On Winning the COVID Wars
It won't be easy. But a clear path to beating COVID-19 is emerging.
And so, it’s war.
As it has done countless times before, society has begun the deep restructuring needed to battle a serious invader. This time the enemy is called COVID-19. This is a sneaky smart attacker who seems to take casualties everywhere, from out of nowhere. The reach is impressive: Hotspots in New Rochelle and Seoul. Thermal scans and social distancing in Bali and Australia. Lockdowns in Italy, El Salvador, and the Davao City Jail in the Philippines.
It reminded us of how the North Vietnamese snuck down into the south to attack the Americans in the 1968 Tet Offensive. Just tinier and more lethal.
As it has with previous conflicts, humankind has immediately innovated: A la In and Out Burger, drive-through COVID-19 testing sites are popping up. No fries with that test, please. The Reserve Bank of Australia is quarantining not just people, but bank notes, to limit the spread of the disease. It is marvelous to watch our leaders finally respecting the facts behind words and numbers. If you confuse pandemic vs. epidemic, or blow the numerics involved in infection curves or flub how denominators work in fatality ratios, it could be life or death.
That’s progress in the age of Fake News.
Make no mistake, the COVID Wars will not be an easy win: The casualties involved will be in line with the world’s greatest conflicts: 160 to 215 million Americans will come to carry the virus, says leaked data to The New York Times. Some 80% of total populations in more densely populated places like England and Europe could be affected. And calculating the attendant deaths from all that transmission is nearly impossible to predict now.
That means that the best direct reporting we could find on surviving COVID-19 was the advice we got long ago from our tough-as-nails forbears, who survived from the Spanish Flu, back in Europe in the 1920s, not once but three times:
“Get up. Get going. Learn. And keep moving.”
Taking our cue then, from the survivors who gave us the chance to win this battle, let’s begin with a clear and bracing truth: When it comes to winning the COVID Wars, it will be those who don’t show symptoms that carry the secret to beating the disease.
The experts we’ve spoken with have two messages: The headlines may go to the people and their tools who race to save the lives of those infected by COVID-19: Those who build out the hospital beds, install the pulmonary ventilators, and open more and better testing to everyone.
But the real heroes will be the scientists, companies and investors who decipher how contagions like COVID-19 affect those who never need to be treated in the first place.
The key to the novel coronavirus will be understanding the vast group of asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers that spread the disease. Whoever can rapidly identify, model and treat these asymptomatic carriers will hold the secret to winning the COVID Wars.
When on the dawn of that CV Day finally comes, with it will come a new age of public health and info-pharmaceuticals that should be able to diagnose and prevent most any communicable diseases, whether it be COVID-19, measles or, potentially, insect-borne diseases like Lyme.
The COVID Wars are the battles we should have been fighting all along. And yes, we do have some ideas on how to wage such an info-analytic campaign.
