My School has Coronavirus

“Love in the Time of COVID-19.”

This quarantine shit is kind of whack, huh?  If you’re reading this as it’s published or soon after, chances are you’re in Illinois, and chances are you’re currently under the shelter-in-place order to help flatten the curve and slow the spread of the novel Coronavirus.  Which means that you’re supposed to stay inside and only leave for emergencies and necessities, like food or medical attention.  And if you aren’t under those conditions in Illinois, you’re probably under them all the same somewhere else.  Or you likely will be soon.

Honestly, as a writer, the idea of working from home and staying inside isn’t all that foreign to me.  I’ve fantasized about being able to write as a full-time job and work at home.  Of course, that isn’t actually the case, since I’m a student now, so before everything froze over I was going to class every day in actual school buildings.  Now I’m forced to take classes from home, usually via skype-in-a-tie, Zoom.  So as much as I want my future to look similarly to the shelter-in-place orders, in the sense that I’d like to be able to work from home (not in the sense that I want everyone to stay at home), it still feels pretty weird to be back in town.  As I’m sure it does for everyone else “enjoying” their “coronacation.”

That being said, I shouldn’t complain about my school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, closing up and shifting everyone online, since that was definitely the right move.  Sure, I could complain that the university didn’t give professors enough time to adjust, or that they don’t respect their own graduate employee’s (or maybe any employee’s?) rights to paid time off, or some other things like that, but I shouldn’t complain.  I could complain about how being online and moving home means that I’m away from all my school friends, and that my clubs and exciting college activities are all cancelled, and that the comfortable rhythm and system I was building up is now defunct.  And all these things are frustrating, yes.  But I shouldn’t complain about it, because things could be a lot worse for me.

Life is weird right now.  Stores are closed, restaurants are take-out only, I can’t go anywhere except to walk around and help my dad move, and classes are now almost comically bad, but things could be weirder still.  For example, I could be sick.  But I’m not, and no one that I know personally is, and I’m thankful for that because it means that something’s working, somewhere. Someone on campus at UIUC got the Coronavirus, and that’s not good. But at least for now it seems contained around there.

I used to be staunchly in the train of thought that “eh, there’s been pandemics before, this isn’t that big a deal, we’ll get over it.”  I used to not take it seriously, look at it as something happening far away, think about it as an “old people’s disease.”  I figured all this quarantine stuff was going overboard, and it wasn’t as bad as everyone was saying it was.  China had, what, 4,000 deaths?  300,000 people worldwide died from the regular flu in 2017 alone.  20 to 100 million people died of the Spanish flu in 1918-19, the last great pandemic comparable to what’s happening now, though it can’t be as bad because that was 100 years ago and now we have modern medicine.  These new numbers are nothing, right?  It isn’t that bad, by comparison.

That’s how I used to think.  But then I realized a couple important things, and changed my tune entirely.  The first thing was that all these deaths are on top of every regular medical emergency, not instead of.  Now for every patient with a heart attack a doctor in New York City has to treat, they have additional patients that are not only struggling to breathe but are also highly infectious and risk contaminating the entire hospital.  The second thing I realized was that the low numbers in China and the low numbers in Italy and the US (low, that is, compared to standard illnesses and death, like cancer or past pandemics) are due to the fact that countries have been cracking down on containment already.  New York’s death toll is still growing, and isn’t going to peak for a while, but it could be a lot worse if we don’t quarantine and suppress.  And then the third thing I realized was this model.

So, the WHO (the World Health Organization, not the band that did Tommy), teamed up with the Imperial College of London and a couple other groups to do some epidemiological modeling of potential outcomes of the Coronavirus pandemic based off of what we knew from the initial findings in China.  They took things like virulence, infection rates, attack rates, fatality rates, the current preparedness of world governments, different prevention measures, and the like, and they plugged these numbers into a mathematical model to look at how things would shake out.  I’ve done some mathematical modeling in my classes, though only small, rough models that tell me how many Coho Salmon are in Lake Michigan.  But I know the general principles, and I know that, more often than not, these models are pretty accurate if they’re made with goo d data.  So I tend to trust them pretty whole-heartedly.  Which is why, then, these model results made me change my tune so damn quickly.

