Middle Pandemic4

2020-05-12

Similar to the last time, the space between these is due to the slowing of events. But there are some notable things that are starting to happen, and they (hopefully) bode well for the public understanding of the virus.

Reinfection

There’s been a lot of talk (usually stemming from WHO statements) about "reinfection". The way it’s bandied about is usually meant to scare people - as if trying to say that having antibodies against a strain is not a protection against that strain, and you could just get perpetually reinfected over and over until your body gives up.

The problem here is that it’s not clear what they’re trying to say by "reinfection". Clearly, if you have antibodies, it’s because your body defeated a strain of the virus. Those antibodies are how the virus was killed, in your body. So if you have the antibodies, you’re clear. Explaining this feels a lot like explaining that a basketball bounces with equal and opposite force when you dribble it, but this is the point of the public conversation we’re at.

The rehearsed phrase goes something like "we don’t know if reinfection is possible". But, we’ve never observed it, so we have no reason to believe that antibodies against a strain somehow become ineffective against it. That’s how it works for literally everything else, so do we have a reason to believe it’s different here? Well, no. But then the phrase "we haven’t proven it to be impossible" (or some variant) gets thrown around.

I had a discussion about a month ago where i got to throw around Russell’s Teapot (something I haven’t had to do since talking to evangelical Christians in the 00’s), in response to someone who was so enthusiastically panicked that he asserted that i was being unscientific for saying the virus didn’t disfigure people. I couldn’t prove to him that it didn’t, he said. But naturally, you can’t prove a negative. All you can do is show that it’s never been observed. Reasonably, if something has never been observed, it’s reasonable to assert it doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t - germ theory wasn’t invented until the 19th century, but bacteria and viruses definitely existed - but it does mean that you can’t just make something up and expect everyone to believe it.

Is there a teapot orbiting the sun? Well I’ve never observed one, and it doesn’t fit any theoretical model, so, no, probably not. Could people get reinfected? Well we’ve never observed it, and it doesn’t fit any theoretical model, so, no, probably not.

But

A more optimistic way to look at the "reinfection" discussion is to note that the term may just be being misused - it could be that "reinfection" is an admission that this isn’t a one-time thing that’ll be defeated and we’ll move on. Instead, "reinfection" might signify that we’re starting to accept the reality that we’ve known all along - the coronavirus is not an event, it is a newly permanent feature. As i constantly harp on, it cannot be eradicated, it cannot be removed, it cannot be defeated or drive away by hiding. The talk of "reinfection", hopefully, is the break in the dam of controlled sentiment that might lead people to realize that there will not ever be an end to this virus. The vaccine will not be any more effective than the flu vaccine, the ridiculous distancing and mask measures people enjoy so much don’t actually matter. We will all get it. Multiple times. It might even be a relatively common cause of death in the elderly, like the flu.

Hopefully, talk of reinfection (however stunted it is, in its phrasing) will lead to discussions about what measures are at all reasonable.

Reopening

This naturally leads to mentioning that states are beginning to reopen. People are sick of being caged up by a governor’s order - they want to live, they want to work. They want their jobs and life back. Tolerance for this sort of overreach is starting to wane, and while it’s disheartening that it took 2-3 months for that to happen, but at least it’s starting to.

There are fairly chilling proposals that allow the governor to arbitrarily dictate sections of the state that are allowed to conduct business, based on infection fears - with regions able to be graded up or down based on how the governor feels about them. Other states agonize over the most politically convenient way to reopen without looking bad when infections increase again (as they must).

Outcomes

Overall we’ve not yet come to terms with the reality of the situation yet. And, while I hate to reiterate this, I’m legitimately dumbfounded that these conclusions are not being made by anyone looking at these details. It absolutely mystifies me - I see no other possible conclusions to draw about the future, given everything we know and have seen borne out repeatedly, other than the conclusions I’ve already written about for two months now. Nothing has changed, except other people’s opinions.

I have a feeling only two possible long-term outcomes are possible;

Future generations look back at this and consider our actions and intentional ignorance of the knowledge we already had to be a colossal blunder. The media handling, the government measures, the social distancing and hypochondriac responses - how could we not know this was purely unpleasant fiction?
Permanent social change will occur, and it will increase government power, anti-social behavior, and further degrade any real culture by effectively dismantling freedom of assembly. We will convince ourselves that everything we did was right, and we were saving lives, and by continuing to evade each other and perform these nonsense rituals of social distancing and perpetual mask-wearing, we’re somehow making the world better.

Both are, of course, possible. It’s quite likely that people will continue their enthusiasm for this process and follow the second course of action for a while. Perhaps it will take a generation to publish enough studies showing that this stuff is pointless, and that temporary flattening the curve is not worth the destruction of so many families and lives. The length of time that this could take is the unknown quantity.

Any honest reading of the situation obviously skews towards the first possibility, so it might seem like a rigged prediction. And probably so. I admit to not knowing how long it will take. I hope sooner rather than later, but nobody’s got a crystal ball.

While it’s not the darkest possible outcome, it’s saddening to see so many enjoy willfully ignorant destruction as much as they do.