From Emily Landon, chief infectious Disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago:

“It’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world when you’re watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right, nothing happens, A successful shelter in place means you’re going to feel like it was all for nothing, and you’d be right: Because nothing means nothing happened. And that’s what we’re going for here.” (“One doctor’s straight talk about the coronavirus strikes a chord with anxious Americans“)

A couple of points to be made here: Actually, I can’t think of anything more depressing than binge-watching Netflix or anything else, but perhaps I won’t say anything more about that. Secondly, and more importantly, success is invisible when it consists of something that didn’t happen. That principle is part of the reason why we pay so much attention to the outliers in some successful treatment. Vaccines, for example (I say as I climb up onto a well-worn hobbyhorse) prevent disease. While we can determine to some extent how many people would have gotten sick without a vaccine, we can’t ever know if that disease would have struck in our little circle. We do know, though, if the vaccine harms us. So if it’s my child who belongs to the tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who have some kind of severe reaction to the polio vaccine, you’d better believe that I’m going to be hopping mad. But it almost certainly will not be my child, and so I’ll never know. I’ll be like the Netflix surfer, blessed by what didn’t happen.

Another article, this one from City Journal, compares the 2020 outbreak to that of 1957, the year of the so-called “Asian flu”–

Today, I look back and wonder if an oblivious America faced the 1957 plague with a kind of clueless folly. Why weren’t we more active in fighting this contagion? Could stricter quarantine procedures have reduced the rate of infection and lowered the death toll? In short, why weren’t we more afraid?

It’s hard to answer that question without explaining what it was like to grow up in an age of infectious illness. My mother once showed me a list of the contagious diseases she survived before the age of 20. On the list were the usual childhood illnesses, along with deadly afflictions like typhoid fever, pneumonia, diphtheria (it killed her older brother), scarlet fever, and the lethal 1918–19 Spanish flu, which took more than 50 million lives around the world.

For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four. Polio took a heavy annual toll, leaving thousands of people (mostly children) paralyzed or dead. There were no vaccines. Growing up meant running an unavoidable gauntlet of infectious disease. For college students in 1957, the Asian flu was a familiar hurdle on the road to adulthood. For everyone older, the flu was a familiar foe. There was no possibility of working at home. You had to go out and face the danger. (from “Say Your Prayers and Take Your Chances“)

There wasn’t anything you could do about the situation, and so you didn’t. (The author of this article is, as he says, at an “advanced 80-something age.) Now we can, so we do. It’s the old quandary of unintended consequences–what will be the true cost in lives from the economic shutdown, as opposed to the lives that would be lost if we didn’t shut things down? Impossible to know, now or indeed ever. We just have to do the best we can, with the information we have.

In the continuing spirit of my finding strange comfort in disaster literature, I’m listening to 2014 novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, about a post-apocalyptic world in which 99% of the world has been wiped out by the “Georgia flu.” I don’t know if it’s Georgia the state or Georgia the area in Russia. (I think the latter.) It’s a pretty good novel, I have to say–focused not on the immediate affects of the pandemic with its chaos and horror but on how the world looks 20 years later, with some great characters skillfully drawn. And I’ve just checked out the last book in the Little House series, The First Four Years, which chronicles (what else?) the first four years of Laura and Almonzo Wilder’s marriage. Every year has its own disaster, and I’ll be revisiting them as I read. I remember the locusts and (I think) a prairie fire. (See below–neither of these things happens, but plenty of others do.) They also have Rose, their only child, so there’s that bright spot. Even with that event, though, there’s a strange, sad incident: As Laura and Almonzo are leaving the homestead of the Boasts, a childless couple who have been friends of the Ingalls family for many years (they show up in at least two prior novels), Mr. Boast comes out with them and says as they climb into the buggy, “If you folks will let me take the baby in to Ellie for her to keep, you may take the best horse out of my stable there and lead it home. . . . You folks can have another baby, and we can’t. We never can.” Laura is astonished and appalled: “Oh no! No! Drive on, Manly!” But she is sorry for them, all alone on that homestead, knowing that there will be no one to inherit it.

I looked up that passage before reading the book as a whole, but now, as I finish this post, I’ve read the whole thing. (It’s pretty short.) So I’ll just list what all happened in those first four years: A hailstorm with hailstones literally the size of baseballs hits just before Almonzo harvests the wheat. It’s all beaten into the ground, a whole harvest wasted. Almonzo and Laura both get diphtheria, and because Almonzo exerts himself too much before he’s fully recovered, he suffers a mild stroke. I know from other sources that he never fully recovered, but boy! he sure works hard for someone who’s partially disabled. A hot, dry wind kills the wheat and oats just as they’ve come up, so another harvest is lost. Almost all of the trees on Almonzo’s second claim die, thus making it necessary for him to pay Uncle Sam $1.25 an acre or he’ll lose his claim. There’s a huge dust storm right after wheat planting, blowing all of the seed away, so they have to buy new seed. Let’s see–I think there’s another harvest disaster, but that gives you an idea. Laura has her baby Rose who’s a joy and delight, but the doctor has to come out from town for the birth and that costs them $100. And other debts are mounting, multiplied by outrageous interest rates–3% per month for some of them. Laura then has a second baby, a boy, who dies within a few weeks of “spasms.” We’re told that “to Laura, the days that followed were mercifully blurred. Her feelings were numbed and she only wanted to rest–to rest and not to think. But the work must go on. Haying had begun . . . ” And then, to cap their four years, the claim shanty burns down. Laura, Almonzo and Rose are given shelter by a couple of bachelor farmers in return for Laura’s doing the housework for them. Remember, there’s no insurance, either medical or property. There are no government bailouts. Almonzo and Laura do have Laura’s parents living nearby, but there’s no hint that they can get any financial help from them. Ma and Pa have troubles and needs of their own, although Ma of course shows up for the births. That all gives you an idea. What a catalog of disaster! And yet the book ends hopefully, with Almonzo having built a new claim shanty before winter sets in. And that’s where the whole Little House series ends, but of course that’s not the end of the story for Laura and Almonzo. They ended up in Missouri and there they prospered. We were so privileged to visit their home which is now a museum last summer.

Well, I’m way over my limit of 1,000 words per post, so I’ll get to some recipes later this week. Y’all stay safe!

How Do You Measure Success These Days?