Hello,
The U.S. started the month of May with its highest one-day death toll from Covid-19 since the pandemic began — 2,909 people, according to a tally from the World Health Organization. While in New York City new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are declining steadily, the country overall remains stuck on an unsettlingly high plateau as the disease spreads outside of the original epicenters and states begin to relax stay-at-home restrictions.
In Texas for example, a statewide stay at home order ended this weekend even as the state posted a record-breaking three straight days in which the number of newly detected Covid-19 infections exceeded 1,000.
Epidemiologically speaking, we may be moving out of the most acute phase of the crisis into a summer of slow-burning disease spread, with the chance of a major second wave in the fall — as happened in seven of the eight influenza pandemics since 1700, according to a new analysis (PDF) by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Sociologically speaking, we’re seeing the first traces of the post-pandemic-onset world starting to emerge. Life in Wuhan, after the first wave of the pandemic receded, remains completely transformed, according to this richly detailed feature by Sharon Chen and Matthew Campbell for Bloomberg:
So far, Wuhan’s answer has been to create a version of normal that would appear utterly alien to people in London, Milan, or New York—at least for the moment. While daily routines have largely resumed, there remain significant restrictions on a huge range of activities, from funerals to hosting visitors at home. Bolstered by China’s powerful surveillance state, even the simplest interactions are mediated by a vast infrastructure of public and private monitoring intended to ensure that no infection goes undetected for more than a few hours.
But inasmuch as citizens can return to living as they did before January, it’s not clear, after what they’ve endured, that they really want to. Shopping malls and department stores are open again, but largely empty. The same is true of restaurants; people are ordering in instead. The subway is quiet, but autos are selling: If being stuck in traffic is annoying, at least it’s socially distanced.
The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic is still unfolding, and its texture and consistency will continue to evolve over the next weeks and months. But it is not too early to imagine changes in the character of the country as we re-emerge. One area of possible change is our relationship to technology, infrastructure, and each other.
Science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novel New York 2140 is one of my favorite speculative futures of the city, muses insightfully on science and the fragility of our technocratic society in The New Yorker:
There are 7.8 billion people alive on this planet—a stupendous social and technological achievement that’s unnatural and unstable. It’s made possible by science, which has already been saving us. Now, though, when disaster strikes, we grasp the complexity of our civilization—we feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science keeps from crashing down.
…
When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.
This new “structure of feeling,” as Robinson calls it, channeling the critic Raymond Williams, extends beyond the sense that we live in a fragile technosphere from which we “cannot simultaneously escape and survive.”
It challenges us to reconsider what it means to live in society, and our obligations to each other. Robinson continues:
We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but we exist in a larger social body. Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view. And now, when those of us who are sheltering in place venture out and see everyone in masks, sharing looks with strangers is a different thing. It’s eye to eye, this knowledge that, although we are practicing social distancing as we need to, we want to be social—we not only want to be social, we’ve got to be social, if we are to survive. It’s a new feeling, this alienation and solidarity at once. It’s the reality of the social; it’s seeing the tangible existence of a society of strangers, all of whom depend on one another to survive. It’s as if the reality of citizenship has smacked us in the face.
That is the silver lining of catastrophic events like these: that in realizing how fragile the prevailing social order is, people’s imaginations open to new possibilities for changing it.
[Paris, April 24, 2020. People watch a film projected on the wall of a nearby building. Photo by Stephane Cardinale for Corbis, via Getty.]
// Link Roundup
The two best things I read this week on the pandemic concern the mysteries still swirling around Covid-19.
The first is this piece by David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine about the array of strange complications and new symptoms associated with Covid infections — including the revelation that fever may not be the keystone symptom we previously thought: as many as 70 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid in New York City didn’t develop a fever.
“We Still Don’t Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us.” David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine.
The other is this enormous and enlightening piece by Ed Yong in The Atlantic about all the areas of uncertainty that remain in the story of the pandemic, from the virus and the disease it causes, to the response, to the search for vaccine and treatments, to the stutter-steps around testing. Essential reading here.
