Coronavirus and the fragility/strengths of modern society

2020 will probably be remembered for a lot of things, but it will definitely be remembered as the year where a strain of the coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2 scythed through the population of the world with record speed and created one of the largest pandemics in modern time. Infected countries are now taking increasingly drastic measures to halt the spreading of the disease. In my neck of the woods, these measures of emergency laws the mass closing of schools and day care centers have hit extra hard: The outbreaks of SARS and bird flu, which can be considered dry runs of the current pandemic, never really reached all the way up here and always had a remote, unconcerning feel to them. When the real pandemic finally hit our shores, the response from the health authorities was haphazard and late and as of writing this article, supermarket shelves all over the country are empty as the panic-stricken population raided their local supermarkets, overcrowding them and standing in queues for hours mere minutes after the press conference that urged them not to hoard and not to congregate in large groups as it would help the virus spread even further.

_{Picture credit: CC0 public domain}

Seeing the images of shelves totally stripped of their contents that were full mere hours before and reading the news stories of people getting arrested for refusing to leave a closing supermarket or getting into fights over packets of yeast or toilet paper really underlines on what fragile underpinnings our entire civilization rests. The principles of free trade and the division of labour has created wealth on a scale that would be unimaginable to our ancestors only a couple of generations back and has helped to create a world, where it is the norm that goods, and not soldiers, are crossing borders on a daily basis and where the majority of the world’s population live in sprawling metropolises that produce little goods themselves but instead import them on a huge scale in exchange for services provided by their inhabitants. Anyone who has been to any truly large city such as Tokyo or New York cannot at one time not have been overwhelmed by the fact that these endless and seemingly chaotic streams or cars, trains and humans are actually acting as a coordinated whole that makes the city and its inhabitants live and breathe. While this system is amazing to behold, it is also fragile: The computer programmer and the financial analyst can make a good living by exchanging their specialized services for good money, that again can be exchanged for the goods and services that we need to live and even leave some for the goods and services we consume purely for the pleasure of it, but if this system were to break down and they suddenly could not rely on their specialized services anymore for sustenance, panic would ensue and this is what turns the mild-mannered school teacher father of two into a thug shoving strangers in an overcrowded supermarket to get the last packet of yeast. What is worse is that this does not even constitute a breakdown of the system: (at least not yet and it is unlikely that we will ever come to that) Most shops are still open, most go to work at least in some capacity and all major supermarket chains told the media that stores would stay open, wares would still be delivered and the situation would be normal as long as people would just continue shopping as they used to and yet, the thought of a societal collapse were so terrifying that people would brave even the elevated risk of contagion to fill their fridges.

_{Tokyo - my perfect metropolis and a living symbol of human progress}

This effect is exacerbated by the nature of the crisis: A highly contagious virus, that while induces only mild symptoms in most carriers, can prove deadly to the old or the infirm, and that can be carried for as long as 14 days before symptoms manifest. Human beings are usually very good at dealing rationally with concrete issues. Japan and the rest of East Asia experience serious and even destructive earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis on a semi-regular basis and countries such as Canada will frequently experience heavy snow that can bury and isolate communities and yet these events, however serious, fail to induce the same panic-stricken terror in us as the intangible threats such as disease or radiation, as we saw with the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant after the 2011 earthquake. Threats that we cannot see, feel or really comprehend speak to the most primitive parts in us and can awaken bestial sides of us that have long been held dormant under the heavy blanket of civility quilted from the experiences of the safe, sheltered life in the modern world.

In situations such as these, there will always be nostalgic and conservative commentators, who lament what they see as a weak modern society and criticize the lack of resilience and short-sightedness of modern living and yearn for a romanticized era, where people to a larger extent could live self-sufficiently and produce more goods themselves. This criticism is easy to make, and is to an extent justified, but falls largely short, because it fails to recognize the tremendous advances in wealth and technology that this much lamented modern society has produced; advances that will make it possible to effectively sanitize to prevent the virus from spreading, screen and diagnose potential carriers in less than two hours and, further along the line, a vaccine that can put an end to the COVID-19 scourge once and for all. There is a point to be made in having supplies in your freezer to last you a week or two in case of an emergency is prudent and that building up the mental fortitude to rationally assess the risks the COVID-19 pandemic poses to you and to others is preferable to blind panic that can turn into nonsensical hoarding behaviour or even violence, but do not let anyone tell you that we were better off living in medieval villages and growing our own food. The millions that perished from the Black Death in 14th century Europe tell another story.

_{Citizens of Tournai bury victims of the plague - picture from Wikipedia}

There are also those who will use a pandemic as a catalyst for increasing state power, stating the need for a quick and unified response to prevent the contagion from taking hold. While I do not claim to hold any expertise on matters such as containment measures, I find an emergency such as a pandemic to be one of the few situations, where collective safety at least to some degree can trump individual rights. However, the first epicenter of the outbreak, China, whose government plays very loosely with the concept of individual rights and freedoms even on the best of days, shows to what extremes such emergencies can be taken. Also, like with the other big national emergency, war, it is also important to remember that any expansion of government and subsequent diminishing of individual freedoms seldom revert back completely after the emergency is gone, so it is a tool that is to be exercised with the utmost caution.

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Thank you for reading! I urge all of you to stay safe out there and take the recommended precautions of practicing good hygiene, refrain from unnecessary bodily contact and, for the sake of others, practice strict self-quarantine in case you do get infected. I would also recommend to stay updated on any developments in the threat level from reliable sources, get a reasonable stock of supplies and work together with neighbours, colleagues and family members so you and they are not completely cut off in case of quarantine being necessary.