Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Covid-19: What is there left to hope for? Predicting our Future with SARS-CoV-2


I've been following the SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 crisis carefully and have previously identified key indicators that will likely predict what future we find ourselves inhabiting.

Those key indicators included:
  • Nature of the virus - its capacities for circulation among and within human bodies
  • Nature of human socio-biological resilience (e.g., immune response) and disease susceptibilities (e.g., organs impacted and capacities to clear virus from infected systems over time)
  • Institutional impacts and adaptations - especially around critical supply chains such as food and energy
  • Social response - leadership, testing, support for sick and first responders, community cohesion

Where we stand today.

NATURE OF VIRUS & HUMAN SOCIO-BIOLOGICAL RESPONSE

The virus is highly mobile and innovative in its circulations across and within human bodies. Some people do not clear the virus and some people get reinfected or it re-activates. It may behave like a retrovirus but doesn't seem to replicate in T-cells as does HIV.

Is it merely a novel coronavirus, innovative but still predictable in terms of nature and capacities, or is it Stephen King's Captain Tripps? I do not know but I clearly hope for the former, while acknowledging the evidence for the latter.

To be clear: The extent of the crisis remains unclear!

The nature of human socio-biological resilience is not clear. There exists so much variability across individual responses. Older people are clearly more at risk but young people can be terribly afflicted with escalating inflammatory responses.

People with pre-existing conditions are at risk but yet perfectly healthy people fall victim while some elderly patients are apparently able to clear virus, at least as represented by our tests over the time period measured.

Much of my hope today centers on our biological resilience over time, as applied to the body of the global population and to individual human bodies.

The novel coronavirus can invade our blood cells and inhabit our lungs, gut and brain. Yet, the effects of these invasions are still unclear, as are our capacities to contain, de-activate, and expel this invasive coronavirus. 

It's important acknowledge that biological resilience is most decisively driven by social resilience factors. People who are economically disadvantaged are more likely to contract and die from covid-19, probably because their work is more risky and they have less access to health care and other institutional supports. Indigenous community impacts are, tragically, among the worst.

INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE

Institutional impacts have been great with food supply chains impacted but adapting. Energy infrastructures seem unaffected, although refineries have reported large numbers of infections.

It is hard to predict infrastructural shocks. Perhaps shocks will result from a certain level of infection across the population or perhaps shocks will occur only from the convergence of other disruptors, such as Influenza A and B in November.

The biggest institutional impacts have been economic, particularly for the lowest-wage workers. The economic dispossession is staggering and will have profound consequences for the forseeable future.

SOCIAL RESPONSE

Leadership has emerged only sporadically and most often locally. Testing is fraught with poor reliability and manipulated data reporting by some entities. Public faith in political and expert leadership has deteriorated.

Community cohesion is complicated. The desperation of the most dispossessed, many of whom are in the streets demonstrating now, may create symbolic unities that counter their amplified socio-biological vulnerabilities.

In other ways, I see community cohesion breaking down. I cannot smile at the elderly Fry's customer who is my anonymous neighbor. People do not look at one another in public places very much any more unless it is a direct challenge by some unmasked person signalling their liberty in the face of an undecided virus that could still turn out to be Stephen King's Captain Tripps.

The growing desperation of the anti-mask groups, including their public rallies, signifies to political divisions that I believe are as much socially-engineered as organically driven, although there are many social engineers potentially involved, ranging from international actors to local ones.

I've seen social media posts targeted very narrowly to people in my specific locality aimed at inciting fear and social paranoia.

There have been a series of fires over the last two months in Maricopa county. Driving up to Payson AZ we saw fire-devastated landscapes. On the way back we saw an entirely new fire, started right next to the highway. This fire was not seeded from the previous one. It was likely arson.

Fires starting next to highways/freeways seems to be a pattern. Who is starting these fires and with what intent?

The world is burning, symbolically in Dr. Fauci's metaphor of Covid-19 as an increasingly out of control forest fire; and literally, as disruptors literally set the world ablaze.

In the course of these fires I hope and pray for virtuous, courageous and enabled biological/institutional/social fire-fighters....


 
 

5 comments:

  1. We should expect it to act like SARS-1, it is a close brother.

    Even though communties do not reach herd immunity (60 to 80 % if you ask the experts), coronavirus NEVER come back in any serious way. SARS-1 was restricted to mostly Asia, and yet the whole world became immune? Why is that?

    stock sayeth, because an advanced evolutionary trait in human uses the collective unconscious to "program" production of the necessary T-cells.

    And NO ONE has a better theory.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Drs Fauci and Birx have done a rather poor job. Neither is an epidemiologist. Almost from the start there should have been the two categories: vulnerable and not vulnerable. Protection for the first class; and the second class can fend for itself. New York failed the best at this and sent infected persons back to nursing homes when there were viable alternatives.

    If say Dr Atlas, a retired medical professor at Stanford, had been in charge:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZqGSnVt8c8

    I have spent a great deal of time in the past several months tracking down virologists and epidemiologists. Also refreshing my memory about vaccines. And by the way there is no real class of persons for this vaccine as the young do not need it and the old should avoid it like the plague. It is great misfortune that we got stuck with Fauci and Birx. No lock down would have been the superior path. Masks are simply bad for one's health and do no good. I know people who were putting their mail in the oven.

    Fauci wanted the celebrity and wealth from a vaccine. He and Birx are connected to Bill Gates. There are serious problems with vaccines.

    There are serious scientific studies regarding masks. https://technocracy.news/censored-a-review-of-science-relevant-to-covid-19-social-policy-and-why-face-masks-dont-work/

    You will not find solutions to much of anything unless you look deeply and sometimes longly! But perhaps you prefer to buy your car from a used car dealer or place your safety in the hands of a politician. Go ahead. This is still a free country.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ER Doc – The Truth About COVID 19

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru7egBTOxB8

    If you have grown fond of your fear and anxiety do not watch the above. It will create alienation of affections.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and “I”"

    https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/to-quarantine-from-quarantine-rousseau-robinson-crusoe-and-i/

    ReplyDelete
  5. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like.shtml

    ReplyDelete

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