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Living with COVID
There's been a lot said about "living with COVID" in various bits of media and so on. But I don't know whether anyone's really been thinking about what COVID means on a cultural and social level yet.
There's a lot of indications that COVID is going to be the new equivalent of what polio used to be. It's a disease which can be deadly, but which is even more dangerous to the people it leaves alive. COVID is a crippling illness, rather than a killing one - and as the various variants evolve to become more contagious and less severe, we're going to see a greater number of people with various disabilities showing up in our society.
Now, on the one hand, this is something which has been coming since the growth of antibiotics (and vaccination) made a lot of the former childhood menaces into just names on a sheet of paper. We don't think about the danger of measles any more, because by and large, measles is pretty much gone from the wider community. Enough people are vaccinated that it doesn't have the space to spread, and when it does show up, it's generally easy enough to treat with a course of antibiotics. For about eighty years now, the Western nations haven't had the widespread menace of illnesses which render children deathly ill, and then linger on as things like heart conditions, lung problems, digestive issues, or other organ failures. Since the widespread eradication of polio, the sight of children with limbs in calliper splints hasn't been a regular thing, and the idea of people living their life in an iron lung (or other BiPAP ventilation) isn't something which is a regular part of the public consciousness. The idea that pregnant women have to take care to avoid illness (for fear of what it might do to the baby) has largely passed out of the public mind as well. Rubella isn't a menace that causes deafness and blindness in children any more - it's a shot you get in high school and don't worry about.
COVID looks set to bring all these ideas flooding back. Again, it was always going to be an inevitability - we're starting to see the growth of multiply-resistant bacteria (which means our antibiotics aren't working as effectively as they used to) and it's only a matter of time before one of these multiply-resistant forms turns out to be a contagious disease that's severely harmful to humans. To be honest, my money used to be on multiply-resistant tuberculosis (which not only exists, but is actually a slowly-growing problem here in Australia), but these days, I'm thinking COVID is going to be the disease which is going to remind humans of our place in the wider scheme of things. We're clever monkeys, no doubt. But that's all we are - and we're tied into the wider ecology of this planet.
And the fun thing is: we're only two years into this pandemic. So we don't know what the long-term effects on children being born to COVID-affected parents are. We don't know what the long-term effects of COVID are on adults or children. Heck, we're still learning of the long-term effects of surviving polio from the last generation of post-polio patients, and we're still learning the full extent of what post-polio syndrome entails. Even if we managed to eradicate COVID (which we probably won't - coronaviruses are remarkably resilient little darlings; just look at influenza!) we're stuck with dealing with the after-effects for anything up to a century after the last case has been cured, and I don't know whether anyone is ready for this.
Meanwhile, the point I'm trying to make here is this: what we're experiencing with COVID is not unprecedented. Indeed, I'd say the unprecedented bit was the eighty years beforehand, where contagious diseases were eminently treatable, and only minor worries. What we're actually seeing with COVID is a return to historical "business as usual" - local epidemics disrupting economies, disrupting supply chains, disrupting social life, disrupting everything.
There's a lot of indications that COVID is going to be the new equivalent of what polio used to be. It's a disease which can be deadly, but which is even more dangerous to the people it leaves alive. COVID is a crippling illness, rather than a killing one - and as the various variants evolve to become more contagious and less severe, we're going to see a greater number of people with various disabilities showing up in our society.
Now, on the one hand, this is something which has been coming since the growth of antibiotics (and vaccination) made a lot of the former childhood menaces into just names on a sheet of paper. We don't think about the danger of measles any more, because by and large, measles is pretty much gone from the wider community. Enough people are vaccinated that it doesn't have the space to spread, and when it does show up, it's generally easy enough to treat with a course of antibiotics. For about eighty years now, the Western nations haven't had the widespread menace of illnesses which render children deathly ill, and then linger on as things like heart conditions, lung problems, digestive issues, or other organ failures. Since the widespread eradication of polio, the sight of children with limbs in calliper splints hasn't been a regular thing, and the idea of people living their life in an iron lung (or other BiPAP ventilation) isn't something which is a regular part of the public consciousness. The idea that pregnant women have to take care to avoid illness (for fear of what it might do to the baby) has largely passed out of the public mind as well. Rubella isn't a menace that causes deafness and blindness in children any more - it's a shot you get in high school and don't worry about.
COVID looks set to bring all these ideas flooding back. Again, it was always going to be an inevitability - we're starting to see the growth of multiply-resistant bacteria (which means our antibiotics aren't working as effectively as they used to) and it's only a matter of time before one of these multiply-resistant forms turns out to be a contagious disease that's severely harmful to humans. To be honest, my money used to be on multiply-resistant tuberculosis (which not only exists, but is actually a slowly-growing problem here in Australia), but these days, I'm thinking COVID is going to be the disease which is going to remind humans of our place in the wider scheme of things. We're clever monkeys, no doubt. But that's all we are - and we're tied into the wider ecology of this planet.
And the fun thing is: we're only two years into this pandemic. So we don't know what the long-term effects on children being born to COVID-affected parents are. We don't know what the long-term effects of COVID are on adults or children. Heck, we're still learning of the long-term effects of surviving polio from the last generation of post-polio patients, and we're still learning the full extent of what post-polio syndrome entails. Even if we managed to eradicate COVID (which we probably won't - coronaviruses are remarkably resilient little darlings; just look at influenza!) we're stuck with dealing with the after-effects for anything up to a century after the last case has been cured, and I don't know whether anyone is ready for this.
Meanwhile, the point I'm trying to make here is this: what we're experiencing with COVID is not unprecedented. Indeed, I'd say the unprecedented bit was the eighty years beforehand, where contagious diseases were eminently treatable, and only minor worries. What we're actually seeing with COVID is a return to historical "business as usual" - local epidemics disrupting economies, disrupting supply chains, disrupting social life, disrupting everything.