COVID...and Climate Change
The other day I received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer edition, and should get my second one in three weeks. Yes, I feel fine. No, I don’t have seizures, fever, liver failure, dropsy, quinsy, the Black Death, autism, Marxism, gigantism, or sudden death. The vaccine didn’t hurt me. And it won’t hurt you.
I don’t think most people realize how lucky we were with Coronavirus. The infection kills less than one percent of the general population, and is usually (but not always) a minor illness for the young. We were able to come up with a vaccine in record time, and we will probably return us to a normal society within 6-8 months.
It didn’t have to be that way. COVID could have killed five percent of its victims, in which case you can multiply the death toll we have now by five. Or, like the MERS virus a decade ago, it could have resulted in a 30% mortality, which would have caused unimaginable suffering. Each mutation of a virus is random. We are so very lucky that the mutation that allowed coronavirus to jump from animal to human, was not in a more deadly mutant. It’s like your car skidding off the road on ice and ending up in a two-foot ditch. It didn’t have to be two feet. It could have been fifty.
So, while things will probably turn out all right, there are things to be concerned about. When COVID erupted, we had two courses of action — to contain it by social behavior (masks, social distancing, and quarantining), or by technology (treatment and vaccines). In an ideal situation, we would have relied on both. We would have curbed the spread with masks and social distancing, and we would have used the vaccine to finish the problem off.
Instead, in America in particular, we bailed out on social behavior and are allowing vaccinations to bail us out 100%. This looks like it will work — if you consider 400,000 - 500,000 dead to be working. Hey, it isn’t 2 million, said the President during the fall campaign. It could have been worse, right?
Maybe. But maybe if we had gone all in on social measures we could have saved ourselves a great deal of grief. We could have reduced the baseline case rate significantly, saving thousands of lives, and allowed businesses to open up for a period in the summer and early fall, savings thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. But we didn’t. We decided to let things devolve into a political fight, and the virus spread. Infection rates never reached a safe level, and America found itself in a neutral zone — not enough deaths to frighten the general public, but more than enough to prevent full opening. The worst of both worlds. Today, the only way we can stop this is if we get enough people vaccinated. But there are not enough people committed to social prevention to stop COVID otherwise.
To abandon social responsibility and expect technology to bail us out is not responsible. It is gambling with the souls of millions, counting on science to come up with a solution rather than stopping COVID with discipline and effort.
This isn’t a new thing in medicine. People smoke, say they will pay the consequences, and then show up in the emergency room when they start coughing up blood. They drink too much and then want to know if they can get new livers. They ignore their high blood pressure for years and present with a stroke, hoping medical magic will rescue them.
But something is different here. This isn’t the choice of an individual smoker, suffering for his own choices. This is millions of people not doing enough, and then lining up for the shot that solves their problems. Or worse, not getting the shot at all, and depending on their neighbors who get it to protect them, or their doctors to save them if they get COVID and it doesn’t go well.
This lack of unified public will is a serious problem. There could be another virus later, a more lethal one that doesn’t give us the time to come up with a response before it wipes out millions. As some specialists have observed, there is a sense in which COVID is a “practice plague” that was supposed to prepare us for a future, more deadly one. On the social end of the scale we failed. Technology bailed us out. This time.
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Which brings us to a related issue: Climate change. Climate change, like COVID, is a social threat that must be addressed with a social component and a technological component. The social component is conservation — driving less, buying more fuel efficient cars, consuming less in general. The technological component is more efficient solar energy, better batteries, nuclear or even fusion power, and transportation that relies less on fossil fuels. The question is the same as it is with COVID. Can tech bail us out? Can science come up with enough breakthroughs to reduce emissions to zero without humans having to compromise socially at all?
Given the pace of climate change, my suspicion is that it can’t. But I am not an expert, so don’t take my word for it. Nonetheless, the challenge is unchanged. Are we willing to gamble everything we have on the chance that science will bail us out one more time? Doesn’t it make much more sense to take place our bets on both sides, conserving fossil fuels through behavior even as we innovate? If we get this one wrong, the number of deaths from COVID will feel like nothing.
