I have to tell you I consider one of my (rather few) talents is having a sense of where the future is headed.

So how did I miss the way this pandemic would engulf the world?

I’ll tell you. Give you a good laugh it will.

I figured we lived in a world where the germ theory of disease was well known. So all you had to do was understand how a given disease was transmitted, start the necessary public health measures, use the wealth of modern societies to pay for testing and tracing and treatment and provide the income support to avoid as much of the economic fallout as possible. And Bob’s your uncle.

After a few months of effort, it would all be over. We know how to do this, I thought.

…

Instead it turns out that we never really climbed out of the Dark Ages and we’re still living at the whim of so-called strongmen.

They’re not really strong, you know. They surround themselves with guards so they don’t have to stand much of anything. They don’t know how to persevere or take on burdens or never give up. Their only talent is not caring. They don’t care a used tissue’s worth about anyone else. About you or yours or your friends or your neighbors. To some people for some reason that looks like strength.

So now we’re dying by the hundreds of thousands. Once we’re done dying of this particular disease, the hundreds of millions of unemployed and bankrupt and ruined will continue dying with other causes listed on the death certificates.

There’s no point at all asking for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Maybe yesterday already. Maybe now. Maybe again. Maybe tomorrow. Any minute, anybody.

Same as everyone else, I’m like the Frenchman who, when the doctor started speaking of dying, said, “But I always thought an exception would be made for me!”

There’s no other way to live life except to ignore that it’s a terminal condition.

Until you can’t and some tinpot dictator rubs your face in the fact that they can rip up your life in a heartbeat. Then you tiptoe through the days knowing everything can shatter, and that you’ll have to walk on the fragments till they’re ground into dust and blow away.

I’ve been leaving this comment everywhere I can think of, because I’m impressed with this article by a reporter who looked at superspreader data very carefully. Jonathan Kay writing in Quillette.

The main groups of infection arise from places where people are in close proximity, indoors, and talking, laughing, singing loudly. That fits a pattern of mainly airborne infection by large droplets.

Being in close proximity for extended periods, such as members of the same household, is also very good at spreading it. But in terms of people you’re less close to, it seems to do best in enclosed areas where people are expelling air forcefully. The sport of curling, for instance, where the sweepers are practically nose-to-nose while working hard. That’s also why slaughterhouses are such a hotbed. Workers are inches away from each other, very noisy environment, and they have to shout to each other to do their work.

Not spread by aerosols (very small droplets) primarily, because then superspreading events would be in offices, on aircraft, and similar. New Zealand had a sort of natural experiment on that. One of their biggest clusters was centered on a flight attendant who worked on one of the usual nearly day-long flights before travelling to a wedding. The people on the planes he took did not get sick. People at the wedding did. (He was asymptomatic at the time.)

Also not primarily spread by touching surfaces, because then people like FedEx workers would be getting sick and being superspreaders. That’s not the pattern so far, either.

This isn’t to say you can’t get it via aerosol or surfaces. Just that those don’t look like the main routes.

It’s a fascinating article, quite long, well worth a read. The news-you-can-use part is that it means masks, any masks, even tea towels, plus distancing are the two most useful things to do when out and about.