The long haul

Our Earth is in the grip of pestilence -- but is there anywhere to flee?

There is no escape to be had by running to some more favored country.  The virus has spread almost everywhere, and what few places are free of it will be infected soon enough.  Further, the least-affected countries are not likely to welcome refugee hordes from less fortunate lands, for obvious reasons.

And make no mistake, the United States is going to be one of the worst-hit places, because we are among the least-well-equipped to cope with the problem.  We are the only advanced nation with millions of uninsured people.  We are the only advanced nation with no laws mandating paid sick leave for all workers, forcing millions of people in shit jobs to keep going to work no matter how sick they get.  Our present leadership is of unparalleled incompetence.  We have only three hospital beds per thousand people, compared with eight in (for example) Germany.  The Trumpnotized third of our population has been refusing to take the threat seriously or take basic precautions, an attitude many seem to be clinging to even while Trump himself begins to accept reality.  The creation of super-concentrated crucibles of infection at our major airports is just the current example of the kind of gross stupidity and blundering that has marked the administration's response and will continue to do so.

If there is any silver lining to this disaster, it's that it may finally force us as a nation to confront the pitiful rotted-out reality behind America's truculent Potemkin rhetoric about "the greatest country on Earth".  Read this -- it's important.  The coming tsunami of misery and death will be all the more tragic if we fail to at least learn from it, and from those who handle the onslaught better than we do.

Fortunately the private sector and some of the states have stepped in.  More and more employers (including my own, as of this week) are implementing work-from-home.  Large gatherings are being prohibited and venues closed -- although we as a society must provide some relief for the restaurant, hotel, etc. employees whose livelihood is now threatened due to no fault of their own.  Some areas are "locked down", under more or less permanent curfew except for essential outings.

That's the only place to flee.  Your home.  And be prepared to stay there.  Almost all the time.  For a long time.

For make no mistake, this is going to continue for months, not weeks.  If these stringent precautions are relaxed while the virus is still in circulation, the same pattern of exponentially-spreading infection will just start up again.  It may not be possible for normal life to resume until a vaccine is generally available, which could easily take a year.

And a lot of people won't be able to do it.  As people go stir-crazy sitting at home surrounded by mountains of toilet paper, wishful thinking and self-deception will set in.  Some will turn to quack remedies or religious gobbledygook to gain a false sense of protection. Some will persuade themselves that the problem is exaggerated or it's all a sinister plot of some kind (crank conspiracy theories are already spreading among the mental-bottom-of-the-barrel population).  Some will abandon cause-and-effect thinking for irrational fatalism ("if I'm gonna catch it, I'm gonna catch it").  The point is, people will want to evade precautions and will find rationalizations for doing so.  And such cases will keep the epidemic going.

It's going to get ugly in other ways.  Religious ravings about sin and divine punishment will get louder and crazier.  Problems like domestic violence will increase among cooped-up people.  Some will channel their anger and frustration into scapegoating minorities or other unpopular groups.  Authoritarians will seize on the crisis as an excuse to impose censorship or grab guns or whatever other kind of control-freakery they've been yearning to impose all along, no matter how irrelevant it is to the problem.

But we're in this for the long haul.  It's not a few weeks of crazy.  It's a new normal.

Update:  A new scientific paper projects US deaths as high as 2.2 million if stringent precautions aren't maintained until the vaccine is available.  On the likelihood of the whole country observing such precautions, see the comments on this Christian site's report on the paper.  Fundie churches are likely to be infection vectors.  Congress's new bill mandating paid leave excludes millions of workers.  The impending disaster makes a mockery of politics-as-usual.