America Surrendered to Coronavirus — the Result is a Tidal Wave of Death

Coronavirus in America has done something bizarre, nightmarish, and gruesome.

America’s line towers over the rest of the world. And then, unlike many other countries, rich and poor, it doesn’t decline. It doesn’t crest, like a wave. Instead, it plateaus.

The only accurate way to describe it, I think is this. America has had a tsunami of death.

Americans struggle these days, asking: is this the first wave? What about the second wave? The descriptions feel wrong because they are. America doesn’t have a wave. America has a tsunami.

There’s a very, very big difference.

Do you see how odd that chart looks? How it’s strangely, grotesquely misshapen, lopsided, humpbacked? It doesn’t look like a wave because it’s not one. No crest, no trough. It is something else entirely, that points to a very different story unfolding.

The strange, unfamiliar, weird shape of this chart — it contains multitudes. It tells the story of a catastrophic, terrible, and needless tragedy — one so surreal that I have to reach back into history to really explain it well. Let me begin here.

When we encounter a pandemic, we — modern people — expect something like a wave. We instinctively look for one. We see in our minds something like this. An exponential rise, a crest, and a rapid fall. That never happened in America, and it is not about to happen anytime soon, but we’ll get to that.

The wave is the shape we expect in this day and age when it comes to a pandemic for one of two reasons. One, some killer diseases, like Ebola, burn themselves out — let’s leave those aside for now. Two, measures are put in place to “flatten” the exponentially rising curve. Hence, the shape of a wave — a rising crest, and a falling trough — develops. A disease spreads, and we tamp it down. If we’re very good at this — preventative measures, limiting the spread of a disease, and so forth — then we get a proper wave. We have “crunched” the curve — meaning we’ve produced a recognizable trough. Or at least we’ve flattened it, meaning we’ve made the crest fall.

That’s what happened in many countries, from New Zealand to South Korea to Vietnam. They tested, traced, took swift, decisive action. The wave-shape emerged. Explosive rise — sudden, swift fall. Crunch. Others flattened the curve — Italy, France, Germany. Not quite such a symmetrical wave — but a decisive decline, nonetheless.

Here’s my point. We’re used to thinking of “waves” precisely because we ‘re lucky enough to live in an age in which we can combat and thwart disease, quickly and decisively. Waves are things we make.

But it wasn’t always like this.

If we don’t, or couldn’t, take measures, though — fast, strong, quick enough — what happens? Well, centuries ago, there would just be an exponential rise, and then a long, long decay. The rise might take a year or two — but then that disease might take a very, very long time to go away. How long? In the middle ages, for example, it took centuries for the plague to finally relent. From their perspective, “waves” would recur every five years or ten years or so — but looking at it over time, we’d see the strange, misshapen hump of a tsunami, with water bubbling on top, a disease that spread like wildfire — but plateaued, before decaying.

Think of a disease like smallpox. Sometime in the deep past, it emerged. Bang! There wasn’t a wave. There was an explosion, and then a tsunami. One that never really relented, until the 1970s, after the invention of the smallpox vaccine. Before that, smallpox just took up permanent residence in the human population, at a stable level of infection. No wave. Just a terrible plateau, that went on generation after generation. See the difference?

We expect a “wave” precisely because we live in a modern world. We have tools and mechanisms and ways to combat the spread of disease. Back then?

The world was poor, and civilization was ignorant of how disease worked. And so disease like polio and smallpox and the plague so forth spread like wildfire, in huge, terrible pulsations. People had some basic idea that disease was contagious — but nobody really knew quite how. There was no choice but to suffer this terrible hump-backed shape, which represents so much pain and terror, over and over again. Smallpox’s tsunami — not wave — lasted for much of human history.

We are not in that era of history anymore. We know how disease works. And people have enough resources to isolate themselves for a few weeks and months, for that very reason. We have modern governments and societies, too, who, putting all that together, should be able to act to protect societies decisively and swiftly.

We should never, ever see a tsunami shape like the one we do see in America. Ever again in history. That’s why this shape looks so unnatural, so weird, so eerie and strange because it is, at this juncture of human history.

It’s frightening because it’s something out of our experience. It harkens back to much, much darker times in history, times made of ignorance and poverty, which are the true handmaidens of disease and death.

This weird, misshapen tsunami-like chart feels so unnatural, so strange, because it is. It’s something we should expect to see from a plague in medieval times, or a smallpox explosion somewhere in farm country before modern theories of disease really emerged.

This eerie tsunami shape, in this day and age — it carries a deep meaning in it, therefore. It is the kind of thing we’d only really expect to see in failing societies, in failed states, in countries that can’t function as modern, civilized ones, but resemble something much more like medieval or feudal or tribal ones than 21st century democracies.

And that is exactly what we do see.

Which other countries have Coronavirus charts which resemble America’s — that misshapen hump? It’s really, really not a club you want to be a member of. Britain, Russia, Brazil. Probably places like Pakistan and India will join that list. Dirt poor countries with few resources at all, spread across Africa and Latin America. It’s only a dismal collection of the world’s failed states mirrors America’s experience. We don’t see that bent hump-shape anywhere in the world outside failed societies, and desperately poor ones, or both.