Ed Yong: Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
On march 27, as the
U.S. topped 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Donald Trump stood at the
lectern of the White House press-briefing room and was asked what he’d say
about the pandemic to a child. Amid a meandering answer, Trump
remarked, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a
virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody
even knows what it is.”
That was neither the
most consequential statement from the White House, nor the most egregious. But
it was perhaps the most ironic. In a pandemic characterized by extreme
uncertainty, one of the few things experts know for sure is the identity of the
pathogen responsible: a virus called SARS-CoV-2 that is closely related to the
original SARS virus. Both are members of the coronavirus family, which is
entirely distinct from the family that includes influenza viruses. Scientists
know the shape of proteins on the new coronavirus’s surface down to the
position of individual atoms. Give me two hours, and I can do a dramatic
reading of its entire genome.
But much else about
the pandemic is still maddeningly unclear. Why do some people get
really sick, but others do not? Are
the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and
deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been
infected? How long must social restrictions go
on for? Why are so
many questions still unanswered?
The confusion partly
arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million
people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived.
Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so
much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like
this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have
happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of
Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of
the uncertainty.”
But beyond its vast
scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to
be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and
epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to
making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully
comprehend.... read more
