I haven’t commented much on this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Clearly it is a serious issue, but it is just as clear that it is being whipped up as much as possible by our domestic media to create fear and chaos, in the interest of hanging a millstone around Donald Trump’s neck. When the swine flu afflicted over a billion people in 2009, and caused over 12,000 fatalities in the U.S. alone, I don’t remember anything like this sort of commotion in the media — and there was no attempt at all to use it as a cudgel to beat Barack Obama with.
That said, it appears that the fatality rate for the Wuhan virus is at least an order of magnitude higher than the swine flu’s was. But having said that, it may be that fatality rates are higher in the earlier days of these outbreaks, in that they cull the old and weak in short order. I don’t know enough about it to say.
Also, it would be silly to say that all the hysteria is just a matter of the American media’s hatred of Trump; the virus has had a devastating effect on the movement of people and goods around the world. It’s still early days, too, so nobody can really say whether it’s going to become a truly historic global catastrophe or start fizzling out in another few months.
I guess what’s obvious here is that I don’t have any expertise or special insight on this topic — which is why I haven’t written more about it. (I do think, as I said not long ago, that this painful episode will be a chastening lesson in the perils of connecting everything too tightly to everything else, and I’ll remind you once again to read, if you haven’t already, Curtis Yarvin’s provocative piece “The Missionary Virus“, over at The American Mind.) One positive effect might be that the U.S. will begin to bring home some of the manufacturing it has so blithely outsourced over the past few decades; our dependence on China for so many essentials, including a huge proportion of the drugs we need, will be revealed to have been terribly unwise.
What do you think about it all, readers? I’d like to know. Please consider this an open forum.
7 Comments
I’m hoping that in addition to giving impetus to greater adoption of The Trump Doctrine, we’ll also see a wider embrace, worldwide, of at-home education aka home schooling. I think once parents see how much easier, happier & healthier it is for the kids to be at home for their lessons, and once kids discover it takes them less time & less anxiety to learn at home, they will not want to go back into the factory schools. So perhaps finally schooling can begin to evolve toward the 21st century, instead of being stuck in the Victorian Age.
This should also push more employers to have a better comfort level with telecommuting. There are so many modern jobs that can and should be done from the employee’s preferred location rather than in an employer-paid-for setting. A big roadblock to telecommuting has always been resentment from the people who are required to go to the office – so for morale’s sake many employers just make everyone show up at their desk. Now, maybe those employers will take a meaningful look at evaluating the roles to allow for work from home, and take a harder look at the productivity of those grumblers in the office.
Hi Tina,
I too think this will nudge us in the direction of physical isolation, both internationally and socially. The increasing prevalance of “telepresence” will have a deepening influence on the way we interact.
That’s very much a mixed blessing, I think, at least on the personal level.
The hysteria is pathetic. Three cases in Columbus, OH, so The Ohio State University was closed down….releasing 25K students to run the town and go to bars. When there were no cases reported in Ohio, our church did away with hand-shaking and took away the option of the common communion cup. Yet they still passed the attendance register and the collection plate. And they think that a fist bump or an elbow bump is not contact.
What happens when the statistics don’t even reach the numbers of the annual flu? There will be no chagrin. Like magical thinking, they will think they prevented it with half-measures.
The really scary part will be if it reaches the homeless in big cities, driving the exposure and death rates up. The press will treat it as if it were everyone rather than a select population.
The inmates are running the asylum.
Caveat lector: I am not an immunologist, epidemiologist, statistician, or anything like this, so for the love of God do not see anything I say as being the last word or even correct. And I also recognize that the president has been dealt a tough hand, with his having to maintain a middle way between hysteria (to allude to Bill’s point above) and excessive caution, not to mentioning mitigating the usual leftist carping. It does seem to me, however, that Trump’s response so far has been generally poor. Besides the bureaucratic blunders he seems to have made with testing kits – something the administration I suspect tried to cover its ass on by probably lying about the number they claimed they would soon have – his tone has been terrible in my opinion. There is no level-headed, cool urgency, but all too often just the usual Trumpian adlibbing, self-promotion, contradictions, and whining. As such, the American people lack the steady, consistent leadership that would inculcate proper behaviors on their part rather than maintaining simply the vague theoretical sense that something really bad could happen.
Consider an experience I had last Wednesday, when I visited a hospice patient at a nursing home. At the front desk I asked if there were any procedures that I needed to be aware of: Nope. Any signs prominently displayed at nurses’ stations or patients’ rooms on safe practices? Not at all. (Update: this morning the hospice requested all volunteers to stop visiting patients for the forseable future.) Or contemplate the lack of signage at any business you probably frequent: WalMart, QuikTrip, Starbucks, and so on. Does anybody really believe that janitors are wiping down sinks and counters regularly in such retail establishments, that managers are enforcing the washing of hands of their employees? Yes, to be sure much iniative for standards and implementation is local, but the president could be using his bully pulpit and federal agencies like HHS to accelerate action. The tone is set at the top, but Trump isn’t on the ball.
Something I’ve thought about, how we could actually segregate internationally in a realistic and humane way. Perhaps a leaf should be taken from the late Samuel Huntington’s famous work The Clash of Civilizations, where he argues for Western Civilization (basically Western/Central Europe, the Anglosphere, and South America) to solidify itself against the other civilizations of the world. Thus it could perhaps be arranged that we, broadly speaking, limit travel and trade to Europe, North America, New Zealand, Australia, and a few other nations. Some sort of Westphalian or Congress of Vienna settlement updated for the twenty-first century.
Jason,
Has Trump dropped the ball? I have heard some talk about slowness with testing kits, and have had a few glimpses of him bragging about how “perfectly” in control his team are, but I haven’t done enough digging to have much of an opinion. (I assume that the main news outlets would root for an asteroid strike if it would help them oust Trump, so I’m sure they are reporting everything in the worst possible light.)
Don’t get me wrong – for all I know he is doing a shoddy job here (but then again, he was quick to tighten travel early on, which probably helped, and for which, naturally, he was roasted as a xenophobe and racist). I’m just not well-informed enough to say, in large part because I don’t know whom to believe.
If I recall correctly I wasn’t hearing much out of the media until after Bernie won New Hampshire which was what, February 11th or so?
Malcolm alludes to it with Trump’s tightening travel – and if again I recall correctly, to that Coma Joe hurled the epithet xenophobic, maybe racist too but that I don’t recall specifically from Coma Joe.
I do recall a letter one of my state’s Senators sent to Azar, which you can read here.
And we all really should bear in mind how very quickly these events are moving – not that I expect the DNC media wing to.
Have the salt shaker handy for just in case, given the developing story, a grain or two needs be taken with this last link:
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/03/a-short-note-on-coronavirus-covid-19-by-walrus.html