This was originally posted on blogger.

Like Episode 7 of Star Wars, no one saw the third wave of Coronavirus coming. At least, I sure didn’t. This time, our suffering has less to do with the strength of the virus and more to do with poor governance in supposedly advanced countries. It’s rather shameful, really, but either way, the best thing we can do is sit at home and wait.

Anyways, I was walking to the test site and had some meandering thoughts that even if not too intelligent, stand as a record of this period in history:

1. First I realized that interestingly, in these times we are guilty until proven innocent. Laws and social norms are really the same thing (to different extents) but under the Coronavirus judicial system, the rules are severe. Even before someone enters your house, we assume they have COVID (well, unless there’s biological evidence otherwise!). Guilty until proven innocent.
2. Our friends at the CDC have used the famous number, R-naught (as did Boris Johnson when he issued his first plan for recovery), but maybe that’s misleading. Another way to think about the spread of COVID is through networks. If you’re 3 degrees of separation from someone who tested (ie. your father’s sister’s friend), what’s the chance that you will, too? How many days will it take? The temporal aspect to networks isn’t something we think about too often.
3. Put away your phone! I mean, I should, at least. We get so little human contact these days, so we may as well soak it in while we’re out.
4. Does COVID change our quality of life? I mean for those still with food, water, and shelter, but stuck in our homes all day. How different is staring at a computer screen to going to a lecture and staring at a podium? Some would say that you can be happy anywhere, no matter the circumstances, if you have peace of mind. At the same time, lacking basic needs does make us less happy, and we don’t see new people very often these days. But is Zoom a substitute for that?
5. COVID will probably be the next 9/11. We’ll all remember where we were during the initial quarantine, though the stories to tell won’t be that exciting. I imagine there’ll come some time when people have forgotten about COVID-19 – perhaps in 20, 30, or 50 years – and us geezers will think, “ya’ll are too young to remember the 2020 pandemic.”
6. I read about some protesters in Brazil marching for the climate and because their government had mishandled the virus. Now, I sure wish Americans and Brits had the guts to do that. But it’s hard to voice political disagreement when there’s a virus. It’s a unique state of emergency where the very act of gathering (normally protected via. Freedom of Speech) is pretty taboo. Also, with something like a pandemic (and many other emergencies) the knowledge / expertise is concentrated in the hands of “professionals”, who normally don’t go about getting arrested for political causes. So people protesting must first educate themselves on the science of the issue, then understand the politics of the situation, then take action. That’s a high bar!
7. As Jason Hickel commented in a recent Tweet (as did Kim Stanley Robinson in his podcast with Ezra Klein), the Coronavirus is a glimpse into capitalism’s response to a crisis. In other words, pathetic. Both the coronavirus and the climate crisis are transnational, demand a socialized economy, and though devastating act through slow violence. We need to prepare ourselves for the next crisis after COVID, and the work begins now.