Novel Coronavirus 19

These are pictures of the station and parking lot where I catch the train into work every day. It is sparse-- I'm guessing less than 10% of normal use. I have never seen so few people on a weekday.

And it's certainly because of COVID-19.

Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, 3/10.

I'm not going to talk about how the coronavirus works. That is better discussed here. Or how it produces symptoms. Go here for that.

What I am interested in is why we have to take this bug seriously and why preventing spread is a good idea.

People who should know better have spouted a lot of nonsense how this is no more than a bad flu. It's just a cold. How back could it be? All that sort of thing.

It's not terribly surprising that a virus comes along that is related to (but with radically more serious symptoms than) the common cold we don't take it seriously. It doesn't help that figures of authority who should know better are also not taking it seriously.

We need to.

Let's start with the demographics. For the record, I'm pulling a lot of data from here.

Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 attacks the elderly, immune compromised and those with co-morbidities harder than young healthy people.

The lethality of the virus ticks up beginning at age 50.














In part this is science's fault: we've gotten too good at handling diseases.

The big epidemics were still in evidence in the fifties when I grew up. Immediate relatives had died from Spanish Flu. If you didn't actually know someone who'd had polio, you knew someone who knew someone who'd had polio. FDR was still on everyone's minds and he'd had polio. There were people in my family who'd died of diphtheria in the thirties. One aging cousin of mine had lived through a case of lockjaw (tetanus).

When vaccines for measles, polio, and others came out people stood in long lines to get them. Sure, there was a risk. But they'd seen first hand the consequences of the disease and the risk was worth it. Most of those diseases were wiped from everyday life and, unfortunately, apparently from American consciousness.

We've never successfully developed a general vaccine for influenza. It comes every year. Some fairly small population dies of it. We get sick and we go on.

I am not saying influenza is trivial. It is most certainly not. Thousands of people die from it. Tens of thousands get sick from it to the point of hospitalization. Hundreds of thousands to millions get sick enough to stay home. It has high personal and economic costs.

But we're like the proverbial frog in boiling water: it happens every year and we're used to it.

So, it's not terribly surprising that a virus comes along that is related to (but with radically more serious symptoms than) the common cold we don't take it seriously. It doesn't help that figures of authority who should know better are also not taking it seriously.