“Why The Coronavirus Is So Confusing.” Ed Yong, The Atlantic.
Elsewhere…
The world’s leading health agency is missing in action: Amid the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been alarmingly reclusive, writes Dr Ashih K. Jha. “Ask how many Covid-19 tests have been done, and the CDC doesn’t have an answer. Want a daily update on how many people are getting hospitalized for Covid-19? The CDC isn’t tracking it. Want to know if social distancing is making a difference? The CDC doesn’t know.”
— “We Need The Real CDC Back, And We Need It Now.” Ashih K. Jha, StatNews.Concentrated disadvantage is shaping the demographic profile of the pandemic.
— “We Can’t Wait Until Coronavirus Is Over To Address Racial Disparities.” Junia Howell, Citylab.Death toll undercount: In the U.S. and internationally, excess deaths recorded by health agencies are far higher than officially reported Coronavirus death statistics.
— “U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported, C.D.C. Data Suggests.” Josh Katz et al, The New York Times.
— “Global Coronavirus Death Toll Could Be 60% Higher Than Reported.” John Burn-Murdoch et al, Financial Times.The unburied: Usually in a disaster FEMA offers financial assistance to help families bury their dead. So far in this pandemic, the White House has refused to grant these requests.
— “Grieving Families Need Help Paying for COVID-19 Burials, but Trump Hasn’t Released the Money.” Lisa Song and Yeganeh Torbati, ProPublica.Chronic underfunding of public health preparedness in the U.S. left the country unusually vulnerable to the Covid pandemic, according to a new report. “Years of cutting funding for public health and emergency preparedness programs has left the nation with a smaller-than-necessary public health workforce, limited testing capacity, an insufficient national stockpile, and archaic disease tracking systems – in summary, twentieth-century tools for dealing with twenty-first-century challenges,” said John Auerbach, CEO of the Trust for America’s Health.
— “New Report States Public Health Underfunding Ripened Conditions For COVID-19.” Claudia Adrien, Homeland Preparedness News.The pandemic as a way to see society: A sociological perspective on Covid — “how it hurts, who it hurts the most, why that’s the case and what can be done about it.”
— “5 Lessons From The Coronavirus About Inequality in America.” Jonathan J.B. Mijs, The Conversation.Carbon dioxide emissions have fallen thanks to the pandemic, but less than you might imagine. Experts predict a 5-percent decline in CO2 emissions for 2020, the largest annual drop on record. But it’s still not enough to meet climate change mitigation goals. Consumers have changed their behavior, but most of the biggest emitters, manufacturing and power generation, are still operating. It highlights the point that structural changes in the economy are necessary if we’re going to combat climate change meaningfully.
— “Why CO2 Isn’t Falling More during a Global Lockdown.” Benjamin Storrow, E&E News.Big tech firms are using the pandemic to shore up their market dominance.
— “Tech Giants Are Profiting — And Getting More Powerful — Even As The Global Economy Tanks.” Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post.What are these two plague doctors doing in the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and what can they tell us about cities, nation-states, and authority under siege?
— “Leviathan in Lockdown.” Thomas Poole, London Review of Books.The culture of mask-wearing: In the U.S., adopting widespread public mask-wearing has been a struggle. In China, mask wearing has long been a cultural mainstay. Why? The always great podcast 99 Percent Invisible explores the century-long history of using masks to combat disease outbreaks in this episode.
— “Masking for a Friend.” Rebecca Kanthor, 99 Percent Invisible.The rush to fill the gaps in our understanding of the virus’s origins has produced a universe of competing stories. The most plausible remains that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats to humans, maybe through an intermediary animal host. The video below explores a rival theory — that an accident allowed the virus to escape from a lab in Wuhan. The lab theory has always struck me as a red herring, and the evidence supporting it is circumstantial. But since the story is circulating, it’s worth taking a more serious look.
// Concluding thoughts
That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll get our first look at whether the states that reopened early are experiencing upticks in their case rates, and whether the country as a whole can begin bending the curve of the pandemic down as we move closer to summer. See you then.