Tag: covid-19

Ambiguity as an Asymmetrical Weapon: Lessons from Current and Ancient Crises

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

COVID-19 revealed something terrifying about modern democracies: they are especially vulnerable to ambiguous threats, which can become magnified into national disasters. A virus that was neither mild enough to ignore nor lethal enough to unify a response managed to throw the United States into prolonged disarray causing unnecessary and severe harm.

If COVID-19 had been a super deadly, super-virus, we would have reached a quick consensus on how to fight it, out of necessity. Throughout our history our nearly always divided nation has regularly rallied around the flag and united political divisions to meet major crises. On the other hand, if the virus had been super weak, we could have completely ignored it.

It was its position in the murky middle, neither trivial nor catastrophic, that proved most damaging: a Goldilocks zone where uncertainty overwhelmed coordination. The most insidious thing about COVID-19 was that it did not demand an unambiguous response. By its very nature, the virus thwarted decisive action in the largest democracies. There could never be a clear consensus in a fractious democracy on how to treat it or even how to talk about it. It engendered anxiety and undermined unequivocal action.

If you had wanted to develop a perfect virus to afflict a troubled democracy – one already splintered by culture wars, plagued by distrust in institutions and weakened by an over-saturated information environment – it would have been COVID-19. The pandemic for us, therefore, was a political, psychological and social crisis, one that exposed the fragility of decision-making in democratic systems. Read more »

Monday, August 12, 2024

Anthony Fauci’s Limited Hangout

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Accusatory reevaluations of the COVID-19 era are underway. Anthony Fauci’s new memoir addresses the accusations—or does it?

Oversight and Accountability

Some six weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, an investigative panel of the U.S. House of Representatives. I watched the first hour (the full session lasted roughly three-and-a half), but that was enough to get the gist. Republicans portrayed Fauci as the malevolent demiurge of the COVID-19 pandemic, with his suggestions leading to mask mandates, school closures, forced vaccinations, and possibly even the virus itself. Democrats, conversely, lamented these attempts to smear Fauci, painting them as Big Lies beginning in and persisting from the Trump era, and apologized to Fauci for the attacks on his professionalism.

Since then, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the candidacy withdrawal of President Biden have shifted the political focus in American politics away from Dr. Fauci. But for better or worse, I’ve stayed fixated. When I saw Anthony Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, on the NEW BOOKS shelf at my local library, I knew that I would review it here.

I read On Call while I was on a long car trip with my wife and kids, during family vacation. And while I didn’t start the book any strong feelings about Fauci, I should admit a few preconceptions. For one thing, I’m instinctively suspicious of doctors. When I had appendicitis, I refused to go in until my appendix had fully burst. Also, I’m usually drawn to memoirs by people who are basically unreliable. The other memoir I read this summer—Glenn Loury’s Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative—contrasted Loury’s sexual and chemical adventuring with his “cover story” as a moral crusader.

On Call was not written for me. It’s for Fauci’s preexisting admirers, and is the opposite of a confession—more like an unapologetic self-defense. The book eventually gives readers what they want (in “Part Five: COVID”), but after 300+ pages detailing Fauci’s demonstrable successes, this part ultimately seems embarrassing, an unsatisfying conclusion to a triumphant career.

The chapters of On Call are each just a few pages, and they go by quickly. I got both the hardback and the audiobook, and alternated between them, sometimes reading, sometimes listening as I watched the red vistas scan by, the vastness of Fauci’s story complementing the vast southwestern landscapes outside. But like any visitor in unknown territory, I tried to keep alert for any unexpected movements—signs that this narrator was unreliable after all. Read more »

Monday, October 23, 2023

Coronasomnia

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

I am no stranger to waking up in the middle of the night with a nameless feeling of dread. Like everyone else I know, I developed chronic insomnia around age 40, which was exacerbated by the “election” of Trump and the ongoing pillage of American democracy. And then perimenopause wreaked its havoc in the form of hormonal swings, night sweats, and troubled dreams. But this was different. This night—just over a month ago—I woke bolt upright out of a dead sleep, gasping for air, disoriented and terrified. I leapt out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, so dizzy I was bumping into walls. I found the toilet, closed the lid (an ongoing bone of contention in our household), and sank down with my head between my knees. I was dying. I knew, absolutely and with pure and stainless conviction, that I was dying. Dizziness washed over me, an intense feeling of disorientation, and I knew that it was my spirit separating from my body. I was swept with waves of grief. I haven’t written everything I want to write. My partner is in the next room and I don’t want to say goodbye yet. My family, my friends. Work to do, parties to throw. This toilet—it really needs to be cleaned. This is not dignified. I promise, Powers That Be, that from this moment forward I will no longer be cavalier about my life, if you just spare me now.

