Springtime in the Plague Year
Conversations across vast social distance with Sylvia Poggioli, John Ioannidis, David Jones, and Andrew Sullivan about the coronavirus pandemic. Listen at 2 pm today or anytime at our site.
Mary McGrath, writing from the bunker, gives this report:
Quarantine Radio
Our show this week came to you directly from Chris Lydon’s kitchen table. We were effectively locked down and locked out of the WBUR studios. Only a skeleton team of hosts, producers and engineers dedicated to live news shows were allowed in. Conor, maybe the kindest, most patient man we know, talked Chris through the steps of recording guests by phone and created some of his masterful diagrams. Like:
By now Chris is an ace: no one better faster, no one faster better, as we like to say. Chris, Conor, Adam, and I met many times a day via Google Hangout and planned the show, which changed multiple times all week. We all transcribed, edited, and did the post production to get the show to our BUR colleague Paul Calo in time for BUR to make some CDs that our friend Dave Faneuf, the live on-air host, could play at 9:00 pm, sharp. (George Hicks was on vacation; let’s hope he was relaxing someplace in the Arlington environs listening to Miles, Dizzy, and Dylan).
Our medical humanist Adam has been close-reading responses to plagues, past and present, and Chris doped out the numbers story, which came our way from Harvard’s medical historian David Jones. Jones told Chris about the contrarian Stanford Dr. John Ioannidis’s piece in Stat, and Chris phoned him up. Eight hours later, after a severely dramatic technical snafu, our show was coming together, opening with a report from Sylvia Poggioli in Rome with the news of Italy’s now-highest global coronavirus death count. We’d also seen Andrew Sullivan’s piece about AIDS and the coronavirus and called him up.
Poggioli describes an Italy of eerie night scenes that resemble the shadowy Baroque images of Caravaggio. It’s a place where strict social measures seem to have made some difference, but where such measures may have been deployed in a flawed manner.
From the New York Times:
Italian authorities fumbled many of those steps early in the contagion — when it most mattered as they sought to preserve basic civil liberties as well as the economy.
Italy’s piecemeal attempts to cut it off — isolating towns first, then regions, then shutting down the country in an intentionally porous lockdown — always lagged behind the virus’s lethal trajectory.
While there are risks in reacting too strongly, there are also risks in not reacting enough.
Some officials gave in to magical thinking, reluctant to make painful decisions sooner. All the while, the virus fed on that complacency.
Governments beyond Italy are now in danger of following the same path, repeating familiar mistakes and inviting similar calamity. And unlike Italy, which navigated uncharted territory for a Western democracy, other governments have less room for excuses.
On Public Health and Mystery
Dr. John Ioannidis’s piece for Stat points out that there’s so much we don’t know about coronavirus, and he argues that we may thus be overreacting to the virus that’s overburdened hospitals. A number of medical experts have taken issue not with Ioannidis’s consideration of facts—for which he’s widely admired—but with his Stat piece’s judgment when it comes to judgment. Here’s a tweet from Andrew Vickers, a Sloan Kettering biostatistician:
Another tweeted response:
Harvard’s Mark Lipsitch wrote a considered reaction to Ioannidis, also in Stat—arguing that despite or even because of the unknowns that Ioannidis lists, “we know enough to act”:
First, the number of severe cases — the product of these two unknowns — becomes fearsome in country after country if the infection is allowed to spread. In Italy, coffins of Covid-19 victims are accumulating in churches that have stopped holding funerals . . .
That is what happens when a community waits until crisis hits to try to slow transmission.
“Plagues routinely start with denial.”