Listen to this.  This Imperial College report is the data that got handed to government officials to prep them for the pandemic, and to suggest prevention and containment measures, and it’s one of the big reasons that many countries have been taking swift, heavy responses.  Responses that I initially believed were overkill and unnecessary, because, I mean, look at the numbers.  It’s sad that people are dying, but there aren’t that many people dying, compared to cancer or car accidents or self-inflicted handgun injuries.  Aren’t we all just overreacting? 

No.  Lord almighty, no.  If this model is accurate within a factor of ten, a pretty sizable margin of error, then good Lord no, this isn’t an overreaction.  This is an underreaction.

The study took a look at the numbers coming out of China and gathered data from things like the World Bank and others to look at how the situation would pattern itself in 202 countries around the world.  And they drew up three different sets of numbers; results from a business as usual response, results from mitigation strategies like social distancing, and results from advanced suppression techniques and more social distancing.  And the difference is staggering, and also deeply terrifying.

With no mitigation whatsoever, no social distancing or closing of schools and businesses, with treating it like another flu season, like I once believed we should do, the total infection count is estimated seven billion fucking people in the first year.  Billion.  With a “B”.  There are only 7.8 billion people alive today.  Which means that, if we continued business as usual, nearly everyone would get infected.  It wouldn’t be a matter of “if” you get sick, but “when” you would get sick. 

And here’s the thing; the fatality rate of this disease right now is about 2-3%, which is way higher than almost any other standard disease, but still lower than things like Marburg Fever, Ebola, and Rabies.  The Imperial College model put the final rate at being somewhere between 0.6% and 1% of cases result in fatality.  That seems good, right?  It’s pretty small?  Sure, but when you’re taking 0.6% of 7 billion people, that’s a lot of people.  In fact, that’s 40 million people.  In the first year alone.

Our world hasn’t seen death of that scale in such a confined time frame since World War II.  It’s estimated that 50 to 80 million people died between 1939-1945, which includes the European front, the African front, the Pacific front, the Holocaust, Hitler’s genocide of Slavic peoples, and more.  That happened over 6 years.  Coronavirus would do over half that in one year, without suppression.  It’s estimated that between 20 million and 100 million people died of the Spanish Flu, which is realistically what Coronavirus is most comparable to.  We could have expect to see something like that, even with modern medicine, if we didn’t do anything to stop it. Luckily we’re doing more than enough. Right?

“But we are doing stuff to stop it, though…?  It won’t be as bad, everything’s under control.  And this isn’t 1918, we have modern medicine.”  That was my thinking, at first.  But the study also has those two other outcomes I mentioned.  The second one, the middle-ground option where we practice social distancing but don’t follow through super well (likely the track that we’re on now), estimates 2.4 billion infections worldwide and around 10 million deaths.  That’s still a whole fucking lot. That’s like nuking Chicago and all its surrounding suburbs.  Our modern world, with the internet, more movement than ever before, and more people than ever before, has never seen anything like this.  The Spanish Flu was 100 years ago.  The Asian flu was 60 years ago.  The AIDS/HIV epidemic took place, and is still taking place in some regions, over fifty-plus years and wasn’t transmitted by coughing.  Coronavirus is just as infectious, if not more infectious than, the standard flu, and has a drastically higher fatality rate.  As everyone keeps saying, we truly are in untested waters.

The final prediction that the report made were the results from a high-level implementation of suppression and mitigation methods, like in-home quarantine of the sick, advanced social distancing of the elderly, and more.  And that model, where we took everything we could and threw it at Coronavirus, leaves us with… 500 million infections and 2 million dead.  That’s the best case scenario.  And as the report pointed out, that would require unprecedented levels of suppression and mitigation, causing massive damage to worldwide economic and social systems.  The report didn’t take into account the social or economic damage of things, because it wasn’t the goal of their paper to evaluate human life against economic prosperity.  But they acknowledged it would be bad, economically.  And as we’re seeing right now, it is.

