Social Distancing, the Social Contract and Covid-19

This chart from Montgomery County shows why what we're doing now is important and can save lives.

When my wife Karen was an infant, she got the measles and nearly died.

The measles vaccine was not invented until 1963 and she was already 3 years old when it came out.

For obvious reasons, I have been thinking about pandemics and is so often the case when the fear response starts to blunt clear thinking, I turn to history for comfort and perspective.

I find it comforting because history so often reminds me, we've been through this, or something like this, before.

Medical Breakthroughs

The 1950s and 1960s was a time of great medical discoveries driven, I suspect, by great medical peril.

The breakthroughs to which I refer began in 1955 with the discovery and perfection of the polio virus.

When my father was a young man, growing up in Westfield, NJ, his parents feared he and my uncle would get polio from swimming in the town pool so they, like so many others, went to the seaside during the summers.

Dr. Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine he invented.

They built a small shore house on Long Beach Island. Being Swedes, whose ancestors survived long, dark winters, their appreciation of irony dictated they build in Brant Beach, named, sadly, not after us but the Brant duck who is partial to those parts.

Whether my father and uncle spending their childhood summers on boats in the bay, helping the harbor master at the Brant Beach Yacht Club bring boats in when storms swelled up, kept them from getting polio is impossible to say.

What is obvious is how it shaped their lives and mine.

My sister and I spent two weeks there every August and they are some of the happiest memories of my life. My cousins still own my grandparents' shore house and we all share a strong connection to  it, as does my father, who has never lived far from the ocean.

Do we have polio to thank? It's hard to say. Easier to recognize, not always in the moment, is how circumstances we can't anticipate will shape our lives. I suspect President Trump is entertaining such thoughts even as you read this.

After the measles vaccine was invented, in time to ensure baby Evan was vaccinated, came the mumps vaccine in 1967 and rubella in 1969.

These were all diseases that had killed or harmed children at what we would these days consider to be an alarming rate. So it is incumbent on us all to acknowledge how much safer the lives of my generation and those that followed have already been as a result of those discoveries.

We Must Do For Each Other

But nature is ever evolving, and that is as true for the microbial world as it is for Darwin's finches on the Galapagos. We never really win the war against disease so much as win battles and temporary reprieves, often, only after taking heavy losses, before diseases re-group, evolve to surpass our latest defenses, and begin the assault again.

This month, microscopic nature launched its next attack and, as usual, it is a race against time, to find the measures or the medicine which will prevent existential loss of life.

It's too soon to say whether the measures we're now all taking will be enough to keep coronavirus from getting out of hand. But it is our responsibility to do our part.

Prevention is always invisible when it works, so if we succeed, some will say we over-reacted and blew the threat out of proportion.

If we don't, tears will be shed and fingers will surely be pointed.

We've Been Here Before

The most obvious example of our previous experience with such times is what became known, unfairly I would point out, as the Spanish flu.

It struck first in spring of 1918 and then again more severely in the fall of that year. It would be the most familiar to us today by its affects.

Schools and businesses were closed. New York City actually had vital businesses like grocery stores open in shifts to avoid over-crowding on the subway.

This is what a spike looks like.

Hospitals were overwhelmed and the closed schools and churches were used as makeshift care
centers.

Ironically, as they were moved around in tightly packed ships and trains, more U.S. soldiers died from the flu than from battle during World War I.

By the time it was over, not as a result of medicine but because of a massive loss of life and our development of a measure of immunity, between 20 million and 100 million people had died. Record keeping was poor and because of the war-driven news blackout, no one really knows the actual number. But some estimates put it at 3 percent of the world population.

And it has happened since then, although with fewer deaths.

Flu season in 1957-1958 killed 2 million people worldwide, 70,000 of them in the United States. In 1968-1969, another 1 million died from flu, 34,000 of them in the United States.

More recently, the "swine flu" epidemic in 2009-2010 killed 12,000 people in the United States.

We Know What to Do. Will We?

It's too soon to say if we're facing a similar catastrophe today, but the conditions are different.

Unlike in 1918, we know what's causing this and we know what preventative measures to take to try to "flatten the curve," as Montgomery County Commissioners Chairwoman Val Arkoosh keeps repeating in the county's daily press conferences.

What Arkoosh, who is a medical doctor, means is that the medical infrastructure can manage the sick if we can keep the number of sick people from spiking all at the same time. That's where we come in.

How social distancing protects us.

We do that by self-quarantining, staying away from large groups of people, washing our hands and a 100 other little considerate-but-inconvenient things to make it harder for the virus to spread from one to another.

It does not seem like that's a lot to ask to protect one another, but perhaps what is making this particular pandemic crisis so scary is that these days, we might not seem willing.

In texting with my son Dylan, who is staying in Lancaster while his college is closed because, as he put it, "I feel a strong ethical and moral obligation to limit my contact with those outside my usual circle of contact."

Given that there are more suspected cases of Covid-19 in Montgomery County than in Lancaster, I wasn't going to argue with his logic.

We discussed my wife's brush with measles and it occurred to me, that whether it's war, economic depression or contagion, that each generation or so must weather its own crisis, and this may be ours.

What remains to be seen is how we face it.

As I told Dylan, the best response to this will be responses like his, that depend on the social contract; taking inconvenient actions to protect people you've never met.

Dr. Valerie Arkoosh

"We have to put the needs of the community before our personal conveniences," Arkoosh said during Saturday's briefing, which was broadcast live on Facebook.

"If we pull together as a community, we will get through this, there will be an end and this will not be our forever normal," she said.

What worries me is whether, at this point, we've broken that social contract and not enough of us are willing to help people we don't know.

I think it's been eroding for a while and this crisis may well test whether our commitment to each other in the abstract is still strong enough to save us.

We have to be willing to trust the scientists who are most likely to save us, and the journalists carrying the scientists' and doctors' message to the masses.

Trust in both science and the press has been undermined in the past several years and it remains to be seen if enough  remains for those things to work they were designed to, when we need them the most.

Pottstown High School Principal Danielle McCoy

Surveys say folks trust local news most, and we're doing our best with the skeleton crew that remains to get you the information you need to know. We've lifted the paywall on our web site for all stories related to this health crisis, although, as some have pointed out to us in less than gentle fashion, sometimes we forget to lift it right away.

But ironically, while I have an inherent distrust of power as an abstract, which is why I do what I do, I find I also trust local officialdom best, I suppose because I know so many of them.

As John Armato is always telling me, "it's about relationships."

Food collected for hungry kids Sunday 

in Pottstown.

So my faith in the social contract, at least locally, was bolstered when I saw on Facebook -- that double-edged sword of modern life -- that the folks over at Pottstown Schools had one thought in mind as soon as Gov. Wolf ordered the schools closed: "how do we feed the kids that depend on us for food every day?"

At all levels, in all corners, people were stepping up to figure out ways to help, and taking on a certain risk I might point out, to help the children of this community, a community with more children in need of help than most.

"You know, I'm really sorry all of this is happening," said Pottstown High School Principal Danielle McCoy, who is among those organizing food deliveries to hungry children. "But I have to say, I really like how we all come together in a crisis."

Here's hoping we can do that on a large scale too. Otherwise, this crisis will be a whole lot worse than it has to be.

No matter how well we behave, it will affect the course of our lives and the lives of our children for the remainder of those lives. Here's hoping for grace, faith and concern in and for each other, and a good dose of common sense.