Pandemic!

????? ? ??????????? ????? ????????, ??? ????? ?? ??????? ???? ? ????? ?? ?????. ??????? ???? ??? ???????, ????? ????????? ????? ?? ???? ?????. ???? ??? ????? ???? ????? ??????, ?? ????? ?????? ???? ??????? ??? ??????.¹

The slow-motion global disaster of 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t fit any of the big screen—or small screen—cliches of rampant global outbreaks.

There are no heroes that save the day in a 2-hour action flic, a primetime drama with time out for commercial breaks, or a series on Netflix.

There are no archetypical villains—other than the virus—no evil scientists, no zombies, no misguided genius who meant well, no accidental release from a secret bioweapons lab.

Instead, we have governments’ floundering responses to a very infectious virus that has left over 840,000 dead and has infected more than 25 million people across the globe.  Some governments have had some amount of success in mitigating the catastrophic impacts of the pandemic—others, not so much.

I had developed a much longer blog post than this, which I am not going to try to recreate. For some reason, all that was saved was everything before this paragraph.

 I had written about the wide impacts of the pandemic.  While most people are focused on the local, state, or national impacts of COVID-19, this is an epidemic that is truly global in its reach.  This naturally occurring new (novel) virus is more infectious than influenza but somewhat less infectious than measles. 

There is no COVID conspiracy to benefit anyone, implant microchips, affect the outcomes of elections, skew the count of the number of cases or deaths, spreading by 5G, or any of a number of other theories.  Given the extent and duration of the extraordinary circumstances we are now in, it is understandable that there will be more questions about the how and why of things and reasonable to expect that some people will turn to notions of conspiracy to shape their understanding of today’s world.  Ironically, “research… indicates that outside of social media and the interests of journalists, most people probably have no idea these conspiracy theories exist.”²

COVID is not going to magically disappear any time soon and some of its effects may be very long-lasting, perhaps even permanent.

1. Editorial review of Pandemic, a limited release (April 1, 2016) science fiction movie subsequently released as video on demand (April 4, 2016).
2. Should we be worried about COVID-19 conspiracy theories?—The Big Q, Project for Media in the Public Interest (PMPI), University of Aukland, New Zealand

2020kickstart#17