We will be reminding our new generations how many people died who need not have died, had they just stood still sooner.
We will be telling tales of the damage caused by people buying authority in excess of their wisdom and selling lies rather than admit their wisdom is not absolute and universal.
Covid-19, as a globally unfolding event, is being recorded in unprecedented detail and in real-time. We will have crunched the numbers long before a hundred years have passed and will know exactly the cost of recklessness.
There will be so much data and so many records from all over the world that nobody will be able to pretend their part in what happened when it gets picked over in legal detail later.
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When Covid-19 first raised its head in China it is not a surprise it was a few days before they knew quite how dangerous it was, nor that they hoped it would turn out to be a local incident unworthy of global note. The important thing is what they did as soon as they realised their hopes would be dashed.
The Chinese government warned the wider world, put all non-essential activity at home on pause and told everybody there to stand still. Then they threw all the resources of China into saving lives.
The Chinese didn’t pretend to the world it should expect a few people to get the sniffles soon. The Chinese were not being boastful when they showed the world they could build a specialist hospital in a handful of days, they were demonstrating the urgency they saw to build a specialist hospital.
The Chinese people were not being oppressed by an authoritarian regime when they were held in their homes and individuals were being walked immediately into quarantine at the first symptom of trouble, they were being kept safe by one.
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When Covid-19 first raised its head in Europe there were no illusions in government about what had happened in China or doubts about what needed to be done but the political system differed in Europe. Hence it was necessary to pass emergency laws to centralise all costs to government that would arise from putting all non-essential activity on pause and from telling everybody to stand still before the button was pressed and the order issued.
Guidance was given to socially-distance and to voluntarily take precautions while systems were devised and paperwork was drawn up as completely as urgency allowed for no individual, when all this is over, to reasonably complain at their own eventual financial loss or at someone else’s eventual gain arising directly from the normal activity of the country being placed on hold by law.
But as soon as the mechanism was in place to centralise a country’s Covid-19 costs to one national account, thereby giving nobody a valid reason for kicking-off about having to stay home and watch telly instead of risking death on crowded streets, all non-essential activity was put on pause and everybody was told to stay home.
Meanwhile all available health resources were being put toward keeping people alive wherever the virus had already reached.
European people were not being oppressed by suddenly authoritarian governments when they stayed home, they were trying to stay safe and to ease the burden on the people saving lives. Their police were active to make sure everyone did their equal bit and didn’t take avoidable risks.
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When Covid-19 first raised its head in America the President called it a hoax. He shrugged it off as a political attack on his person. If the coronavirus came up in interview he talked it down and spoke of his own greatness.
Days passed. China and Europe continued to demonstrate how to contain a virus through lock-down and Europe was demonstrating how delaying lock-down even just for the legal process to enable it fairly in a democracy carried a cost in lives.
The President spoke of his greatness and the greatness of his followers while, as a child might, name-calling any who doubted his wisdom was absolute.
The scientists in America began to shout, the people in America who were paying attention to the scientists began to shout, too, the President spoke calmly of miracles and pinned his hope to Easter as a day to celebrate his anti-viral victory in churches all across his land.
Then hospitals began to shout and his celebration was postponed
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It seems the global memo to pass supportive legislation to take the financial burden off individuals had reached the US Congress and Senate because, albeit reluctantly, it was done.
But the bit about hitting the pause button and locking the whole country down as soon as you physically can so the virus can be stopped from spreading and killing people seems to have been mislaid. [*]
Time passed. Time during which the scientists’ screams became so loud the President could hardly hear even his own voice praising his greatness on his cable TV.
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We cannot trust the President to ever tell us truthfully what made him lose faith in his pastors’ adoring assurances - I can think of nowhere else from which a businessman of long-established low repute would draw expectation of miracles by Easter. Clearly he turned to science only after superstition had let him down.
He then lent doctors his stage from which they soon said things he did not want to have heard. Scientific facts became the celebrity draw and the President tried hard to look important as he introduced experts to deliver wisdom that he could not comprehend.
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The man who believed he knew everything, who was intoxicated by the authority of his purchased puppet-rank to the extent of hallucinating his own divinity, the man who led prayer for himself before government business, the man whom wealthy pastors queued eagerly to touch, was being smacked in the face, repeatedly and with increasing force, by a world more real than any he had ever known.
The man who quite literally painted his public image to match the one in his mirror at home, compensating with make-up in the glare of broadcast news that the light that bathed him for the public record was not first softened and warmed by reflection off his gold, had fear in his uncovered eyes.
He stared right and he stared left and he stared straight ahead of him in shock. Then he looked down and saw there was blood on his hands. For in them lay the responsibility he so vehemently denies.
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The rest is not yet even recent history. But unnecessary carnage will continue over in the US while people argue for the sake of it whether anyone has a constitutional right to tell an American to stand still, even if standing still is the only possible way to stop the virus spreading and killing more Americans.
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At the time of posting this answer the Johns Hopkins statistics page is reporting just over 266,000 US confirmed Covid-19 cases, and 6921 deaths. Individual American States and cities are shutting themselves down to varying degrees to protect themselves but it seems they are waiting for proof they have a problem locally in order to justify imposing any restrictions at all.
Being yet without a countrywide lock-down and without a coordinated response to focus existing resource upon immediate need and to urgently create resource for future need, we will be teaching the US’s story as a cautionary tale of how bad a disaster can become if rules are not made to bend to meet reality as it changes.
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People have died because of their blind faith in the irrefutable wisdom of priests in biblical scripture for thousands of years. Now we are seeing Americans of all religions and none being killed by those with blind faith in the irrefutable wisdom of the handful of politicians who wrote their constitution, semantics again being held more sacred than human life itself.
America is currently responding to a pandemic exactly as it would have done in the 18th century, with momentary shrugs, days of prayer, weeks of hopeful denial, then an extended period of chaos and catastrophic loss of life.
[*Closing the international doors to America just trapped the virus somewhere it had 350,000,000 people to infect. That doesn’t count as a lock-down.]
