Coronavirus

Amazing how the long-feared global pandemic, much written about, treated with many screenplays, joked about among friends, has come to pass with such a shrug.  I write this knowing that I am fortunate enough to be immunized (ahem) against its effects to a greater extent than many, being a remote worker whose industry – from what we can tell in these early days – is essentially unaffected (ignoring second-order impacts) by the spread of the virus.  The absence of an image to come back to – no burning rubble on the ground, or traumatized people fleeing, or scarred or disfigured victims laying singular in hospital beds – makes this feel almost like a school fire drill.  Tedious, taking away from the usual day in a way that is simultaneously freeing and bothersome, but not harmful.

I suppose for all the rhetoric around coronavirus – and certainly the writers of copy have busy weeks in front of them – it still seems remote or outrageous, if not self-righteous.  “Doctors are being forced to choose who lives or dies” – doctors do that every day anyway, we call that organ transplants.  Bioethics is a very real and well-developed field.  “The working poor and wage earners have no safety net, we have to help them.” – they haven’t had one in decades, if ever.  We’ve been talking about helping them for years, not least in all the gig economy editorials.  “The healthcare system isn’t prepared for this, it’s being run too much like a business and we are capacity constrained.”  Again, this isn’t a revelation, it’s a matter of scaling up all the small, ignored warnings over previous decades.  “Old people”, “young people”, “sick people”, “poor people” – the usual suspects to be the tip of the spear when it comes for society to suffer are experiencing the usual gut-wrenching choices.  There must be dozens if not hundreds of Cassandras out there shaking their heads, likely to busy dealing with the crisis to spare time for an “I told you so” but that’s the usual way of things anyway.  I don’t hear anything about long-term solutions, just a bien pensant “do whatever it takes to keep things afloat for now.”  Can’t we support that but also be bold enough to seize the chance to fundamentally change anything?  There was an interesting piece in the New York Times, less provocative than the title suggested, about how to value responses to healthcare emegencies.  If we shut the country down for two weeks, but that costs ~10 million people their jobs with the expected ripple effect on the economy, is that worth it?  If a human life is worth around $10 million, per the actuaries, a crisis we are paying $1 trillion to stave off must save at least 100,000 lives.  From my reading that seems in the realm of possibility.  So we’re doing the right thing now, but I mourn slightly for all the right things we won’t do afterwards, even as we stare down the extra $1 trillion of debt to try to pay off.

The market is cratering, and as usual we are measuring from the previous peak, even if before valuations were making people sweat.  The drop on the roller coaster looks fun from the ground but going through it is a hell of a thing.  If you’re fortunate enough to have cash to invest, or a house to refinance or borrow against, complaining about the drop is sort of like the roller coaster rider complaining to someone who can’t afford the cost of the tickets to the theme park or take a day off work to go.

All in all, a good time to reflect and appreciate those who, voluntarily or other wise, are rolling up their sleeves to get to work for the next several months.  I hope that in the meantime the rest of us can ignore the escalating numbers on the screen and think about how to fix the system after this is over so it’s less vulnerable the next time around (and I don’t mean just building an extra few thousands ECMO machines).  The silver lining to all this is that, as I think I wrote previously, the economy is the number one determinant of whether an incumbent president is reelected, such that Trump didn’t look especially vulnerable.  That’s out the window now, and Joe Biden’s chances are probably the best they’ve been in the past four years, and not just because he’s got the nomination on lock.

Keep your fingers crossed, and wash your hands afterwards.