Suddenly a scrap of memory. A conviction that one is dying—that sounds familiar. I think … that can happen in panic attacks? Maybe I’m having a panic attack? But—how can this be? I have had panic disorder and intermittent generalized anxiety since I was 16, and have had hundreds of panic attacks in my life—never before did I become convinced that I was dying. For me the worst part of panic is the feeling of derealization, as if the world around me is fake and I am in a dream. (It’s very difficult to explain why this feeling is so horrifying to those who have never experienced it—you just have to trust me.) But that night in the bathroom I suddenly remembered that the sensation of dying is on the long list of panic attack symptoms, one I had always skipped over when reading about my disorder since it didn’t apply to me. And yet here we were.

Okay, okay. I might as well try the usual techniques I’ve perfected over the years. Deep breathing. Walking in circles while shaking my hands and feet. Splashing cold water on my face. Above all—not fighting it. Letting the feelings pass through me and trusting that I would come out the other side. It worked; I was released from the iron grip of terror; my soul returned to my body; I lived.

I did not sleep again that night. Read more »

Monday, October 9, 2023

Faulty Wiring

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere long-term.

For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to enact change. I taught about how media provokes consumerism and how to counter that, and why to counter that, in our daily lives for the sake of the planet, the people, and our own well being. I often stepped outside of the social sciences to draw on thousands of years of philosophies and religions that have understood that happiness isn’t the result of an accumulation of things.

I practice what I preach for the most part. Curiously, though, by about mid-July each year, I’d forget everything I had been teaching and end up on a shopping spree until I’d come to my senses. Ten years ago I wrote about how much I need government policies to restrain my habits – that we all do – or else we’ll literally shop ’til we drop, as a species, which is happening before our eyes.

Barring that reality, and knowing this would be an ongoing, lifelong issue, I got a tattoo on my Visa-paying forearm to remind myself that my actions affect the entire world. I borrowed Matisse’s Dance and have the characters circling a re-forming pangea. We need to come together on this, collectively, to reduce ongoing suffering. Read more »

Monday, May 22, 2023

Frankl’s Phases of Life in the Camps

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

A dear friend of mine recently passed away unexpectedly. He had recommended I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which I gobbled up in no time, yet it was too late to talk to him about it. That’s destroying me a bit these days, so I’m writing about it instead. 

Frankl survived several concentration camps, the near starvation and typhus that took many others, and explains how he coped and designed a form of psychotherapy in the process. He kept his mind on the future, imagining better days after the war, back with his wife again and lecturing about his experiences. I’ve read it trying to use his word to better tolerate the less acute, more chronic threat of Covid. It might seem trite or contrived to make such a comparison, but consider that more people have succumbed to Covid than Jewish prisoners in the camps and it continues because we are living blindly to it, unthinking. I’m hoping to learn something from his work beyond the obvious problems with allowing unfettered discrimination. 

The book is in two parts. In the first, originally published in 1946, he describes his experiences living in a death camp and the three phases of survival in camp life. He wrote it after being released and returning to Vienna to learn that his pregnant wife, parents, and brother had all died in the camps. In the second half he explains how to cope with it all, but I’ll save that for next month. Page numbers throughout are from the 2006 edition. Read more »

Monday, March 27, 2023

Looking for the Enlightened

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

The season finale of The Last of Us sets up a great deontological v. teleological conundrum with the big question (tiny spoiler), which ends up being an episode-long trolley problem: Is it right to kill one person if doing so could save multitudes?

In a utilitarian view, of course we should sacrifice one person to potentially save all of humanity. It would be absurd not to see this and ensure the safety of all! But it doesn’t pass the categorical imperative sniff test. We can’t support intentional harm coming to people, any people, no matter how few, even if it will help many others. 

Kant’s famous rule: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law,“ so killing a person to help others is necessarily wrong. It’s not a numbers game since “the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected.” And we have to treat each person as an end in themselves, never as a means to an end. 

Or, as the great Mitchell & Webb make clear, killing some to save others is just plain wrong “because it’s offensive and evil.” 

And people will do absolutely anything to save the children they love if they turn out to be the sacrificial lambs in question. 

Fortunately, the current issues facing us don’t force us to choose. We can help our children and the world at once, so that should be easy, right?!? Unfortunately, our drive to protect our kids is often short sighted. Life is not as cut and dried as a good zombie-like show. We often want our children to be happy today even if it means they end up suffering later. Read more »

Monday, August 30, 2021

Goddam, Mississippi

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna K. Kreisel (doctorwaffle.substack.com)

This week I had planned to present the 3 Quarks Daily readership with a fluffy little piece about my memories of a grade school foreign language teacher. It was poignant, it was heartfelt, it was funny (if I do say so myself). Above all, it was intended as a brief respite from the nonstop parade of horrors scrolling past our screens every day—a parade in which my own recent writings have occupied a lavishly decorated float. We all deserve a break, I thought. It would be nice to look at some baton twirlers for a minute, listen to an oompa band.

