Danger Young'uns, Danger

The ever informative Harper's Magazine explains in an essay by Elisa Gabbert why coronavirus may still attempt to infect large numbers of victims from among the youth. The lesson to be learned comes from the influenza virus. I'll quote from p13 of the June edition [Readings: Sick Sad World].

A 2020 study, for example, found that people became more sociable in the forty-eight hours after exposure to the flu virus, a period in which one is contagious but asymptomatic. The infected hosts, researchers noted, were significantly more likely to head out to bars and parties. 

Before you consider this coincidental, the article mentions other zombie-like viral takeovers of our brains. Most of us are familiar with toxoplasmosis which increases risk taking and rabies which makes its victims avoid water apparently because water would dilute the concentration of virus.

If this phenomenon holds for coronavirus and it may, being as nothing seems to curtail the youth from evading recently established social norms. But perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to blame the virus for as Camus once wrote in The Plague--also quoted in the June issue of Harper's in a column, Easy Chair, by Thomas Chatterton Williams:

There's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea that may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is--common decency.

However, those who promote a new normal should read the previously mentioned essay and these words-- hopefully inapplicable to today's situation:

What was the human condition after the plague? Exhausted by deaths and sorrows and the morbid excesses of fear and hate, it ought to have shown some profound effects, but no radical change was immediately visible. The persistence of the normal is strong.

The same essay also tells us not to seek an eradication of the virus because it, unlike smallpox, is a zoonosis that jumps between species. So, we may eliminate it from attacking us in two years but eventually it will jump back to us just like most animal viruses. We'll be taking covid vaccines ad infinitum as Bill Gates counts his blessings.


Media notes:
nothing much to speak of; except I did learn at the CNN 7PM show that they will bring you on as a virus expert if you have "millions of followers." Who said CNN is not a people network? When a news outfit puts it's trust on herd mentality, they care about us!