I’m sitting on my front porch watching the sun set.
We’ve just pulled the plug on our annual family beach trip to the North Carolina coast. Our kids would be coming from all over - New York City, Denver, Salt Lake, South Carolina. They don’t want to do it; they’re afraid they’ll kill us.
North Carolina has not been particuarly hard hit by the pandemic but we’ve had our problems like everyone else. In our county we have about 700 cases and 40 deaths, but everyone’s experience has been different and you have to respect that. We’re not in seclusion but we’re not running wild, either. We venture out some, and have people over for socially distant interaction out in our meadow.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, tend to cluster in herds, like water buffalo on Animal Planet, reducing the odds that any one of them gets gored. It’s a different kind of herd immunity.. Like most politicians, our governor seems to have a strong instinct for survival. “We’re following the science,:” he says in his daily press briefings.
But that’s a head fake, a sleight of hand. The truth is a lot of the science is still unclear. We don’t know, for instance, how much virus, over what period of time, must be transmitted to infect someone. We don’t know the overal death rate from the disease because we don’t know how many people have had it.. We don’t know why it’s less likely to spread if we open up three weeks from now instead of today. And we don’t know, or have yet to care much, about the collateral damage caused by the reaction to Covid-19 in the U.S. and around the world.
But we do have models. It was anthropologist Gregory Bateson who cautioned againstt mistaking the map for the territory. These days we’re all in on the map, but it’s still not the territory. Models are useful the way maps are useful, but they can’t capture reality. The ones we have often don’t even predict what’s right in front of us.
A year from now, maybe, all will be clear. We’ll know if we calibrated our response to this tragic pandemic appropriately. If the carnage - human, economic, then human again as the cessation of commerce compounded the calamity - was worth it. For the present, we wear our masks, we venture out a little more, and we wait and see.