One last thing from the report.  Right now there’s a lot about how New York City is running out of hospital beds and they’re going to exceed (or have already exceeded?) their hospital capacity, just like what’s happening in Italy.  We’re running out of space and ventilators right now, but the report predicts that, in some situations, we’ll exceed hospital capacity by seven times what we currently have.  We aren’t prepared for this.  We never were.  But we’re still better off than low-income countries; the model predicts that third-world nations will exceed their hospital capacity by as much as twenty five times in some situations.  If you lived in one of those countries, you’d have less than a 5% chance of getting a hospital bed at the height of the pandemic, if you’re lucky enough to live near a hospital.  And that’s what happens if we don’t flatten the curve.

Pandemics are a numbers game.  It’s as much statistics as it is making vaccines and growing viruses in a lab.  Coronavirus may not have the gross-out blood-spewing factor of Ebola (though, realistically, neither did Ebola), and it may not have the existential terror of a war or nuclear annihilation, but COVID-19 has the numbers.  Our best won’t be enough to save everyone, so you better hope to high hell that the Imperial College report was overestimating things.  Because if it’s accurate, by the time this is done we can expect anywhere between 2 and 10 million deaths, 5% of which would be in North America.

Consider me converted.  I’ll be staying inside as much as I can, and avoiding as many people as possible, and so should you.  Well, sort of.  Your mental health matters too, so staying in touch with friends and family is incredibly relevant right now.  You can still go help family in emergencies and things like that, and it might be good to help your friends for your own and their mental health, but just know that doing so may be dangerous for you, them, and anyone you come in contact with. Advice I’ve heard is to limit social contact, cut it down to one friend at a time, and only if your local area has low transmission. Like in rural communities.  Wash your hands and cover your mouth when you sneeze, and if you’re sick, stay home.  If you can afford it, that is. If you can’t, I’m sorry.  And for that reason, I’d like to thank everyone who’s still working during this crisis, for keeping things running even at the risk of your own health.

It’s funny how, in a time of crisis, all these low-wage jobs that people look down on suddenly become essential.  All these jobs that people don’t want to raise minimum wage for, that we relied on before and rely on even more so now.  And I also find it funny that people who are scared of socialism are more than happy to accept the largest taxpayer-funded government stimulus package in the history of the US, and maybe the world.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally onboard with the bailout bill and the loans to small businesses and greater unemployment benefits.  For once, it’s an action of the current administration’s that I can agree with almost 100%, and for once we seem to be getting something bipartisan. And I like it, even if it isn’t doing enough for families and small businesses. At least it’s a step in the right direction.  I just want to point out, though, that socialism (and certain candidates) was for that kind of stuff before there was a worldwide catastrophe.  Do with that what you will.

At any rate, listen to the CDC and the WHO.  Pay attention to officials who know what they’re talking about.  Follow the procedures to help flatten the curve.   That’s the best advice I can hand out, not that you needed me to tell you all that, since everyone’s already heard it.  I just wanted to add a bit of the why.  Because I didn’t get it before, but now I know.  I get why we’re doing the shelter-in-place, and why I had to go back north when my school moved online for the semester.  I get why we’re supposed to have less than ten people in a group, and why restaurants are only delivery.  I understand now, and hopefully you do to.  These are scary times we live, and I hope you and your family are well and safe, both physically and economically.  The world is shifting, but we can adapt, as we have before. We’ll push on.  Because if we don’t, we’ll die.

Oh, two last things.  One: this pandemic has done more good for the environment than anything else in a long time, but don’t be fooled; this pandemic, from a human suffering perspective and a spending perspective, is kind of like a brief taste of what a full-blown climate disaster might look like.  Once we’re out of the woods on this, remember that.  And, two: my mom put together this project called the #PandemicDanceOff, where you record yourself dancing, share it with your friends, and donate what you can to those in need, like through Feeding America or my mom’s friends in Uganda.  Try that out if you need something to brighten your day.  Watch, Share, Dance, Donate.  #PandemicDanceOff