This is the first line of Andrew Sullivan’s New York magazine essay on the coronavirus and AIDS, linked above, and he discussed the phenomenon on our show:
The first thing that always happens in plagues is that people just don’t want to believe it’s happening. And if they do, they want to see it happening to other people so that they’re separated from it. And I think the ability to find a category in which you’re not in danger is essential for people. So people who are young are constantly thinking, well, this isn’t going to affect me, it’s somebody else’s plague— until one of them gets it. And then you realize that nobody is safe. And of course, you continue your existing patterns of behavior because you know no other way to live. Until this suddenly interrupts it, you’re shocked. You deny it. You then become unnerved. You then come to accept it, I think. And then you have to sort of reorder your life to realize that this new, weird, surreal environment that you’re in is your environment.
Read: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is a masterpiece, critically sensitive in its examination of a plague, which is also just a faster-paced version of our usual condition w/r/t death. It’s also oddly comforting: a reminder of the fact of death and the relative smallness but nonetheless-worth-recording-ness of human variability.
It’s an early expression of the novelistic imagination along with the most thorough application of the Enlightenment’s journalistic empiricism, its common-sense attention to facts from all kinds of sources, facts that never fully disclose truth but that lead ever closer to existential recognitions.
Journal of the Plague Year is Defoe’s first-person, evidently well researched narrative of a man dealing with a hellish public-health situation in seventeenth-century London, but it’s fiction: Defoe was at most a child during the 1665 London plague. It’s an imaginative reckoning with reality, then, and very much a story of speculation—of projected dreads and hopes—related to encounters with the tough facts. The loose, baggy narrative follows the people of London who sometimes despair, sometimes hope, sometimes deny the plague. Early in the catastrophe, when things seemed briefly to ease up,
everybody began to look upon the danger as good as over; only that still the burials in St Giles’s continued high. From the beginning of April especially they stood at twenty-five each week, till the week from the 18th to the 25th, when there was buried in St Giles’s parish thirty, whereof two of the plague and eight of the spotted-fever, which was looked upon as the same thing; likewise the number that died of the spotted-fever in the whole increased, being eight the week before, and twelve the week above-named.
This alarmed us all again, and terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the weather being now changed and growing warm, and the summer being at hand. However, the next week there seemed to be some hopes again; the bills were low, the number of the dead in all was but 388, there was none of the plague, and but four of the spotted-fever.
But the following week it returned again, and the distemper was spread into two or three other parishes, viz., St Andrew’s, Holborn; St Clement Danes; and, to the great affliction of the city, one died within the walls, in the parish of St Mary Woolchurch, that is to say, in Bearbinder Lane, near Stocks Market; in all there were nine of the plague and six of the spotted-fever. It was, however, upon inquiry found that this Frenchman who died in Bearbinder Lane was one who, having lived in Long Acre, near the infected houses, had removed for fear of the distemper, not knowing that he was already infected.
This was the beginning of May, yet the weather was temperate, variable, and cool enough, and people had still some hopes. That which encouraged them was that the city was healthy: the whole ninety-seven parishes buried but fifty-four, and we began to hope that, as it was chiefly among the people at that end of the town, it might go no farther; and the rather, because the next week, which was from the 9th of May to the 16th, there died but three, of which not one within the whole city or liberties; and St Andrew’s buried but fifteen, which was very low. ’Tis true St Giles’s buried two-and-thirty, but still, as there was but one of the plague, people began to be easy. The whole bill also was very low, for the week before the bill was but 347, and the week above mentioned but 343. We continued in these hopes for a few days, but it was but for a few, for the people were no more to be deceived thus; they searched the houses and found that the plague was really spread every way, and that many died of it every day.
We’re Watching: The Plot Against America
David Simon’s HBO series has just dropped one episode (they air Mondays), but we we’ve seen all six. Chris has some quibbles, says it lacks Philip Roth’s voice. We’ll be talking to Simon this week, less about this series per se, and more about his sweet spot — the shakiness of American institutions, which he famously explored in The Wire, probably the greatest TV show ever made.
This week’s ephemeral library:
Videogame connection during quarantine. “Why We’re Not Overreacting to the Coronavirus, In One Chart.” The fever room in Bleak House and Jane Eyre. Dealing with climate, informed by COVID-19. Atul Gawande on CV-19 and health care workers.
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