Pandemics and denial
Here’s a great article from Ed Yong at The Atlantic (speaking of their pandemic coverage) on failing to cope with Delta and what it means for future pandemics. (And there will be future pandemics.)
One thing that’s been really bothering me, given all the reading I’ve done about the 1918 pandemic, is how much everything about our current health response looks like our response to that one, over a hundred years ago. In specific, the psychology of it—and the way its already being memory-holed.
I find it very unsettling to read books or watch television created during the pandemic that doesn’t acknowledge its existence at all. Television seems to be taking place in an alternate 2020s where nobody is sick and people walk around without masks on and never mention the plague. I know this has to do with not wanting to make the productions seem dated, in this era of streaming and total access. But a plague-free season of Leverage set in New Orleans has been landing a little odd.
Histories of 1918 also talk about how it was a quickly-forgotten trauma, treated as an anomaly and papered over, barely discussed or memorialized. And we are paying the cost for that now.
Anyway, denial is real, and wanting to forget trauma is real. But the more we shove those feelings aside and try Very Hard For The Plague To Be Over So We Don’t Have To Think About How Much It Hurts, the more we’re setting ourselves up to be unprepared for the next time.
There have been two novel pandemics in my lifetime already, and I just turned fifty. Climate change and opportunities for disease to spill over are only going to accelerate as the world warms and pathogens spread to new locations and come into contact with new hosts.
Maybe what we need to do here is not repeat the mistakes of the past. This is a long-term mitigation effort, and healthcare remains a human right.