Live With It?

I may have said this before, but I think on some level, COVID-19 is something that we as a civilization will simply have to learn to live with...at least for the next several years.

Yes, I know, it's deadly--but so were tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever (want to know how bad yellow fever could be? Watch the movie Jezebel sometime.), and a host of other maladies we dealt with in the past (and I'm not even going to go back to the days of smallpox and plague). The difference today is, I think, two-fold.

1. We have a much better understanding of disease and how it spreads then we did even 80 years ago, when our soldiers brought back malaria from the South Pacific. That means we can treat things better and control the infection rate.

2. Conversely, we have greater ability to track the spread and inform the public...not only in our own nation, but worldwide...and that's one of the problems. Sometimes information is scary.

The thing that worries me even more than living with the virus for another two years is what it is doing to our political life. None of the other scourges I mentioned (or others such as polio) became politicized in the way COVID-19 has. Nobody called the Spanish Flu a political hoax--at least not in any reports I've read. Nobody suggested the annual polio epidemics or yellow fever epidemics were a tool being used by their political opponents.

That is even scarier than the epidemic itself.