The beast itself.

In this time of uncertainty, we want the numbers, the hard facts, so that we may know our fate. We obsess over what the media gives us so much that you could almost call it sado-masochistic graph viewing. What do these these crystal balls of catastrophe portend? Can they provide any guidance?

The White House predicts somewhere between 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US alone, and according to Dr. Fauci, could be worse if Americans do not practice social distancing measures. According to a University of Washington model, the worst day will be April 15, requiring 140,823 hospital beds and 24,828 ventilators, which may change as the days go on; there is even a movie-quality doomsday clock, “X days until peak resource use.”

Can you feel the breath of disaster on the back of your neck yet? Do you hear Hans Zimmer’s low, rumbling score? Rumors abound that we will have to stay like this, locked down in our homes with nothing to do, people out there dying in a world we are not allowed to venture into, for months — and that says nothing about a possible second wave, which could be worse.

The drums of fear are so deafening that it is hard to think, but now most of us have quite a bit of time on our hands. Perhaps you will find this cruel to read, but the silver lining, if it could be called such a thing, is that COVID-19 primarily endangers the old and immunocompromised. Is it cruel to acknowledge such a fact?

Source: www.worldometers.info

Everyone dies. That, of course, does not mean we condemn the high-risk to death, tossing them all onto the street to get infected because “hey, they’ll die anyway,” and indeed even some of our young and healthy have died. We should still do all we reasonably can to save everyone. What I am not seeing, beyond Trump’s throwaway rhetoric “we can’t let the cure be worse than the disease,” is anyone seriously questioning what is reasonable.

If we focus on the elderly we can find another cruel acknowledgement: if COVID-19 won’t get grandma, the flu will; or an infection; or falling and breaking a hip; or an aneurism; or a heart attack; or just shutting down. We should fight to protect her against those dangers as well, but the fact is people die, and our modern world is absolutely terrified of placing that fact into its policymaking. George Carlin said “we don’t want to die, but we do. So we bullshit ourselves!”

Again, this does not mean that we should do nothing to protect our beloved elderly or the immunocompromised; it does mean, however, that we have to ask: if we shut down the world for months, what is the impact?

According to an analysis in Lancet Psychiatry, unemployment kills about 45,000 a year. That is when unemployment numbers are normal, usually in the single digits; COVID-19 may push unemployment to 32 percent. These are simply direct deaths. The researchers looked at the 2008 financial crisis and noted that, in addition to a bump in deaths from higher unemployment, the number was only “the tip of the iceberg” of the problems the recession caused, with a deluge of epiphenomenal problems. We know for instance that unemployment increases illegal drug use, possibly doubling it. Euronews reports a 30 percent increase in domestic violence in France’s COVID-19 lockdown. Mass migrations in India due to the lockdowns are becoming a slow-motion disaster. We can ponder what this will do to the millions worldwide who suffer from mental illness.

This game can be played all day, and since many of us have nothing to do, it will. My point is just a question: what is the cost-benefit ratio to our current strategy? It is not to be taken lightly that we are destroying businesses, setting 7 billion people into panic, perhaps fatally affecting those who are mentally ill and thus fragile already, reducing the mental health of everyone, others dying through mass migrations like we see in India, and more. Surely those in power have been running on this question, but we have not seen much of their answers to it trickle into the layperson’s purview.

Pro-quarantiners seem to view this as putting the world on pause, but that is just not what happens in practice. Recession, death, and devastation have not yet reached the peak of the curve, and just like COVID-19, things will get worse, possibly much worse. This whole line of thought brings us to those cruel facts and questions. “Who among us shall die” is a trope used in film after film. Now we are being forced to answer that question, and I doubt we will answer it well.

A smaller, easier to grasp example to illuminate how bad we are at this would be with end of life, or medically assisted, suicide. Such controversy, such terror over someone admitting they are either old or in terminal pain and would like a death of their own choosing, brave and powerful in their final moments. No — can’t have that! Instead we make it taboo, shame the suffering into the fantasy of living forever, and thus buy ourselves front row tickets to watch the immutable fact of life slowly, so excruciatingly slowly, reveal itself before our eyes, becoming the final nail in the coffin: everyone dies. This bizarrely does not apply to our beloved pets, of course; we “put them down” the moment we get a whiff of death, solemnly nodding that it was the right thing to do. George Carlin again: “Thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won’t have to die. I’ll ‘pass away’! Or ‘expire’ like a magazine subscription.”

We must ignore the paranoia of slippery slope arguments and ask ourselves: is what we are doing against COVID-19 a good strategy, or are we simply too afraid that people die to look at the costs of our decision? I want to protect everyone, and I am glad we are implementing extreme measures to save lives no matter who they are. We should continue to do so. I would simply like to see a more thorough look at what we are doing. We are told that containment is impossible and thus our only savior will be herd immunity — yet we do not see experts championing models that get us to herd immunity as quickly as possible with the lowest number of deaths. We do not see models for victory, only models for anxiety. Will we truly just fall to our knees in fear and pray for a miracle vaccine to descend from the heavens? Will we yet again invoke the vagueness of flattening the curve?

If the world’s governments are arguing that shutting everything down for months is the best way to go, or are pinky-swearing that an indefinite shutdown will not last that long, then they have to actually argue that bold decision. Convince us of its value. These ethical decisions — choosing the least-evil choice in a spread of evil choices — are what good leaders are for. Making those choices, however, is a burden to bear. Heavy lies the corona. Can we carry that weight?