized events -hurricanes, tsunamis, even droughts – that areas recover from soon after the event.
Covid is the perfect disaster in a few ways…
1. Its devastation is truly worldwide. I was reading a book about pandemics and the author observed there are only four things that potentially have a negative worldwide reach – thermonuclear war (always possible but feels much less likely than the cold war era), asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs (possible but very unlikely and not something humans can control anyhow), climate change (within humans’ power to control but such a slow moving disaster, hard for many to recognize its danger) and finally, worldwide pandemic which has gone from non-entity to worldwide impact on our health, economics, politics and more, all within weeks.
2. All viruses balance their need to spread with their ability to cause damage. If they cause too much damage to their hosts, they’ll be unable to spread and will burn out. Ebola is a virus that has these characteristics. On the other hand, a virus like HIV has been around for decades, killing millions but slowly so that it continues to spread rather than burn itself out. Covid is somewhere in between these two extremes – highly transmittable but still having a devastating impact in terms of health and death for many who have it.
3. Covid is fast-moving in some ways having changed our world completely in the course of a few months. But, at the same time, it’s not like other disasters like a hurricane where everyone is affected in roughly the same way at the same time. Right now, some people’s lives have been destroyed by Covid, either directly (death or permanent health damage) or indirectly (job loss, other economic impacts) while others’ lives are pretty much unchanged except for a few small things from earlier this year – they still go to work every day, they still shop for groceries, they still sleep comfortably in their bed at night.
4. One of the biggest reasons that SARS didn’t become a pandemic nearly two decades ago was that it had one big difference from Covid – it wasn’t transmittable until carriers were showing symptoms (at which point they were less likely to go out and interact with people.) Covid can be transmitted by asymptomatic people which makes it especially dangerous since you never know who has it.
5. It’s a novel virus which means that humans had no previous exposure to it at all so we don’t even have partial immunity. This makes the race to create a vaccine so important as the only other options we have before that are the ones we’re using – social distancing, frequent handwashing, limiting opportunities for large crowds to gather at businesses, sporting events, concerts and so on.
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