For about a month, I’ve been meaning to post my view on this but haven’t gotten around to doing so because it requires adding a lot of context. The tl;dr form of this is that my suspicion is that our debate regarding how and when to open up is going to get us through the next 6-8 weeks. We’ll endlessly debate what effect this is having on infection rates and ultimately my suspicion is that these stay relatively unchanged, if not continue to decrease. If there’s a bump, I don’t see this being something massive, and there are a whole host of reasons that I’ll have to elaborate on later, but I’ll have to settle for just laying out the bare bones with that. We will debate what we’re seeing. If rates don’t spike, we will favor more palatable narratives of how we’ve opened up slower, people are being more cautious, and how we’re still not testing sufficiently (I’m not saying any of these are untrue, just stating what how we’ll be qualifying what we’re seeing). Ultimately, we’re going to arrive in August/September and a different narrative will really heat up: the summer suppression of the virus. Currently, this is an argument castigated as ignorant and wishful (but is and will change). This will become more accepted because the argument will be highlighted as more nuanced: that it wasn’t the summer and the heat killing the virus (as all those ignorant rubes believed), but because the summer facilitated social gathering in ways that were more consistent with social distancing — that people congregated more outside and away from each other. This will allow a few things to come out. One is that it will reinforce the idea of social distancing helping curtail the virus, rather than ‘magic’ or anything implemented by the administration, but it will also reassure and provide a level of vindication for the initial doomsday models of millions dead. After all, those represent one side of the simplistic dichotomy of ‘science and facts’ vs. ‘ignorance and greed,’ and how palatable is vindication that the original models weren’t wrong, just mistimed? Our discussion will shift to the fact that COVID started at the very end of winter, and we had massive casualties. True, it did not reach the millions projected (‘because we acted’), but the summer has provided false hope for all those who deny science, and they’ve prematurely spiked the football in their ignorance and arrogance, but now [end of summer] we’re headed into a full winter where the death toll will be like nothing we’ve ever seen. Lots of talk of “we’re ****ed” and “we have no idea what’s about to hit us.”
That’s the tl;dr. I’ll have to actually clarify most of this, but not now. Maybe this weekend. I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of truth in some of this, but this narrative is and will be coalescing over the coming months.
