Pandemics are perversely democratic things. They are nasty things, lethal things, yes, but give them this, they don’t discriminate. No matter your age, race, gender, region—no matter your very species in some cases—you’re probably a part of the pathogenic constituency. It’s a global kind of kumbaya—even if it’s the kind that can kill you.
That human collectivism—a universal response to a universal threat—is newly and powerfully evident in the face of the now-global outbreak of coronavirus. As of February 1, there have been 250 deaths, nearly 12,000 diagnosed cases, and a virus that emerged in a single city in China—Wuhan—indeed, in a single crowded market in that single city, has now spread world wide, with cases in TK NUMBER of countries across the Pacific rim as well as in Europe, the Middle east and the U.S.
“During an outbreak, it takes only a few links to make the global population fully connected,” says Justin lessler, associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The last time a population was fully isolated was in the 15th century when the Spaniards came to the Americas and brought smallpox with them.”
Half a millennium on, the behavior of viruses hasn’t changed, but the behavior of their human hosts and victims has. If the response to new corona outbreak is showing anything, it’s that in an era of nativism, nationalism and a seeming breakdown of civility itself, we are actually getting better and better, smarter and smarter—and even kinder and kinder—at joining hands to battle a bug that threatens us all.
If there’s one thing that that gives the current coronavirus an edge that pandemics of earlier eras didn’t, it’s our new and growing state of human interconnectedness—with global air travel a force multiplier.
