Responses

I’m collecting several responses to points made in comments of various posts here.

A regular commenter, reacting to the reemergence of COVID-19 in China, wrote:

and reports were that most of China was unaffected by the late winter and early spring outbreak. Could be the same virus and likely is

Earlier in the year China locked down the areas affected by COVID-19 pretty hard, closing down all forms of transportation to or from those areas. To the best of our ability to determine that was effective in limiting the spread of the disease. The main testing measure that China has, apparently, used is taking people’s temperatures.

Those approaches have limitations. Taking temperatures as a means of limiting spread assumes that there’s no asymptomatic transfer of the disease, something about which we’re still unsure. And blocking off areas only controls the spread of the disease for as long as the lockdowns are in place. It’s a delaying tactic rather than a mitigation tactic. Maybe the vaccines the Chinese have developed will halt the spread of COVID-19 in China now. Or maybe they’ll need to engage in more lockdowns.

If the supply chains of any American companies are adversely affected by these new lockdowns in China, they should be screamed at. They were warned. They have no on to blame but themselves.

The commenter is correct. There’s no way to tell whether the variant the Chinese are experiencing now is the same one they did a year ago. It could be the same strain or it could be the variant that afflicted Europe and then the United States or it could be something entirely new.

In another thread another regular commenter responded to my “what if” question about multiple repeated pandemics with this:

We all die.

I find that not only panicked but lacking in historical perspective. Outbreaks including pandemics of multiple diseases as serious as COVID-19 and many more so have been the norm during human history right up until very recent times. These diseases include smallpox, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, and many others including flu. The case fatality rate of smallpox was 30%. In the 19th century as many as half of all deaths of people from the age of 15 to 35 was due to tuberculosis.

We don’t really have a great handle on the case fatality rate of COVID-19 but right now in the U. S. it appears to be around 3%, largely concentrated among the elderly.

It wasn’t until the 18th century when Edward Jenner, using the insightful and risky strategy of inoculating people against smallpox using live viruses, put us on the path we’re on now. That was accelerated in the post-war period by the use of antibiotics to control bacterial infections. Leaving the big city centers for the suburbs among other things was a way of reducing the spread of diseases which could be contracted by what’s being called “community spread”.

Somehow the human species survived that and I expect we’ll survive not just COVID-19 but the coming multiple pandemics.

One more thought. Until the 20th century in the United States the poor, middle income, and rich people all lived side by side, not segregated into different neighborhoods by income as is increasingly the case today. Many of our institutions arose while that was true and I suspect that some proportion of the deaths among the poor due to COVID-19 is a consequence of that segregation.