When the coronavirus started to become a serious threat, my first reaction was irritation. I was having the time of my life at McDonald Observatory and I was being sent home early. It made perfect sense for Jeff Davis county to remove all the outsiders as quickly as possible. If people started to get sick, there were very few doctors. Nevertheless it was frustrating to be leaving one of the safest places in the entire country to rejoin life in an urban hotspot.As things started to deteriorate, my next reaction was not to let this virus ruin me like the financial crisis of 2008. It took me over a decade to get back to even after that debacle. I started making lists of stocks to buy when the market reached a bottom. I actually thought that this bottoming out might occur in less than a month. Boy, was I wrong on that one.
My thoughts have changed again. I'm pretty sure that despite heroic efforts around the world, a ton of people are going to die. You can't stop a plague. What we are witnessing is as bad or worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. Time will only tell if it eventually rivals the Black Plague of the 1300's. Overpopulation, globalization, hyperconnectivity and centralized supply chains have combined to create a deadly stew that is spreading throughout the world like an uncontrolled wildfire. The loss of life is terrible, but I'm more worried about the end of civilization as we know it. There has to be an end game for all this. You simply can't shut the world down indefinitely and expect things to end well.
I believe the experts who say it will take well over a year to develop an effective vaccine. Who knows. The vaccine might not even work very well. Some flu vaccines are notoriously ineffective. What if summer comes and goes and there is still no effective treatment? How long is is even feasible to shut the world down? There is a breaking point. We just don't know what it is yet. At some point we are all going to have to decide whether saving lives or saving society is more important. Remember when most of Australia was on fire a few months ago? People were making all these heroic efforts to put the fires out, but what eventually ended things was rain. This virus will eventually run its course and disappear, but I don't think things will ever return to normal.
I guess the question now is what the new normal will look like. Forget about politics. Politicians aren't going to create the future. The virus is. I still think that nature has hit the reset button. The world wasn't sustainable for very long as it is today. At some point it would have all come crumbling down anyway. Now we don't really have the luxury of continuing to kick the can down the road for the next generation. Lets get it right this time. We can survive with 30% less people. I'm not sure how long we can survive if civilization crumbles.
I'm staying isolated, but the world keeps coming to me. The electricians came back today to finish the work they'd started several weeks ago. I stayed in the other end of the house with Dawn and thanked them when the wiring in the bathroom had been fixed. Electricians are considered an essential business and I'm not going to criticize anyone who is nice enough to help me out. I didn't ask these guys to come over though. They just did it on their own. They both seemed strangely unaware of the pandemic. I wiped everything down after they left and all is well. Dawn wasn't happy though. She doesn't like strangers in the house.
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