Time and the Virus
Today – April 07 – is World Health Day: an ironic designation, seen from the present standpoint. In the UK the British Prime Minister, who long delayed a scaled-up public response to the Covid-19 crisis, has himself been moved to an ICU (intensive care unit). From New York, the epicentre of the virus in the US, a friend who works in one of the city’s ER rooms reports that nobody is testing negative. Outside of Europe and North America, the virus will already be doing greater damage than newsroom-level reporting can reveal in nations where testing (not to mention protective gear for health workers) is scarcer even than it has proved to be in wealthier countries.
April 07 presents us with a snapshot of the global response and its failings. But like all epidemics, the story of this virus must be told above all in parcels of time.
As a story of years the Covid-19 pandemic is a fable of under-preparation. Like the storm waters that rushed New Orleans in 2005, exposing decades of racial inequality and public under-provision, a pandemic of this sort was long predicted. And long ignored. World Health Day in 2006 was dedicated to the “healthcare workforce crisis” around the world. Among the causes the World Health Organisation spotlighted that year was “under-investment in health workers’ education and skills and low salaries.” With retired health personnel being recalled back to work and vaccine researchers working round the clock for a cure, 14 years now seems like a good amount of time in which to have learned the lessons of that report.
Told in months and the story becomes a tale of the geopolitics of disease: the virus sweeping unpredictably, but not without cause, from one nation to another. Like a searchlight roaming the dark it illuminates social fractures, government incompetence, and the reluctance of societies bound to privilege (or simply the means of surviving it) to change their habits. Martial metaphors structure this timescale, as countries mobilise one-by-one. For Italian PM, Giuseppe Conte, the virus is Italy’s greatest test since the Second World War. President Macron went one further last month and declared France to in fact be in a state of war: fully half a dozen times as he announced he was putting the nation in lock down. And now Boris Johnson insists from his sick bed that we, the British people, will win this fight. All in their turn, none of them together.
At the level of weeks the narrative shifts to the statistical terrain of epidemiology: a story now of politicians brought up sharp against an exponential infection rate that not only threatens to outpunch them but is quicker on its feet as well. The inevitable response has been to throw in the towel: to the ring the bell and shut the whole game down. The audience, of course, aren’t used to drama such as this. For years they’ve been fed on a diet of “nudges” and tinkering. Such unprecedented decisiveness in public policy interventions (and if you want to sample what used to be the norm just read the gaseous platitudes of the G20’s March 26 summit) will leave its imprint on the post-Covid world too: as Rebecca Solnit wrote this weekend, that is the next fight due out in the ring.
And then there are the days, the here and now, where the story stops being narrated because we are all living within it: as we cleave ourselves apart from family and friends and come to terms with a world upside down; as factories close, sports halls are turned into morgues, and public spaces empty out. Times Square is silent. The international post may, or may not, be sending to where you want it to go. Planes are grounded, and many borders are closed, even in parts of Scandinavia. Who now will sow the potatoes here in the weeks to come: a task that has been undertaken by East Europeans for years? Things shut down so quickly there was scarcely any time for answers. Only questions.
And so what, if anything, have we learned thus far? Surely that is the most important question of all. Perhaps, most simply, we may have renewed our faith in the value and the power of the state: which has sanctioned (and may have saved) our lives more directly in the past few weeks than it ever has in decades. Certainly we have a renewed appreciation of the importance of candour and clarity from our politicians. We have been reminded, too, that national public health systems are vital, in every sense of the word, to our existence.
Forced into social distancing from friends, neighbours and colleagues it has been brought home to us, quite literally, how important those wider social webs are to our own sense of self. We are learning to take it a little less for granted that our society of freedoms is presaged upon such vast and cascading chains of mutual obligation as we can barely fathom. From the food on our table to the information on our screens we are learning just to what extent we rely on the rest of society to sustain our individual selves.
We are learning to live with what we have and where we are. Whatever comes next, at least we now know where we are starting from.