11-13-2020, 06:47 PM
It's hard to have imagined a plague as contagious and lethal as COVID-19 appearing in the advanced industrial world -- or even in countries roughly in the second-tier of economic development. Yet it happened. I had my nightmare of a virus as lethal as AIDS spreading through behavior less controllable than sex or IV drug use. (OK, there are IV-drug users and people of compulsive sexuality whom AIDS ravaged. I'm not going to make any moral conclusions).
One of the harshest realities of biology is that animals excessively ubiquitous (by natural standards) eventually get cut down with parasites, cancers, and infections, especially if those are social creatures. That means us, dogs, cattle, horses, and domestic cats. Apparently COVID-19 came from animals -- bats -- that congregate in gigantic numbers. Bats are among our closest non-primate relatives, so it is easy to see how bats could become vectors of dangerous plagues. The crowded late-medieval cities (and they were extremely crowded even by modern standards) were the sites of mass death from the Black Death.
We have been taking undue chances with crowded, unsanitary worksites. Workers in some food-processing places wear diapers in case their bladders or bowels might compel a toilet break. Maybe that does not spread COVID-19, but some of those food-processing places were especially prone to COVID-19 because people were too close in crowded plants.
To maximize profits and to make things meet a price point we cut corners, and at some point that corner-cutting can get lethal.
One of the harshest realities of biology is that animals excessively ubiquitous (by natural standards) eventually get cut down with parasites, cancers, and infections, especially if those are social creatures. That means us, dogs, cattle, horses, and domestic cats. Apparently COVID-19 came from animals -- bats -- that congregate in gigantic numbers. Bats are among our closest non-primate relatives, so it is easy to see how bats could become vectors of dangerous plagues. The crowded late-medieval cities (and they were extremely crowded even by modern standards) were the sites of mass death from the Black Death.
We have been taking undue chances with crowded, unsanitary worksites. Workers in some food-processing places wear diapers in case their bladders or bowels might compel a toilet break. Maybe that does not spread COVID-19, but some of those food-processing places were especially prone to COVID-19 because people were too close in crowded plants.
To maximize profits and to make things meet a price point we cut corners, and at some point that corner-cutting can get lethal.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.