SO WHEN IS THIS ALL OVER

Given that in the past week we've seen an increasing number of protests from dumb and mostly well-off white suburban people complaining that they can't buy lawn fertilizer or haircuts any more, it is probably worth looking at the important question of "what does the end of this look like?" Because at this point, if you're anything like most people, you would love for this pandemic to be over, done, finished, et cetera.

The answer really depends on what you consider "the end." If you consider regional or national quarantines and lockdowns ending to be "the end," that could be anywhere from two months to two years, depending on how impatient people are and how good we are at reaching a safe point. This is generally the point in writing about Covid-19 where someone mentions South Korea's testing regime, where they are testing so much that they've managed to test a significant percentage of the population, and the point of doing this is to be able to isolate people who are virus carriers and prevent them from infecting other people.

Or maybe you read about how New Zealand is planning to drop their lockdown "from level 4 to level 3" this week, because New Zealand (and Australia, for that matter, where they are planning gradual beach re-openings) have taken advantage of the fact that they are relatively isolated islands, in combination with strict quarantine protocols, to really knock Covid-19 spread down to nothing - New Zealand in particular announced that at this point they believe their protocols have been so successful that their infection rate is down to the point where they believe each infected person is infecting less than one other person on average. That's great news and actually holds the potential to end infection spread entirely in the interim, because if each infected person infects less than one other person on average, eventually you will run out of carriers and thus, disease.

There are other good-news stories like this out there across the world which offer the promise of All Of This being over relatively soon - maybe not as fast as New Zealand, because we can't all be small island nations at the corner of the world, but, you know, maybe within six months if we really get our acts together, that sort of thing. I mean, New York's death rate appears to be levelling off, which is still horrific but at least it's not ramping up anymore, right? But then we run up against the other problem, which is that there is another, arguably more valid definition of "the end," which is "it's over when we don't have to worry about Covid-19 any more."

Because also this week, Japan's confirmed caseload surged, after we had all spent weeks reading about how Japan generally being willing to co-operate with quarantines and wear masks had helped them stifle viral spread early on. And that's the problem: this is an insanely contagious disease, so whenever there's a new flareup, there's going to have to be a new lockdown, or we just go through the entire same set of problems again. It is very, very unlikely that we can get Covid-19 down to the point of smallpox, which is now extinct in the world outside of a few closely guarded lab samples, anytime in the near or even medium future. (I mean, smallpox itself took literally thirty years to eradicate from the time governments started trying to do it.)

So, if we can't just eradicate it entirely any time soon, what are the other options? Well, there's vaccination, of course. Granted, we have to first discover a vaccine for Covid-19, which will take a long time. The optimists are saying "by the fall," and the realists are saying "one to two years, if we're lucky," and the pessimists are pointing out that we've had HIV genetically sequenced and identified for decades and we don't have a vaccine for that yet.

Of course, if there's no vaccination, there's always just what we do with a lot of other viral diseases: treatment. We don't have a vaccine for HIV, for example, but there are enough treatments for HIV that it can simply be something you live with now rather than a death sentence. Granted, it took us in between fifteen and twenty years to get to a treatment for HIV (depending on how you decide to start and stop the count) , but on the other hand a lot of that time was spent with people wondering "this disease mostly just kills gay and poor people, is it really worth the bother" and that won't happen so much this time around. Maybe we'll be able to get to a point in a few years where getting a serious case of Covid-19 is just a matter of you taking a specific set of pills and staying home for three weeks.

And of course, there's herd immunity - the idea that if enough people get sick with Covid-19, survive and then develop antibodies, eventually enough of us will have the antibodies that we don't need to do anything else. In olden times, this was basically how humans survived plagues: the plague would kill off a big chunk of people, but then everybody else survived it and the plague couldn't infect people any more, et cetera. And sure, technically that works, but as we've seen now allowing Covid-19 to spread unchecked is basically a recipe for anywhere from 5 to 10 percent mortality rate just because it spreads so fast and forces so many people into hospitals, and 5 percent of everybody worldwide is about 400 million people worldwide dead, so yeah, that's not a great option all things considered.

On top of that, we're talking about a disease that can do a lot of damage even if it doesn't kill you: it can damage your lung capacity for the rest of your life, there are signs in a lot of survivors that their body's ability to clot blood is weakened, and we're only just starting to see signs of potential neurological damage as well (in case you weren't terrified enough). So herd immunity might not only be grim in terms of deaths but also physically and emotionally damaging to survivors, as well as increasing expense to national healthcare systems overall.

In short: the answer to "when is this all going to be over" is "a while. Or longer. Depends." We live in interesting times, as the old curse goes.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Oh god I have watched so many movies over the past two weeks that listing them at this point seems like an exercise in braggadocio. Just go to my Letterboxd ("mightygodking") and read my notes there, as I desperately try to keep up with all of them. As I write this I am only 20 movies behind in my reviews!

We're also making an effort to finish watching Black Sails, the great show from a few years ago about pirates, which remains consistently entertaining and has lots of guns and swords and nautical terminology and general horniness. It is a whole lot of fun and its hit-and-miss approach to historical accuracy is enjoyable too.

See you in seven.