10) The Coronavirus Terror

Part 10 of the 12-part series - 'A Grand Machine to Beat Covid-19' - discusses the threat posed by C-19 and our initial response to the pandemic.

The Coronavirus is a dangerous enemy – highly infectious, with a horrifying death rate for people in at-risk groups. Operating like an assassin, it disguises itself as harmless, so it can move amongst us with ease… passing through many without being noticed at all… searching for vulnerable victims. And then when it truly strikes an individual, it comes from several directions at once – attacking multiple organs and triggering the immune system to self-destruct in a catastrophic series of misguided countermeasures. It's as if the unexpected novelty of C-19 panics our bodies into a suicidal overreaction…

And it’s done exactly the same thing, on a collective, social and political level, all around the world. The spectre of this ‘New Death’ panicking governments, institutions and citizens into a catastrophic overreaction – provoking us to enact a series of self-destructive countermeasures, so extreme, that they’ve devastated our communities, societies and economies in an endless multitude of ways.

We suspended vaccination programmes across the globe, with vast numbers of children missing out on potentially life-saving immunisations. Important operations and surgeries have been postponed, with all sorts of horrible health conditions left to fester and torment.

We closed down whole industries – jeopardising countless livelihoods, destroying innumerable businesses, casting tens of millions into unemployment. It’s bad enough in the economically-developed world, but the impact has been especially ruinous in poorer countries, without effective welfare states.

Dread to think about the suicides, the mental health damage and all that domestic abuse. The hundreds of billions of lost hours of education. The vulnerable children missing out on social support. All that money we’ve thrown away, that could’ve been spent on nurses, research-scientists, care-workers, etc.

Then there’s the fact that we’re social beings right down to our very core – it’s one of our fundamental, species-defining features. Human contact is essential to our mental and emotional wellbeing. Many of the hobby-groups and community clubs that we’ve shut down, were vital lifelines of social interaction… for people who now find themselves lonely and isolated. And we all need to be able to see our friends and families – to have the freedom to do the things that we enjoy, with the people that we love.

These acts of collective self-harm are not small or trivial matters – they are each of serious significance in themselves – and there are endless other examples. All these factors deserved to be taken into consideration, as we calculated our initial response to C-19… and yet none of them seemed to count for anything at all. Everything else being forgotten, as our tunnel-vision narrowed around the singularity of the Coronavirus. Not just our number one priority – our only priority… our obsession.

The Coronavirus is on track to kill well over a million people this year, but Cancer slaughters about 10 million every year. Cancer will kill far more of us than Covid ever could, and yet the former has been heavily deprioritised in respect to the latter. Life-saving screenings have been postponed, important surgeries put off, Cancer-researchers locked out of their labs. How many otherwise-saveable people has our C-19-response condemned to a Cancerous death? Will it be more than we actually manage to save from the Coronavirus?

In a few years’ time, we’ll be able to make sober, rational and holistic assessments of humanity’s initial response to C-19, based on objective data and solid facts. When this happens, I think we’ll probably find that our extreme lockdown countermeasures have done more harm than good… and that, sadly, we've ended up killing more people than we’ve saved.

But for now, we don’t know enough to really understand what’s going on… and it will take time to develop any semblance of collective rationality when it comes to the topic of C-19. Because, when the Coronavirus began to spread, the international media kicked into overdrive and whipped up a frenzy. Terrified citizens demanded extreme reactions from their governments and political leaders, realising that this was the defining PR issue of the age, responded accordingly. Fear of the unknown is a powerful emotion and it has sent our whole world into a tailspin of turmoil and confusion.

We can’t really blame ourselves for reacting like that… we’re only human, after all. And when the first data and information began to come out, the death-rate appeared to be significantly higher than current estimates suggest. The spectre of the 1920s pandemic loomed large (which had truly petrifying death-rates, especially for young adults), lending good sense to the idea that it was right to apply the precautionary principle, this time around.

And, of course, it’s eminently noble that we’re doing so much to try and protect the poorest, oldest and most vulnerable people in our society. Although, unfortunately, it is also these individuals, who will likely suffer the worst repercussions from our collective overreaction to the pandemic.

Ultimately, it’s important for us to really try to understand our enemy… what it is we are fighting… what exactly we’re trying to protect ourselves from. The Coronavirus is a dangerous new disease – it’s killed over a million people in the nine months since it was discovered. It poses a very real danger to older people, and those with underlying health conditions... and it genuinely threatens to overrun health systems, especially during the winter. So we should all take the pandemic peril seriously.

But we should bear in mind, that the greatest danger comes from C-19’s ability to provoke self-destructive overreactions… on both the biological and social levels. This is the Coronavirus’ modus operandi – its signature approach to destruction. Of course, our collective response is not really caused by anything intrinsic to C-19 itself. It is caused by something intrinsic to us – our own fear of death and the unknown – leading us to flail around desperately, blindly destroying innumerable things that are truly valuable.

Thus, in a very literal sense, dealing with the Coronavirus Crisis is primarily about dealing with our own fear… our own primal terror.

Read the next blog in the series - Part 11 - The Grand Plan