And then. Something happened in my newly adopted home state that has filled me with such rage that I feel I have to write it out in order to be able to move on with my life. Everyone around me—my colleagues and friends—are filled with the same rage, to the point where I think we could use some kind of collective catharsis. It occurred to me yesterday that maybe my monthly essay for 3QD could form a tiny part of such a catharsis. Maybe I could scrap what I’d already written, and quickly write a piece about what happened here on Friday. At the very least, it would feel good to scream a little into the void, even if ultimately no one in the rest of the country really cares. That happens a lot with stuff that goes down in Mississippi.

Before I go any further, let me hasten to say the following. I am about to complain about Covid protocols at a university. I fully recognize that many, many other faculty, staff, students, and teachers across the country are dealing with horrifying working and learning conditions right now—not to mention, of course, what health care workers are going through. I do not mean to imply that we are somehow special. And yet—who are we kidding? It’s Mississippi. Of course we’re special! If you’ve been checking the New York Times Covid coverage for the past couple of weeks you might have noticed that things here are … challenging. For weeks our state has occupied pride of place as the top, labelled line in all the new-case graphs published above the fold. Indeed, we are now number one in the world for Covid transmission. So please bear with me as I attempt to complain about my own patch while simultaneously recognizing that it’s pretty bad all over the place. Read more »

Monday, March 1, 2021

Epilog: Peace and Horror

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Two profound horrors have plagued the world in recent times: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump presidency. And after years of dread, their recent decline has brought me a brief respite of peace.

Not that my peace was ever disturbed as much as many others’. One reason is that unlike the ICU patient or the undocumented immigrant child, neither horror has ever afflicted or assailed me directly. Another is that I have long been comfortable with impermanence, the reality that nothing lasts forever. Not the United States. Not me. Should the one be toppled by a dictatorial demagog or the other felled by a microscopic, multiplying coronavirus, so be it. All must end eventually.

Yet here we are, steps closer to but still somewhere short of the Great Undoing that the pathogen and the politician relentlessly dragged us towards. And only now, as their grips finally begin to release a bit, can I recognize more fully how each, in its own way, had previously commanded my attention, either undermining my peace or at least forcing me to redefine it.

First, the blinding orange glow.

Just the other day it dawned on me that not only hadn’t I thought about Donald Trump for a couple of weeks, but I also had not spent much energy charting the republic’s precipitous decline and decay. That is not to say I see Joe Biden as some kind of savior, or even have high expectations for his administration. I don’t. Nor am I convinced that the world is better off with the United States than without it. There are strong arguments either way. But regardless, to live in the United States during the Trump presidency, and to recognize the very real threat it posed to American culture and to U.S. constitutional systems and democratic and institutions, meant that you had to, at the very least, pay close attention to their ongoing perversion and erosion. Because it’s one thing to be intellectually okay with the United States’ eventual demise. It’s another to live through various stages of it while facing down the very real prospect of increased oligarchy, theocracy, nativism, and racism. Read more »

Monday, February 15, 2021

Science Is Truth Until It Isn’t

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Science cat
Don’t forget to credit my research assistant, Erwin Schrödinger. Image: ScienceLive / Shutterstock

“Trust the science; follow the scientists” has become a familiar refrain during our past year of living dangerously. It is the admonition of world health organisations to shifty politicians; it is good advice for all whose lives have been battered into disruption by Covid-19. But another insidious pandemic has been creeping up on us. The World Health Organization calls it the “infodemic”. It includes those endlessly forwarded emails from ill-informed relatives, social media posts, and sensational videos full of spurious “cures” and malicious lies about the virus and the pandemic. The disinformation isn’t all the work of internet trolls, conspiracy theorists and “alternative” medicine peddlers. Some actual scientists have been caught in acts of deception. These are people who undermine whatever faith the public has left in science, and who sabotage the credibility of their scrupulous colleagues. One of the worst cases of fraud was Dr Andrew Wakefield’s bogus 1998 research paper linking vaccines to autism, which endangered the lives of countless children before it was debunked and its author struck off the UK medical register. In this 700th anniversary year of Dante Alighieri’s death, we should reserve a special place in his Inferno for those who profit from turning the truths of Mother Nature into dangerous lies.

