Moe
Your work is so solid, it pains me to quibble. It’s about the mathematics.
Exponential, infectious, and incurable contagions, like exponential numbers, are predictable.
For centuries, America has chosen business concerns over understanding and managing the unavoidable behavior of exponential anything.
In 1900, bubonic plague touched down in San Francisco. The mayor called the governor, who reached out to the Surgeon General
They crafted a coverup to protect the California agriculture market, then worth $40 million.
It’s worth noting that many San Franciscans believed white folk were immune.
This echoes reactions to the demographic reach of COVID.
This denial of reality repeats during the Spanish Flu.
Highlights? Even though quarantine of sailors and a general shutdown spared San Francisco during the first wave, business owners, led by restaurants, concluded that the masks they also used would be enough.
Cue the casualties.
When HIV came calling, so did the blood banks. They decided testing all the blood was too pricey.
We knew HIV could happen via transfusion in 1982. That did not become public until 1985, when the FDA patented its own test.
Every time, or almost every time, money takes precedence over human lives when a pandemic is in play.
Every time, or almost every time, or so it seems to me, business owners and leaders forget a key part of capitalism.
Risk. You take a risk to make a profit. The chance that an act of G-d could quash your dreams is ever present.
And yet, when the act is an incurable contagion, people dare to mention their wallets.
It is mind boggling to hear the gnashing of teeth over a small business ending because of, say, a lockdown.
This is especially true in a world where Vietnam will have growth because of prompt action.
Sweden is the exemplar of the West’s odd approach. They ignore the data until dead bodies and zero ICU capacity forces action.
One could understand this disconnect if the diseases in play were confusing maladies, full of mystery. They are not.
In 1357, in what is now Dubrovnik, on the shores of the Adriatic, they wrote into law the common sense that eludes 20th and 21st century Americans (and Swedes, French, Germans, Italians and the UK).
Traders by sea had to spend a month on a rocky island before entering the city. Those coming via caravan had to spend their month in the village at the end of the trail.
Even before that, we have Boccacio’s Decameron, in which he describes a group who flee the city to, wait for it, quarantine, in a villa outside the city. Samuel Pepys weighs in as well.
Heck, even Monty Python has the famous sketch punchline, “Bring out your dead!”
It refers to quarantine, which locked everyone down until the “miasma” as they believed, had passed.
You can still see ancient no contact technology in the stone holes in walls through wine could safely be sold.
Fast forward to now — the local burger joint ignores history, science, common sense and literature to insist instead on a kind of magical thinking, much as a child might.
From Wisconsin to California, leaders somehow managed to misunderstand the definition of the word exponential.
This is what I mean: In the history of the world, there has never been an incurable and fatal contagion, which are always exponential, that was managed sans quarantine.
No one anywhere has ever, even once, sustainably kept the burger shop, or the bodega open, “compromised” at whatever number of casualties seems (I don’t know the word. I do know that this acceptance of “some” collateral damage is considered wise in the US) reasonable and had that work.
Any numbers above zero, without serious and sustained lockdowns always, and I mean always, get to the very big, very unacceptable level.
Everywhere on Earth, anywhere you look, anything above zero begins to double every three to five days.
Wisconsin began with one person. Within two weeks they had a few hundred.
It took seven months to get to a hundred thousand, exactly half that to reach two hundred thousand, and then about half again to reach three hundred thousand.
One definition of the United States is — it is literally impossible for us to understand that from nine to eighteen is the same as from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand.
Please pardon the length of this. And my tone is more my own denial of what is and nothing more. I would much prefer to be grossly mistaken about any or all of the above — so, course correction is more than welcome.
