gracchusdixit

After several months of social hibernation, my wife and I finally had a chance to spend a little time with friends, keeping our distance and avoiding physical contact, of course, but at least having a chance to see one another and catch up.  Sitting around our dining table, one of those friends, who works with special needs children in her local elementary school, spoke passionately about the hardships both parents and children will experience if kids can’t return to school soon.  In particular, she said, the challenged children she helps simply cannot learn “remotely”.  For them to focus, concentrate, or learn anything at all requires personal attention and instruction.  “There has to be a way to reopen the schools,” she protested in a pleading, plaintive tone of voice.  “There just has to be a way.”

All of us can sympathize with the sentiments of our friend.  Whether we have young children or not, we all want schools to reopen.  We all long for the pandemic to end.  We all crave the chance to get back to normal, lead the lives we used to lead, and put this disruptive nightmare behind us.  

But what if there isn’t a way to make any of that happen?  What if the pandemic and its consequences are here to stay?  These are questions that we are understandably reluctant to confront.  But they are questions that can’t be ignored forever.

We have been told countless times that COVID-19 will eventually run its course and disappear or that a vaccine will soon be developed to stamp it out once and for all.  In truth, none of these hopeful outcomes is in the least bit certain.  

History is rife with examples of plagues and pandemics that never “disappeared,” but, rather, came creeping back year after year, decade after decade, century after century, until it was normality itself that disappeared.  Diseases and natural calamities have the power to wear down even the most robust and resilient societies and civilizations, to crush even the most determined and deeply felt hopes.

What’s more, the prospects of discovering a pandemic-ending vaccine are not as rosy as we have been led to believe.  Our expectations, and those of the medical experts who advise us, are colored by the almost miraculous success of the polio, small pox, and measles vaccines, which have all but eliminated some of the cruelest diseases in human history.  The fact remains that such outcomes are far from being the norm and by no means guaranteed.

The influenza vaccine, for example, which millions of people take every year, provides only short-term protection and must be constantly modified, with varying degrees of success, as new strains of the virus emerge.  There is, in fact, no “cure” for the ‘flu’.  We have merely found a way of managing it.  After 40 years of trying, virologists have yet to produce any  vaccine for HIV.  Various pharmacological “cocktails” can check its progression and reduce its lethality.  But as with influenza, there is no “cure”.  And to date, no vaccines have been developed to combat any of the seven known corona viruses that came before COVID-19.  The most lethal of these, MERS, kills four out of ten of its victims.  It has been kept in check only by the most aggressive measures of quarantine and isolation.

Counting on a vaccine to save us from this virus may, in the end, turn out to be little more than wishful thinking.

There is a parallel—and more dangerous—response to the pandemic that goes well beyond wishful thinking.  That response asks us to accept the proposition that the worst consequences of covid-19 are inevitable, that we can do little about it, that the cost in human suffering and death is the price we must pay for restoring the political, economic, and social status quo ante.  Some who make this argument do so innocently, without malign intent.  Others, like Donald Trump and members of his administration, do so with cynical and callous disregard for the lives of those they are sworn to serve.  

Whatever the motives of those who make this argument, let’s be clear:  the argument itself is fundamentally immoral, because it proposes to put a price on human life.   But even if that were not the case, its underlying premises are false.

To begin with, we can do something to contain this pandemic—not perfectly or completely or without a hefty price to pay, but certainly with more success than we have thus far achieved.  Virtually every member nation of the European Union has done a far better job of containing the virus, and when it comes to those those few that haven’t, the reasons are crystal clear, as are the lessons to be learned.  If we heed those lessons, we can still stave off the worst.

More importantly, the purported trade-off between fighting the pandemic and “getting back to normal” is not only a false choice but a delusional distraction, as recent attempts by a number of Republican states to reopen have demonstrated.  Instead of returning to normal, these states have only made matters worse—in most cases, much worse.   

We may soon have to face the possibility that we will never have a “cure” for this virus, that it will dog our steps for years to come, that the “normality” we once knew is gone forever.  The economy and the workplace may never return to what they once were; jobs and paychecks may never fully recover; children may never again be taught in the classrooms of the past; our private, for-profit health care system, having been “socialized” to fight the pandemic, may have to stay “socialized” just to survive.

We may soon reach a point when insisting that “there has to be a way” will be worse than a false hope.  It will be an insurmountable obstacle, preventing us from facing up to a new and ineluctable reality, one that little resembles the lives we used to lead, one to which we must adapt if we hope to survive.  At such a point, pretending that we can simply reopen our schools, our businesses, and our economy with the expectation that everything will return to what it once was, will be nothing less than a suicide pact with the future.