It compares:
- victims of the Spanish flu of 1918 with
- deaths throughout the 1911 to 1917 period from normal epidemics like the seasonal flu (the control group).
The dotted line is a 'bathtub' curve which describes the usual high death rate among infants and the elderly who are afflicted by disease.
For the Spanish flu, the bathtub curve also applies.
However, there is also a big spike in the middle, with people around 35 dying in disproportionate numbers.
That is what one sees with an autoimmune response, where the body's immune system is revved into high drive and attacks the body along with the disease.
Ironically, it is the healthiest people who can suffer from the strongest autoimmune response.
An autoimmune response might be afflicting 15 children in New York City who are infected with the novel coronavirus.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-disease-nyc-children-hospitalized-coronavirus-link-covid19-rare-disease/
Up until now, this has not been common among children during this pandemic, so it is of some concern.
It has been seen in some adult victims of COVID-19.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200417/cytokine-storms-may-be-fueling-some-covid-deaths
There is the danger that the more people who are infected, the more chance the virus has to mutate to cause autoimmune responses in otherwise healthy young patients.
Of course, this is not yet a reality, but merely a potentiality.
However, not taking potentialities seriously is precisely why the coronavirus was not taken seriously by many people -- perhaps most people -- when it first emerged.
Everyone was overlooking potentialities in favor of looking at evidence which had not yet come in.
Because little was known about it, it came to be assumed that the standard operating procedure that applied to the seasonal flu should also apply to the coronavirus.
Perhaps from that dubious assumption there emerged the assumption that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu.
These two assumptions seemed to have been widespread.
The Chinese government and, later, Europeans and Americans seemed to adopt this position that the coronavirus was just a new flu.
In fact, much of the liberal media adopted the position that because little is known about the virus, there was no reason to panic.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/kayleigh-mcenany-media-downplaying-coronavirus
"Does Vox want to take back that they proclaim that the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic? Does The Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to 'get a grip,' the flu is bigger than the coronavirus? Does The Washington Post, likewise, want to take back that our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus?
"Does The New York Times want to take back that fear of the virus may be spreading faster than the virus itself? Does NPR want to take back that the flu was a much bigger threat than the coronavirus? And finally, once again, The Washington Post, would they like to take back that the government should not respond aggressively to the coronavirus?"Along those lines, it is said to be Jared Kushner who advised Trump to ignore the coronavirus threat because it was probably unjustified.
Kushner is reported to have advised Trump that if the Dow Jones industrial average reached 35,000, then Trump would be reelected.
Therefore, it was best not to spook the stock market with talk of a pandemic.
This advice did not reflect some extreme right-wing belief that the coronavirus was a hoax.
Historically, Jared Kushner has been a Democrat.
It was simply widely assumed that the coronavirus was not something to get worked up about.
There seem to be several lines of reasoning in the denial of the pandemic.
For some conservatives, there is no reason to get excited and carried away from our usual routine.
For populists, any kind of imposition by the federal government is a form of tyranny.
For progressives, if there is no clear evidence of a threat, then there is no threat.
One finds this progressive line of thinking in Carl Sagan's 1997 movie "Contact".
The military urges public officials to not build a structure presumably for space travel that seemed to have been designed by advanced extraterrestrial beings.
In the movie, the military was cast as as a stubbornly close-minded adversary, if not an outright enemy (a role played by populist religious fanatics).
And yet the physicist Stephen Hawking agreed with the military's cautious appraisal toward alien life forms.
Humans should not advertise their existence in the universe by trying to contact alien civilizations.
Extraterrestrials are like a box of chocolate.
You never know what you're going to get.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/stephen-hawking-light-years-dangerous-aliens
Actually, Hawking seemed to support the SEARCH for intelligent life in the universe, but was cautious about trying to contact them.
Hawking also warned of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/stephen-hawking-ai-could-be-worst-event-in-civilization.html
Again, the problem is not AI, but what is not yet known about AI.
AI can and should be pursued, but carefully, with sobriety.
Hawking talked up the potential of AI to help undo damage done to the natural world, or eradicate poverty and disease, with every aspect of society being “transformed.”
But he admitted the future was uncertain.
“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” Hawking said during the speech.
“Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”It could be that political progressives typically have generally optimistic attitude change (neophilia) and outsiders (xenophilia).
The optimistic mentality of the progressive is likeable and understandable.
