Six on the Ronavirus: In intelligence terms, COVID-19 is a revolutionary situation; CVS Covid Test Worse Than No Test at All; Every sport has a coronavirus plan. MLB’s lasted four days; Here's what COVID-19 does to a child's body; Tracking The Epidem
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"As dangerous viruses go, COVID-19 appears to be a special case. The experts are trying commendably to understand it, but the novel coronavirus keeps surprising them. Could it conceivably never allow us to comprehend and tame it?
I have absolutely no expertise in viruses. Before retiring to write books, I was an intelligence and strategic analyst. That is the prism through which I look at COVID-19, and I have concluded that, fully half a year into the pandemic, our ignorance about it should be of great concern.
This virus repeatedly defies rational predictions and empirical deductions based on cumulative experience with earlier viruses like Ebola, HIV and SARS. In intelligence terms, it is the equivalent of a revolutionary situation. It’s a situation in which analysts can explain to us where we stand right now, but they should not be trying to predict where we will be tomorrow.
In an intelligence context, the term “revolutionary situation” means we can’t make reliable predictions. Think about past examples of political revolution, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, or the overthrow of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011, or even the chaotic, ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya. Most revolutionary actors, generally, do not know themselves what they will do the following day; they are overwhelmed by events. The only thing an external analyst can really do with certainty is to map out potential alternative scenarios based on multiple variables.
When applied to today’s pandemic, the term “revolutionary situation” means that none of us knows for sure what the virus will do tomorrow. Experts predicted the virus would disappear over the summer and return over the fall and winter months. Instead, in some parts of the world, including the United States, the number of active cases has erupted. COVID-19 was also not supposed to spread so easily among youth; turns out it does, yet its severity among youth is so negligible that they don’t take it seriously. This renders it all the more difficult to prevent the virus from spreading.
We still do not know with absolute certainty where COVID-19 comes from. An animal? (Which animal?) Was it an accidental leak from a laboratory? Experts are still arguing over the manner in which the virus becomes airborne: Big aerosol droplets, little aerosol droplets, or both? How far do they really “fly”? To which surfaces does COVID-19 stick, and for how long?
In other words, half a year into this pandemic, we still do not know exactly where and why COVID-19 is likely to thrive or die, and how it is transmitted.
Do those who recover from the virus have long-term immunity? Short-term immunity? Can they still transmit the virus? Ask again in five years when they are retested. Right now we do not know, and this is deeply disturbing.
When a certain individual in Washington periodically reassures us that COVID-19 will one of these days simply pack up and disappear, we snicker. Yet, objectively speaking, compared to alternative predictions, his loopy magical thinking may turn out to be no less accurate. Indeed, in intelligence terms, right now there are many things about COVID-19 we apparently don’t even know that we don’t know.
This, too, is extremely unsettling. Here is perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the COVID-19 conundrum: We tell ourselves that until there is an effective vaccine made available for universal use, this virus has to be understood as a very clever and dangerous enemy. Once this vaccine has been mass-produced and distributed globally, however, we can certainly go back to normal.
But what if it proves impossible to create a viable vaccine with long-lasting effects? What if there is no post-virus era? What if science is beaten by COVID-19 and our only recourse is a radical and permanent revision of our way of life? Is our absolute confidence in the emergence of an effective inoculation any more justified than some of our earlier mistaken assumptions regarding this virus?
Opinion: In intelligence terms, COVID-19 is a revolutionary situation
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CVS Covid Test Worse Than No Test at All
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CVS corporate and its associated PAC contributed $535,000 in donations in 2017 to political organizations that support Trump,
"Cancel the MLB year, maybe by the end of this week.
Forget about the NFL season; it’s never going to happen.
The idea of attempting a college football season — putting amateur athletes at risk — is obscenely unthinkable.
Within days or a couple of weeks, we also may find out just how feasible it is for the NBA, in its Florida bubble, or the NHL, playing in Canada, to finish truncated seasons and crown champions.
Sure, none of that is certain, but Monday morning’s news that at least 14 members of the Miami Marlins and their staff have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in recent days was a Category 5 covid-19 hurricane alert. You couldn’t have a worse MLB start or a grimmer predictor for other games. ...
The wider effect: Back-to-normal, or even semi-normal, in sports was shattered, just days after being reintroduced.
What does this mean?
Some events have ambiguous consequences. We won’t know their impact for some time. But in rare cases, one event may have enormous impact, just as the positive virus test for the NBA’s Ruby Gobert in mid-March resulted in the shutdown of every major sport within 48 hours.
This is such a moment — but perhaps bigger.
Why are we here? The answer is simple yet inexplicably unacknowledged in wide swaths of this country: The pandemic is in control, and it stays in control until you stop it, suppress it, dominate it and crush the curve.
Though many other countries have done it, America has not come within a million miles of that outcome.
As I pointed out in a column last week, when a league says, Given what we are seeing with covid-19 hitting our teams, maybe we should cancel the season, the correct response is “get rid of the word ‘maybe.’ ”
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The entire American experience of this pandemic has been: Don’t embolden the virus by acknowledging its threat. Try to outrun it, hide from it, say it’s not so bad and will go away.
That just breeds a disaster, and now that disaster has hit MLB just five days into its season. The Cincinnati Reds also have multiple positive tests. The Atlanta Braves have been without two catchers who have symptoms, though no positive tests. Nationals star Juan Soto is inactive after a positive test.
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You can’t be much healthier, as a group, than a pro baseball team. You can’t be much better protected or tested more often than an MLB team. The Marlins are close to the safest possible case. And now, less than a week into their season, at least half of the team has the coronavirus!
That is what is meant by “community spread.” That is what is meant by an “outbreak” in an epidemic. All of us have worried that one or two players — or people in the MLB community — would have bad outcomes from the virus if a 60-game season was played. Time to blow up that assumption. If half of the Marlins team can test positive within a few days, then the scale of danger to health — the number of people who may get sick and the severity of the damage they may suffer, including prime-of-life pro athletes — just shot through the ceiling.
Our assumptions, while well-intentioned, have been blown to pieces. And in short order, so will the season of one, or perhaps several, of our sports.
The Marlins are just the latest — but one of the most vivid — illustrations of what America is facing. And how little we are willing to take seriously the true measure of our fearsome enemy.
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Coronavirus Statistics: Tracking The Epidemic In New York
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Walsh praised the governor’s quarantine rule but said ideally students should quarantine for 14 days at home and then quarantine again for two weeks in Boston and test negative.
Walsh said he is concerned about whether students will follow safe practices. He does not want to have to use city police to monitor them — but said he would if necessary.
“People need to be careful. I would not advise college students to be having parties,” he said.
City councilors are also worried about schools’ ability to oversee the students who pack into off-campus apartments in their districts each September. In Mission Hill, Allston, Roxbury, and the Fenway, students live side by side with longtime residents, many of whom are low-income or people of color and therefore at greater risk of contracting the virus."
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