It’s the Year of the Toad, of Gentle Repose: 2020. The date has a beautiful symmetry, but like 1919, it’s a little buggy. A century ago Nature ran H1N1 in multiple iterations, codenamed Spanish; this year we see the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 #Wuhan. Each century had its favourite vector. Then was a train lover, Now loves planes; both share an affection for boats. But Now has a speed that Then could only dream of. In People-World Chess, Then‘s pawns were pushed incrementally en masse into trenches, where they sickened and were stacked in crowded field hospitals. Now‘s pawns are dispatched a board’s length to far off lands with the knights and bishops of business, or given leave to go their own distant way for a week or two a year.
“Amazing how far you can get in half a day”, boasted Now to Then, and Then, still shellshocked and reeling, had to concede: Now was really fast.
There’s a maxim in the tourist industry: Byte beats Meat. That is to say, the dream of travel conveyed through digital advertising outpaces, by some order of magnitude, the dreamer. Information can Cross Nations Close-to-Instantaneously. Christopher will happily tell you of the dangers of modal verbs. For example, diseases could spread slowly if their host were exclusively ambulatory. Here’s an interesting inversion of the Travel Agent’s maxim then: in the case of SARS-CoV-2, Meat beat Byte to the border. The outbreak started in Wuhan, China, and whilst the Chinese did inform the World Health Organisation faster than with previous national outbreaks, it was still too slow: plenty a person had come and gone, and not from a nearby province. The virus surfaced in Asia, Europe, the Americas. The governments of said continents seemed often to state: “We have confirmed cases”, not “we confirm we expect cases”. The (unusually) large RNA genome — the information — in the guise of Coronavirus outpaced the global early warning system. It quite literally hopped on a plane and walked through customs. Now the pandemic’s a matter of lengthening public record and human social life’s been stilled. Many countries have curfews and quarantines, some even advance the rhetoric of being on a war footing. Shops, cafes, restaurants, gyms — all non-essentials — are shut. Most planes are grounded and cruise ships docked. Schools have closed their doors to their charges. For many people, there’s no more meeting family and friends for fear of infection and/or fines. Of course, you can always go online to say hello, and many are, along with binge-watching streamable media and playing games.
The viral culture exerts pressure on human culture. Countries’ infrastructures are being tested: the binging strains data networks and power grids; the panic buying, the supply network; the infection rate, the health services; and the closures, the economy. There’s a silver lining to the miasma cloud though: data. Though some may have dreamed, no one would have dared to implement an experiment that kicked the pillars of the modern world with such force and duration (leaving aside con theories of the Illuminati and other nefarious, near-omnipotent agents). And yet here it is, across all nations, political organisations, and technology levels.
On the theme of ‘global’, how’s our ball of earth doing? A little more neglected due to our new extra insular mode of being, but climate scientists are getting to sing a multi-lingual “I told you so”: data show significant drops in greenhouse emissions, clearer skies, and cleaner airs [1][2], all attained in a short span of time. Radical societal measures can be implemented when the body politic plays host to the threat. Maybe Dag will propose we declare a Climate Pandemic in order to deeper instil that particular, more broadly reaching threat, but I suspect the world at large would remain unmoved. Here again, Meat would beat Byte, but this time beat it directly, with a lynching: Folly applauding as Science swung from a tree in the warming air. We also shouldn’t forget that housebound economies may want to sprint through the streets as fast as they can once released, ramping up production and, with it, emissions [3].
Who knows? Perhaps the Gentle Repose will give the rushers-on some time and space to think. Meanwhile, I’ve got data to crunch.
Leave a Reply