We are exposed to it in every episode of Star Trek.
What is really problematic is not the irrational optimism of the rationalistic progressive, but the adolescent mind-frame of the romantic.
Whereas the progressive merely overlooks or explains away uncertainty, the romantic is downright enchanted and intoxicated by the very prospect of uncertainty.
For the romantic, uncertainty has an air of infinity possibilities.
The romantic is attracted to gambling when the stakes are unknown and the potential seems vast (e.g., the neoconservative attitude toward the potential invasion of Iraq).
In the 1998 movie "Croupier", the narrator explains that the appeal of gambling is not money, but rather "not facing reality, ignoring the odds."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Croupier_(film)
That is a very different attitude from the world weariness of the professional gambler who knows the odds and all the angles.
["Rounders", 1998, "I play for money"]
The appeal of games is that the system is closed and regulated, there are explicit and transparent rules, and that competitors are known and played against discretely.
Moreover, a game is a closed environment in which the consequences to winning or losing do not outlast the game, yet the game can simulate in safe form the excitement of competition.
The casino is a closed system, so the odds can be known.
Yet most people who gamble don't even want to know the odds because they are intoxicated by the false promise of uncertainty.
When people walk into a casino, they become romantic dreamers and they disregard the odds.
So a casino is doubly seductive.
First, the casino offers a false sense of safety.
The reality is that you can actually lose everything you have in that casino.
Second, the casino provides a false sense of infinite possibilities.
In reality, the casino has very precisely stacked the odds against you.
The real world is not a safe closed environment, the real world is open and ambiguous.
Along these lines, the odds keep changing with the coronavirus.
But a lot of people are not pivoting with the constantly changing flood of new information.
In the initial period of the virus emerging in China, the virus was widely dismissed as being no more dangerous than the flu.
After this initial period of low information, more information started to appear in the media.
In this secondary period, as more information became available, certain basic assumptions began to take form:
- It was estimated that two-thirds of humanity would be infected, and that the death rate would be two percent.
- That would mean four million dead Americans if no measures were taken.
- The South Koreans, with their extensive testing, claimed that the death rate among the infected was more like 0.6%.
- That would still be 1.2 million dead Americans.
- Of course, that is nothing like the bubonic plague, which killed somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the European population in the 1300s, yet the coronavirus death rate is enough to overwhelm the healthcare system, and this was the reason initially given to justify the lockdowns.
- Not taking measures against the pandemic would also demoralize society, and not just in the sense of emotional depression.
- A certain cynicism and a loss of social cohesion would permanently creep into a society that shrugged off the deaths of so many people.
In fact, that might also be true of Sweden, where government policy urged Swedes to take voluntary precautions against coronavirus without enforcement.
Swedish authorities now acknowledge that they thought that their death rate would be much lower than it turned out.
That is, Swedish coronavirus policy has been a failure.
Nevertheless, the policy remains popular in Sweden.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-lockdown-chief-says-high-death-toll-was-surprise-2020-5
The world seems to be entering a third stage of understanding regarding the coronavirus.
Comparative public policy responses to the coronavirus have altered public perceptions.
There seems to be a sense that responding to the coronavirus with strong measures does not involve a trade-off between economic growth and public safety.
Economically, there seem to be several scenarios that the coronavirus presents to societies:
- Test aggressively and avoid both deaths and a lockdown, and economically thrive thereafter (South Korea)
- Fail to test and then enter a strict lockdown, followed by testing and by a recession (China)
- Enter a semi-lockdown, with a relatively high death rate, and have a severe recession, with the population losing confidence (United States)
- Don't do anything (Brazil)
Again, the issue here is uncertainty.
Perceptions keep changing because the realities on the ground continue to evolve.
Recently, more ambiguities have emerged.
There are comorbidities such as organ failure that later afflict coronavirus survivors.
There is the possibility that there will never be a vaccine because there is the possibility that humans cannot develop lasting immunity to the coronavirus.
There are reports that the virus has mutated into a more contagious new strain, which some observers disclaim.
There is the possibility that the pandemic will never go away, that it will become seasonal.
There is the the possibility that with greater contagiousness and a permanent presence, the virus will have greater opportunity to mutate.
If it mutated into an autoimmune disease, the disease would reinfect and kill young adults who were earlier so confident of their indestructibility.
If fact, in NYC, there is limited evidence of this with 15 very young victims.
On the other hand, who knows?
