Two Kinds of Dumb

I love to read.  Admittedly, I am not typically drawn towards light fare, although I do sit on the beach most weekends with my head in a book. To date this summer, I have read a number of books.  Presently, I am reading John M. Barry's The Great Influenza - The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.  To call Barry's book extraordinary is to be guilty of understatement.  It is my limited vocabulary that prevents me from better describing it.  It is an examination of a true, real-life event chock full of medical terms and scientific jargon written in the style of an impeccably well-done detective novel or murder mystery.  It is a book that I believe sincerely everyone should read or, at the very least, become familiar with what it discusses.  

While the governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic in these United States has been nothing short of criminally negligent, most pointedly at the federal level, there are lessons to be learned from Barry's book that every person, irrespective of your race, sex, gender, ethnicity, occupation, social class, or political affiliation should learn now and should sear into our mind's eye so that once learned they are never forgotten.  By way of illustration, Barry's explanation of what a virus is and what it does is entirely accessible and readily understandable whether you are fluent in the language of science or are Congressman Louie Gohmert: 

Regardless of where it began, to understand what happened next,

one must understand viruses and the concept of the mutant storm.

Viruses are themselves an enigma that exist on the edges of life.

They are not simply small bacteria. Bacteria consist of only one cell,

but they are fully alive. Each has a metabolism, requires food, 

produces waste, and reproduces by division. 

Viruses do not eat or burn oxygen for energy.  They do not engage in

any process that could be considered metabolic. They do not produce waste.

They do not have sex. They make no side products, by accident or design.

They do not even reproduce independently.  They are less than a fully

living organism but more than an inert collection of chemicals...

Whatever the origin, a virus has only one function: to replicate itself.

But unlike other life forms (if a virus is considered a life form), 

a virus does not even do that itself.  It invades cells that have energy

and then, like some alien puppet master, it subverts them, 

takes them over, forces them to make thousands, and in some cases 

hundreds of thousands, of new viruses.  The power

to do this lies in their genes.  

-Barry, The Great Pandemic at Chapter Seven, pages 98-99.

It is intellectually dishonest to claim that "no one saw COVID-19 coming" or to say that "no one could have predicted this pandemic".  There are now, as there were in 1918, learned scientists who lived to study viruses, such as the flu, to craft ways in which to contain them and, ultimately, to develop the means to stop them.  Unfortunately now, as happened in 1918, their counsel has been ignored seemingly every time adherence to it would inconvenience a politically significant portion of the electorate.  After all, it is an election year.  

Remember please that having intellectual dishonesty foisted upon you does not mandate that you must accept it.  You are free to ignore it altogether.  

You should. 

See, here's the thing.  When it comes to viruses such as COVID-19, no matter where you think it is you are being dumb, you are in fact doing it while in someone else's living room. 

-AK