Sylvia's Journal

With new variants of the no longer novel coronavirus, I hear less and less people saying, “when we get back to normal again.” Although we are adapting, we cannot quite suspend the longing to connect with each other the way we used to.  Is this really the end of our familiar world? 

I am reading Station Eleven, which was released as a TV miniseries in 2016, created by Patrick Somerville based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel.

At that period (2014-2016) I still worked at MSH. I was marginally involved in one of several projects funded by the US government, to predict and prepare for pandemics. Americans were shaken only a little bit by SARS and MERS, and then by Zika. But life continued pretty much the old way. Our former president, who’s name shall not be mentioned, stopped the funding of any project related to pandemic preparedness. The elaborate and painstakingly built network of institutions around the world, collaborating on pandemic preparedness, lost its funding and weakened as a result. We are now paying an enormous price for that pennywise and pound-foolish act.

And so now I’m reading this dystopian story of Station Eleven, where society has completely collapsed and the few survivors of the ‘Georgia virus’ must fend for themselves and learn to live without electricity, without fuel, without healthcare, without medicine, without jobs and shops, without money and banks, and without any form of governance other than arms and power.

It is a dark story, with occasional sparks of caring and compassion. But it is a story nevertheless that has sprouted out of the imaginative mind of Emily St. John Mandel. Not real.

But then I read the NYT (1/19) story about a mink farms in various parts of the world that have turned out to be reservoirs of coronavirus. It explains the concept of spillback, when a virus first spills over from animals into humans and then spills back into animals again, where it can freely mutate and jump from species to species. The preventive measures that we take as humans seemed very insignificant in stopping this very clever virus. It is a story about the consequences of how we treat animals for profit. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. This is not an imaginary story that came out of somebody’s imagination. This is real.