“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it,” the physicist Richard Feynman once said in a lecture on scientific method. It’s a noble truth — your theory is wrong if the experiments say so — but given the flaws of human nature, it’s not that simple. Sloppy work or deliberate fraud can make your theory seem correct enough to get published in one prestigious journal, and cited in many others. Scientific theories should follow the Darwinian principle of “survival of the fittest”. Yesterday’s cast-off ideas (goodbye, phlogiston) may pave the path to progress, but along the way, there are also some fake signposts pointing in wrong directions. Read more »

Monday, December 14, 2020

Writing the Virus: A New Anthology

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

An anthology I’ve edited with David Winner, titled Writing the Virus, has just been published by Outpost19 Books (San Francisco). Its authors—among them Joan Juliet Buck, Rebecca Chace, Edie Meidav, Caille Millner, Uche Nduka, Mui Poopoksakul, Roxana Robinson, Jon Roemer, Joseph Salvatore, Liesl Schillinger, Andrea Scrima, Clifford Thompson, Saskia Vogel, Matthew Vollmer, and David Dario Winner—explore the experience of lockdown, quarantine, social distancing, and the politicization of the virus from a wide variety of perspectives. The majority of the texts were written exclusively for the online literary magazine StatORec, and a keen sense of urgency prevails throughout, an understanding that the authors are chronicling something, responding to something that is changing them and the social fabric all around them.

The range of this anthology is broad: there’s a haunting story that explores the psychological dimensions of an anti-Asian hate crime with a curiously absent culprit; hallucinatory prose that gropes its way through a labyrinth of internalized fear as human encounters are measured in terms of physical distance; a piece on the uncomfortable barriers of ethnicity, civic cooperation, and racism as experienced by someone going out for what is no longer an ordinary run; and a jazz pianist who listens to what’s behind the eerie silence of the virus’s global spread. Read more »

Monday, October 26, 2020

Can We Ensure Fairness with Digital Contact Tracing?

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

COVID-19 has forced populations into lockdown, seen the restriction of rights, and caused widespread economic, social, and psychological harm. With only 11 countries having no confirmed cases of COVID-19 (as of this writing), we are globally beyond strategies that aim solely at containment. Most resources are now being directed at mitigation strategies. That is, strategies that aim to curtail how quickly the virus spreads. These strategies (such as physical and social distancing, increased hand-washing, mask-wearing, and proper respiratory etiquette) have been effective in delaying infection rates, and therefore reducing strain on healthcare workers and facilities. There has also been a wave of techno-solutionism (not unusual in times of crisis), which often comes with the unjustified belief that technological solutions provide the best (and sometimes only) ways to deal with the crisis in question.

Such perspectives, in the words of Michael Klenk, ask “what technology”, instead of asking “why technology”, and therefore run the risk of creating more problems than they solve. Klenk argues that such a focus is too narrow: it starts with the presumption that there should be technological solutions to our problems, and then stamps some ethics on afterwards to try and constrain problematic developments that may occur with the technology. This gets things exactly backwards. What we should instead be doing is asking whether we need a given technology, and then proceed from there. It is with this critical perspective in mind that I will investigate a new technological kid on the block: digital contact tracing. Basically, its implementation involves installing a smartphone app that, via Bluetooth, registers and stores the individual’s contacts. Should a user become infected, they can update their app with this information, which will then automatically ping all of their registered contacts. While much attention has been focused on privacy and trust concerns, this will not be my focus (see here for a good example of an analysis that looks specifically at these factors, drawn up by the team at Ethical Intelligence). I will instead focus on the question of whether digital contact tracing is fair. Read more »

Monday, April 20, 2020

Plague Echoes

Posted on by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

“A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore, we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is the men who pass away…” —Albert Camus (The Plague)

Photo by Yaseen Hashmi

“So long as each individual doctor had come across only two or three cases, no one had thought of taking action. But it was merely a matter of adding up the figures and, once this had been done, the total was startling. In a very few days the number of cases had risen by leaps and bounds, and it became evident to all observers of this strange malady that a real epidemic had set in.” (The Plague, Page 35)

Death by pneumonia, and then another, and another, advancing in only days to large populations— caused by one of those crown-wearing microbes, a Coronavirus, deadly, beautiful under the microscope. They named it Novel Coronavirus. Once unsheathed, it leapt from animal to human, one town to another, then between land and sea borders. The first confirmed case in the United States was recorded on January 20, 2020. Only 20 days ago, we had wished each other peace and a vision clear as 20/20. But is a year of numbers and blurred vision. The Grand Princess sailed with 2000-plus, 21 infected by the time she passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. By March 18th there were 7,769 cases. Ten days later, on March 28th, they had risen to 116,505.

“The evening papers that day took up the matter and inquired whether or not the city fathers were going to take steps, and what emergency measures were contemplated, to abate this particularly disgusting nuisance. Actually the municipality had not contemplated doing anything at all, but now a meeting was convened to discuss the situation.” (The Plague, Page 15)

There was a memo early on, wasn’t there? One of them asked.
The man had no answers, only mirrors and insults inside. He spoke as if swirling in a perpetual drumroll. He appeared every day for the press conference, knotting a bright tie in a different color, head skewed; most days he favored red— red and oversized, as he snarled or shrugged at a question, red as he made his pounce. Read more »