Mike Davis on Coronavirus: “In a Plague Year”
As coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, outpacing our capacity for testing, let alone treatment, the long-anticipated monster is finally at the door. And with global capitalism so impotent in the face of this biological crisis, our demands must be for properly international public-health infrastructure.
Passengers wear protective masks amid threats of coronavirus in Delhi, India. (Amarjeet Kumar Singh / Echoes Wire / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
Coronavirus is the old movie that we’ve been watching over and over again since Richard Preston’s 1994 book The Hot Zone introduced us to the exterminating demon, born in a mysterious bat cave in Central Africa, known as Ebola. It was only the first in a succession of new diseases erupting in the “virgin field” (that’s the proper term) of humanity’s inexperienced immune systems. Ebola was soon to be followed by avian influenza, which jumped to humans in 1997, and SARS which emerged at the end of 2002: in both cases appearing first in Guangdong, the world’s manufacturing hub.
Hollywood, of course, lustfully embraced these outbreaks and produced a score of films to titillate and scare us. (Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, released in 2011, stands out for its accurate science and eerie anticipation of the current chaos.) In addition to the films and the innumerable lurid novels, hundreds of serious books and thousands of scientific articles have responded to each outbreak, many emphasizing the appalling state of global preparedness to detect and respond to such novel diseases.
Chaos of Numbers
So coronavirus walks through the front door as a familiar monster. Sequencing its genome (very similar to its well-studied sister SARS) was a piece of cake, yet the most vital bits of information are still missing. As researchers work night and day to characterize the outbreak, they are faced with three huge challenges. First, the continuing shortage of test kits, especially in the United States and Africa, has prevented accurate estimates of key parameters such as reproduction rate, size of infected population, and number of benign infections. The result has been a chaos of numbers.
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