The coronavirus outbreak, now a pandemic spreading at an
exponential rate throughout the world, is upending our routines, certainties,
and assumptions about normal life. It is a stress test that exposes the vulnerabilities
and inequalities in our polity and our ability to confront a threat that could
kill hundreds of thousands of people and cripple the economy for months to
come.
We have not experienced a situation like the present one with COVID-19
in our lifetime — and not since 1918 Spanish flu.
It’s to be noted that the threat stems not from technology but from the
age-old practice of hunting and consuming exotic animals as well as the
increasing encroachment of humans on animal habitats, which enable viruses to
jump from the host to humans.
There is a paradox in the fact that this is the first epidemic in which
we are able to track the spread of infection on a genomic level almost “in real
time.” And, yet, we were caught shockingly unprepared, even though for decades
we have been warned that a pandemic caused by a novel virus is not a matter of
“if” but “when.” The Centers for Disease Control, which the world has looked to
for leadership in previous outbreaks, bungled its response, and the
Administration has been putting out mixed messages. As a result, testing for
the virus, which should have been going on weeks ago, is still not widely
available. Valuable time has been lost. Without widespread testing, we are in
the dark about how many people are infected and where new foci will arise...
More at Geoffrey Kabat on Medium
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