The Covid 19 pandemic has shut down the US (and the world).
It is the first time in my life that I have personally been affected by a pandemic. Until now, I never strongly considered things like quarantines, food supply shortages, enforced isolation, hospitals being overwhelmed, global economic shutdowns, societal panic and poorly thought out government responses.
Over the past month, I’ve had many questions:
- When will this be over?
- What are my chances of getting sick, suffering, or dying?
- Are the government and media telling the truth?
- Is this an overreaction?
I searched for answers from local and international news sources. I listened carefully to government advice and tried to critically assess the information presented by epidemiologists, health care workers and government officials.
I even began a statistics course to learn how to interpret scientific models and tests.
What I really wanted to know was: When will life get back to normal?
Then someone suggested I read two books:
The Plague by Albert Camus which is a novel about a doctor who lives in a mid sized city in France that is hit by the plague in the early 1900s.
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe which is a historical fiction novel about a man who lived in London during the Black Plague outbreak of 1665.
These books led me to do more historical reading (wikipedia, world health sites etc.)
What I read was shocking to me. Now I have answers to all of my questions – even those questions I didn’t know enough to ask.
Plagues and pandemics have been happening forever. They occur so regularly that my 51 year life without experiencing one is an aberration.
Normal is not the insulated, comfortable and convenient life I lived. Normal is periods of respite interspersed with pandemic, plague, war and other natural or manmade catastrophes.
It was inevitable this would happen. I (and apparently many others) just never paid any attention to humanity’s history which clearly tells us so.
I recommend reading the two books above.
I was shocked that the experiences of the people, thoughts, the feelings, and even the government reactions were so similar to what we are going through today.
So similar that they are in many cases identical:
- Disbelief and minimizing that a pandemic is happening
- Thoughts that “this will be over soon”
- Models, estimates, forecasts and predictions varying from loosely based science to wishful thinking
- Hoarding, shortages and panic buying
- Economic shutdowns with the poorest people still working in the most dangerous jobs
- Quarantine, “Social distancing” and Isolation being used as the primary methods to combat the disease
- Magical thinking and hope for treatments and cures
And eventually, after much longer than expected (months, years, decades or centuries) a slow lessening of the problem as the disease peters out or moves on to another region.
Then we forget and go about living our insular, convenient and comfortable lives once again. Forgetting what we learned and being surprised when it happens again.
This may sound bleak to you , but I find it to be hopeful. We are not separated from nature. Knowing this and accepting it brings me peace and answers to my questions I had struggled with.
This is the new normal.
I can accept it and have peace or I can fight it and suffer.
We can’t conquer nature. We can’t barely control our reactions to it. Reading about society’s reactions to plagues and disease from the early centuries to today confirms that we haven’t really changed as much as we’d like to think.
If you want answers to your pandemic questions, skip the endless news cycles and read those two books. You may find even more than you are looking for.