NYRSF 353 Editorial: Vexed by Pestilence

My last editorial signed off with:

As I write this, there are now six known cases of Covid-19 in New Rochelle, about five miles from my house. I came home from work early today with a cough and apparent fever, but it seems that the fever was an inaccurate reading from an old thermometer and the cough was just a slightly amplified version of my usual allergy symptoms. So it’s back to work for me tomorrow, washing my hands every time I think of it. Take care of yourselves and we’ll see you in April.

That was March 7, 2020. The next day, we started winding our cocoon around ourselves. That week we reluctantly decided not to attend of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, normally the high point of my year. The Conference wisely folded itself down about a week later. My last day at the office was March 10.

On March 7, 21 Americans were dead from Covid-19, none in New York state. As of today (May 25, Memorial Day), there are 97,720 confirmed deaths in the US, 28,350 in New York. The actual number could be tens of thousands higher than that—there has not been, and probably never will be, comprehensive testing of all of those who died during the first weeks of the pandemic. One article from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report <www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e5.htm> found that in New York City for the March 11–May 2 interval deaths rose around 24,000 above the seasonal baseline; nearly 19,000 of those were confirmed or probable Covid, leaving over 5,000 “excess” deaths that have not been attributed to the disease but very likely were Covid-related.

So far we’ve been spared the horror of any close friends dying of the disease. Arthur Hlavaty’s brother-in-law Joe had a very bad case but managed a full recovery. I’ve been very fortunate that my company has, to the absolutely greatest degree possible, shifted to work-from-home. By the end of March more than 95% of our employees were working remotely, which I wouldn’t have thought possible; I expect to hunker down for several months to come.

And I know that’s a privilege, one that many Americans don’t have. In the past two months, in the US, Covid-19 has mutated from a public health catastrophe to a disease of the expendable classes. A small percentage of Americans, mostly white and mostly young, have been vigorously agitating to be freed of the communal actions necessary to keep the virus from repeatedly overwhelming the hospitals and “essential” workplaces. Protesters have shoved Nazi slogans at Jewish politicians; multiple people objecting to wearing masks in retail outlets have shot store workers.

The challenge facing America is not primarily a technological one. Certainly the current crisis has technological aspects—the disease spread so widely in part because the first generation of tests in the USA were slow and horrifically inaccurate. But many countries, especially in East and South-East Asia, have contained the disease vastly better. The Republic of Korea, population 51 million, had its first diagnosed case on the same day as the United States and so far has only had 267 Covid deaths. Mongolia and Vietnam, which both border on China (where the virus was first detected) and have extensive commercial exchange with them, have had a combined 0 deaths.

The problem we face is political. Containing Covid requires an extensive testing network, contact tracing, and quarantine/isolation enforced by law. Countries that quickly adopted the established policies to contain and suppress outbreaks have done well. Countries that were unprepared, whose leaders denied the severity of the outbreak, that failed to implement well-understood correctives, slow-walked production of tests and protective equipment, and generally failed to rise to the occasion—those countries have had horrific rates of infection and death.

The natural world periodically rises up to clobber us. Our responses to these challenges are political, not scientific. If we, as a country, don’t prepare for a hurricane, for a new virus, for rising sea levels, that’s a political failing. And one of the most frightening parts of the current crisis is the degree to which the politics of the moment reject, openly, the accumulated knowledge of our society. Science fiction valorizes people who Know Things, and watching the world turn away from Knowing is like a knife in the lungs.

We would love to hear your stories about dealing with the pandemic—personal narratives, anecdotes, cheerful or not-so-cheerful encounters. Let us know how you’re doing and where you think we’re going.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors

Comments

[Raymond]

One of the most sensible and balanced essays on the current plague I have read.