A global pandemic — We've been here before, but where are we going?

What's the progress on flattening the curve?

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I ran across a good resource for understanding the growth in the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate in the context of other nations.

The link below is regularly updated with live data. The important graph is the first one. That first graph shows growth-rate of confirmed cases, counting from the day a given nation first had 100 cases.

Coronavirus tracked : the latest figures as the pandemic spreads

Note two things:

1. The Y-Axis on this graph is log-scale, not linear. Those straight-ish growth-curves you see on this chart are actually exponential curves if you re-plot them on a linear scale.

2. The curve for the United States and the curve for Italy are thus far so closely aligned that you can barely detect that they are two separate lines.

In about 3 weeks we will know whether our ongoing efforts to "bend the curve" have been sufficient.

It's also worth observing that the current UK strategy is the classic "anti-vaxxer" strategy: let everyone get sick as quickly as possible, and let their immune systems sort it out so that herd immunity provides some protection for the rest of the population.

The standard epidemiological model for the minimum portion of the populace required to provide herd immunity is 1-(1/R0). For an R0 of 2.5, that means 60% of the population must become infected and begin to produce the required antibodies.

The historical precedent of pandemics

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While I'm not going to get involved any more in the debate about what strategy the government should be following to deal with the pandemic (there's an argument on both sides.) I will say that this is a genuine pandemic which means the virus is now all over the planet. Also, the virus has a truly dark combination of being highly infectious, and having both a large number of those infected with no symptoms and another large proportion requiring major health interventions, and being lethal in a not insignificant number of cases while not being lethal enough to limit the spread. That is a really bad combination. We are looking at something that will run for about 12 to 18 months from start to finish - it isn't going to be over by the Summer.

That said I'm thinking more about the historical precedents and what the likely results of this will be once it's finally over in about 18 months from now. We have a lot of history to go on because pandemics and very large scale epidemics that affected the whole of an ecumene (a part of the planet's surface with an integrated division of labour) have happened quite a few times. There's a pattern to this which is that such epidemics tend to happen after a long period of increasing trade and economic integration over a large part of the planet's surface. That's because the results of that process make such pandemics more likely.

COVID-19 is a trial run?

Medical experts have been worrying about this for some time because the way we live now means that sooner or later we will have a truly lethal pandemic - the odds in any one year are low but sooner or later the number is going to come up. (This is more like a trial run - the really really bad event would be a pandemic caused by a bacterial pathogen that is immune to antibiotics, so let's hope that doesn't happen any time soon).

The thing is major epidemics tend to arrest and then reverse that process of increased interconnectivity and integration. Economically the pandemic is going to severely disrupt global and longer distance supply chains and will likely accelerate a move back to a more localised economics. It will also almost certainly mean increased control of movement and not just over national borders. You should expect to see a lot of controls imposed on movements within states and these are unlikely to be lifted once they are imposed.

Pandemics like this tend to undermine the stability of established government systems because there's nothing like a major plague to make people pissed off with their rulers - they blame them even when they shouldn't. One reason for that is that people in the elite tend to die from the illness at a higher rate than ordinary people and this is disruptive. Another, because of their economic effects often cause a crash in asset values that wipe out a lot of the wealth of the elites - in this case the virus may well give a push to a structure that is in fragile state anyway because of the cumulative effect of deranged money over the last few decades.

Finally, major epidemics have pronounced psychological and cultural effects. You get simultaneously both an upsurge in millenarian religion and a feeling of "Hey life is short, I will live for the day". I already thought Extinction Rebellion were like flagellants, this will become even more obvious.