In one of the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcasts, they briefly mentioned a book by Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes. [I guess the publishers are not Bob Dylan fans] Several of the doctors said they thought it was great, or it was on their reading list, so I added it to mine.
Mitchell and Webb are good at sly social commentary as well as silliness. If you haven’t seen their “are we the baddies?” sketch, go search it up on the internet; it’s great.
There’s no way I’m the only person who has had this idea. But I don’t see a lot of talk about it, so it seemed like it was worth exploring.
[Warning: medical models and vintage tools]
It is, sort of. The thing is that it’s a “flu” nobody has resistance to. Usually the flu comes through every year and a few people die – more than have died, so far, of the coronavirus. The difference is emotional – it’s the difference between squirting blood from an arterial wound, and having a bloody nose. We’ve all had bloody noses and we know how to handle them and mostly, we’ll be OK.
In 2001 (or thereabouts) I attended some health and safety events sponsored by the Alliance of Professional Tattooists.
In 1999, I was returning from teaching a class at Arthur Andersen University in Downer’s Grove near Chicago. At the time, I lived in Baltimore; it was a short flight.
After we’ve collapsed our civilization and made huge swaths of the planet uninhabitable, it’s just going to open up new opportunities for others. They won’t be others that are interesting, in the sense that we are (in the sense that we mine oil and burn it and fly through the air and argue about going to Mars) but life’s going to be hard to completely eradicate.
Not that we aren’t trying.
The coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is scary and, having been in the path of a near-lethal coronavirus, one of the worst parts is wondering, “how much worse can this get?” and suspecting that the answer is “a whole lot.”
Fortunately, the coronavirus is not as bad as it could be; certainly it’s nowhere in the league of SARS or the 1911 swine flu. Which is a good thing, because it does not seem as though humanity’s response to the virus has been super effective.
When I was in high school, we were assigned to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and we also watched the movie so we could discuss the relationship between movie versions and books; it was a great class.