Future Pandemics—Today (Part 2)

Part 2: Emotional Upheaval

In “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment,” the author Robert Wright notes that “the human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.”

In my last post, I discussed the likelihood that the current coronavirus epidemic has breached into pandemic territory: it is in multiple locations (almost 60 countries) and containment efforts may no longer work in slowing its spread. In other words, there is a strong possibility that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, just another cause of community acquired pneumonia (like streptococcal pneumonia or the seasonal flu). It is very likely that it is here to stay and the sooner we accept this reality, the easier it will be to maintain economic, social, and moral order.

The current hysteria surrounding the virus speaks to our collective confusion about this reality. We must understand that at this point in the pandemic, our feelings are getting the best of us. That is normal. But the consequences of this fear are front page news: tanking stock markets, xenophobia, disrupted commerce, political grandstanding/finger-pointing and inadequate preparedness. Fear and our collective response to that emotion, not the virus itself, is sustaining a lot of the worldwide chaos we are witnessing. These reactions seem to be fed by the idea that the virus is still containable. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is. Not when 80% of infected people have mild disease (symptoms similar to the common cold, like the usual strains of coronavirus) or are entirely asymptomatic.

At some point, we may have to accept that this virus may become endemic, as common as the yearly flu. Our emotions will fog this reality, but we will have to cut through the haze and accept this truth if we are to forestall the type of chaos that the current level of hysteria can easily devolve into.

At the least, if my predictions are overblown, this current epidemic is a useful rehearsal for the types of events that will occur, events mainly driven by fear, when future pandemics take hold. Without a doubt, even before the last century of inescapable globalization, the world has seen pandemics on the scale of what we are seeing now. I return to the 1918 flu which killed 50 million people in every corner of the world where humans reside. This event occurred without the worldwide network of airfare & automobile transportation, without the level of heavy trade and commerce we experience today with its incessant movement of goods and individuals. In a fraction of the time it used to take to cross from city to city, let alone national borders, viruses today are speedier simply because human movement is so much faster. With this virus, it’s as if we are the mosquitoes.

The reflexive response to prevent a pandemic is to slow, if not fully stop, this human movement. But mosquitoes can’t be caged. If governments at some point fail to acknowledge that containment has failed, this decision has the potential to create a domino effect wherein we get to witness how delicate, how fragile our world order truly is.

When commerce slows, markets crash. If you own a grocery store that relies on 300 customers a day and a steady supply of produce to stock the shelves, a government announcement for people to quarantine themselves affects both the back-end and the front-end of the business. Suddenly, half your employees don’t show up to work. No need to show up if the inventory and the customers don’t, so you lay them off. If panic and fear of the virus doesn’t lift, then in six months time, you’re shutting down the store.

If hospitals and medical clinics are avoided, sick people, those without the infection but with other medical conditions, will not get the appropriate medical care that they need. And even if they do venture out of their homes, the clinic may no longer stock their medications which are no longer being produced by a country that has an even stricter quarantine. Deaths due to causes entirely unrelated to the pandemic will accelerate. In some ways, one has to wonder if a wrong-headed approach to prevention actually is more lethal to people than the virus ever could have been.

Governments will topple. The unrest caused by persistent economic unrest will undoubtedly inflame the passions of those looking to point the finger at those in power. Some bad governments will go, but so will some good ones and in the power vacuum, corrupt actors may easily enthrone themselves in a way that resembles some of the most isolated, xenophobic and authoritarian regimes of our day.

As economic and political order crumbles, moral decay sets a foothold on the collective consciousness. In a persistent atmosphere of fear and disorder, the worst crimes of humanity become easier to justify as trust in one another decays. Truth is the greatest victim, trampled and beaten again and again as the world descends into chaos. Of course, this is the worst case scenario, and we are far from that point today.

But we’ve seen all this before. Not merely in fancy predictions about the next global pandemic by academics and the like. The best science fiction is ripe with depictions of the collapse of world order as a result of some unstoppable pandemic. And the fuel for most of these realistic “fantasies” is fear and wrong decisions. Who would have ever thought a nastier version of the common cold might be the bug that finally did us in?

In my next post, I’ll discuss a better way to deal with the coronavirus and future pandemics in general.