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| Check-in area at Frankfurt Airport on April 5, 2020, emptied by Coronavirus (Stefan Moechel/Shutterstock). |
"My first observation is that even major things like coronavirus seldom change the course of history. While there are genuine 'world-historical' events—Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as a state religion, the fall of the Roman Empire, the collapse of China’s Song Dynasty, the 1347-51 Black Death, colonisation of the Americas, the Mughal conquest of India—they are few and far between. Instead, what serious but lesser happenings do is enormously amplify and accelerate trends that were already present. Of course, you often can’t tell the difference between a 'serious-but-lesser' and a world-historical event as it’s happening. Nonetheless, from where I sit, coronavirus falls into the former and not the latter category."
~ Helen Dale, from her post 'Life After the Plague'
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3 comments:
Oh, hell, you don't need hindsight for this thing.
Frankly, it's a bit of a letdown. It's far from the big event I was promised. I want my money back. Don't you? If this is the Big One, where are all the body bags, the civil unrest and the machine gun fire?
What we have is bored folks under soft house arrest, and yet a very staunch level of private enterprising giving the folks what they need when they need it; that is, to the extent that the control freaks at the Ministry of ShutTheFuckUpAndDoWhatYouAreTold allow.
I might just be able to order a tube of draft sealant at Mitre 10 if I play my cards right. But that cheesy pizza still seems to hold a major health risk. A fresh Big Mac seems months away.
I don't see this event as being all that serious frankly. The predicted death toll is EXACTLY the estimated death toll for influenza in 2017-2018 season (61,000) which is a little more than this year (45,000) and far less by proportion of population than the flu killed before the vaccine (it works out to 180,000 based on our population today)
When we cough in Bangkok we do so quietly, joining the tens of thousands of other low synmptom or asymptomatic cases.The commercial centre is a grimy empty mess, but out here in reality land the street food is still just as bad.
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