110. The Curve

Dr. Wheelwright was the grand old man of the philosophy department at my college. We jockeyed to get into his limited seminars, even though we knew the grading was tough. Once, as we went over test results, a student asked how it was that he graded on a curve, but had given out no A’s. “I do grade on the curve,” said Dr. Wheelwright, “and it’s 30 years long. Some years there aren’t any A’s.”

 

In Rats, Lice, and History, author Hans Zinsser says the biologist’s task is to make the incremental discoveries that, over time, will lead to an understanding of diseases and their historical roles. He quotes another philosopher, Henry Bergson, that “a very small element of a curve is near being a straight line… [but] life is no more made up of physical-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.” 

 

The detail that Zinsser assembles in piecing together a “biography of Typhus Fever” and making the argument that infectious diseases have had greater impacts on history than have the movements of armies and the actions of generals—is prodigious. Tracing ancient texts from China to Egypt to Greece—many ancient plagues were thought to have originated in Ethiopia—and combing records for the appearances of lice and mosquitoes, and the “domestication” of rats, he concludes that infectious diseases are never static, and that the movement and mutations of these diseases to and from animal and insect populations will never end. The biologist—and the historian--work to grasp the inflections of the curves that have changed and might change the behavior of diseases, and the course of history.

 

The domestication of rats is due to affluence. I.e., with sufficient food supplies, rats do not need to travel as far for their own basic needs, and the diseases they carry are thus held to small human populations. And “were it not for the single and simple procedure of the Jennerian vaccination,” smallpox epidemics would be with us still, “attacking each new generation.”

 

It’s interesting to think now about where we are on the coronavirus curve. And to think about the impacts it has already had and will have on national and international politics. It succumbed to religious and political pressure in India, which resulted in super-spreading and a disease out of control. In Brazil, political divisions are deep with a president who scorned the disease. It had its role in our recent election, and President Biden has made overcoming it a keystone of his early presidency. 

 

Is it hidden in the violent outbreaks in Israel and Ethiopia? And has our Governor Brown made the right bets on closing and opening schools and the economy? Where are we on the curves?

 

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106. News of the Day

In today’s New York Times, we learn that “a year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.” In India, there were 276,000 new cases yesterday; the death toll—196,000—now surpasses Brazil’s and is second only to our own. Yesterday, after a string of weekly 20 % Covid increases in Oregon, there were 1020 new cases and nine new deaths; hospitalizations were 276, with 64 Oregonians in intensive care. New variants and relaxation of pre-vaccine rules for masks and distancing seem to be at the center of it.

The scientists tell us that we need 80 to 90 percent of the population inoculated or immune through having had the disease before we arrive at “herd immunity.” Given the news of the day and the continuing resistance of many to be vaccinated, that seems unlikely anytime soon. More likely is Governor Brown’s sending 12 counties back to the “extreme risk” category, and the return of restrictions on human activity across the country.

One can’t lay this situation to any one factor, but there are some common attributes of human behavior that seem to be involved. We like crowds, and we like leaders who like crowds; from     President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to our recent President Donald Trump, followers have gathered in crowded swarms without masks to hear their leaders. But there is a kind of opposing human action—egoism, the self-centeredness that encourage us to do what seems right or advantageous for me at the moment. At the end of this egoism is hubris, the radical individualism and overweening pride that puts me and my life about all others, with a supreme—and often tragic—confidence that I am right though the world around me says otherwise.

It all adds up as a recipe for a continuing struggle with Covid. It will bounce back and forth between counties, states, and countries, dipping here and exploding there, gaining traction with stronger variants, dipping as the citizens of a county, state, or country come together to look out for each other.

There’s the key. Do we have enough herd mentality left to build herd immunity midst a moving and changing covid? My mentor, Alvin Josephy, often said that Indians were the only ones in America still capable of “group think.” The news from a few Indian friends is that tribes are doing this. 

We might look now to Lapwai and Colville and Umatilla for guidance in human health—as we are looking to them for ways to fish, water and fire health. 

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