Biodun Jeyifo
THERE is an intensely personal, perhaps even existential dimension to this piece on the outbreak and galloping spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, also known as COVID-19. This personal dimension is not the focus of this essay; however, it does provide a point of departure for my observations and meditations in this piece. Permit me to briefly narrate what it is.
I am writing this article on Friday, February 28, 2020, although it will appear on Sunday, March 1. Yesterday, Thursday, February 27, 2020, I was in a hospital for a routine medical procedure in Boston. Three and a half weeks ago, I had had a surgical operation in the same hospital complex, a very successful operation, I should add. So my visit yesterday entailed a post-operative meeting with the team that had performed the operation. The post-op also went well, thankfully: I am recuperating well and getting stronger after the surgery. But then, there appeared to be a catch, not concerning me, but pertaining to the doctors and nurses that attended to me. What was this catch? Well, they were all afraid of what the spread of COVID-19 would do to their health and their ability to continue to render services to patients like me. Why so?
Well, three months after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, there is as yet no vaccine and no known curative regime of treatment anywhere in the world for this spreading disease. Indisputably, in time an effective vaccine will be developed. More importantly, a cure for the disease will also be found and will hopefully be available in all parts of the world, in the poor countries as well as in the rich countries. But all that will take time, costly, angst-ridden time. And everywhere in the world, the group of people that will be most vulnerable to the spread of the pandemic will be the “first responders”, these being medical personnel in hospitals that will have to treat those who contract and succumb to COVID-19.
This was the talk, the fear expressed by some of the staff who attended to me and other patients at that Boston hospital yesterday. In the knowledge that no vaccine and no cure is as yet available anywhere in the world for this disease, they are waiting for the big-time arrival of the pandemic in the United States in a state of great anxiety. Hearing them talk yesterday and sensing their dread, I had an intuition that if and when COVID-19 arrives like a tidal wave in the US, people like me who require all kinds of pre- and post-operative medical services on a continuous basis will be greatly imperiled. This is because, until a vaccine and a curative treatment are developed for this disease, the only thing that anyone can do to prevent him or herself from contracting the disease is near total self-isolation: you must stay away from everybody, including those you will continue to need to see as you get better from a surgical procedure. This dilemma is the source of the title of this piece: waiting for the COVID-19 pandemic to come – and go.
As I write these words, I meditate on the phenomenon of waiting in great anxiety or dread concerning something catastrophic that is lurking on the horizon of consciousness and the present, about to come with full, devastating force. I call this condition waiting in extremis: you do not know when it will come; you know only that it will surely come and that for quite a while after its arrival, there will be no effective protection available from its ravages. You stay away as much as possible from people who are not members of your household; you may even go into near total self-isolation. But even as you seek assurance and solace from these measures, you know that they too come with heavy, perhaps even devastating consequences. This is because these same measures that are calculated to insulate us from the depredations of COVID-19 are causing costly disruptions in services, travel, schooling, and trade and commerce within and between the countries and regions of the world. And indeed, haven’t we seen the collapse of financial markets around the world on the mere inkling that COVID-19 is coming? The futures markets in particular have been hit hard because not knowing when it will come and how big it will be, plans cannot be made to secure the future availability of raw materials, spare parts and tools for the world’s productive economic activities. Indeed, yesterday, Thursday, February 27, 2020, US financial markets suffered their worst fall in share prices in history, all on account of waiting, waiting for COVID-19 to come.
As we wait all over the world, we cannot but notice that while only Antarctica among the continents of the world remains free of invasion by COVID-19, Africa is far less invaded by the pandemic than the other continents where the pandemic has surfaced. I confess, shamelessly, that I derive some solace from this present profile of the global distribution of the pandemic. May it continue to be so! For who can dispute the fact that when it comes to stigmatization for starting and spreading worldwide pandemics in the modern age, Africa and Asia have borne the worst of the stereotypes, the stigmas and scapegoating? I do not rejoice that, so far, COVID-19 is invading other continents more massively and aggressively than our own continent. All continents, nations and people live in the world and the world ought to be a place in which we can all live together in health and peace. But I do confess that because we have some of the most ineffective medical infrastructures and services on the planet, it is a matter of great relief that, for whatever reasons that we do not yet know, Africa is so far the continent of least interest to the COVID-19 pandemic journeys around the planet.
It would not have escaped the notice of careful readers that in the title of this piece, I talk of COVID-19 coming and, ultimately, going. Well, since the pandemic has not (yet) fully arrived and since we do not know how big and devastating worldwide it will prove to be, how can we even talk about its going? The answer to this question is as simple as it is incontrovertible: global pandemics have a long, long history in our world. Indeed, if anything is certain about them, it is the fact that they come and then they go. I give you the word of a diligent researcher: prompted by my own personal and existential relationship to the spread of this current pandemic, I have gone to the historical records and confirmed this fact that global pandemics come and then they go, unfailingly. I have also discovered that they have tended to be more catastrophic in the past than in the modern age. For instance, perhaps the worst pandemic in the modern age in terms of mortality figures is the HIV-AIDS pandemic which has taken about 34 million people around the world. Compare that to the Black Death of 1347-1353 that killed between 75 to 200 million in Europe, Africa and Asia. Indeed, Ebola, whose virus proved to be one of the most deadly of viruses the world has ever known, took lives only in double, not triple-digit thousands, definitely not in millions.
Needless to say, I am neither a virologist nor a historian of viruses and their links to global pandemics of the past and the present. Indeed, in the course of my own lifetime, only three or four pandemics have occurred, the worst in terms of the death toll being the Asian Flu of 1956-1958. Altogether, about 2 million people died in this particular pandemic, with an estimate of deaths in the US alone put at 69,800. I was in my last years of primary school when this pandemic happened and though we were made aware of its devastation around the world, I remember that it seemed to us to be happening far away in another world. Of course, this profile does not include epidemics of diseases like cholera, smallpox and influenza that happened at different times in my childhood and young adulthood and that often took hundreds or thousands of lives. In other words, between epidemics that were more nationally and regionally localized and pandemics whose impacts ranged across national borders to the whole world, everyone in my generation knew that these outbreaks came and went, came and went and you were lucky if you did not contract the prevailing epidemic or pandemic or, worse still die from it/them.
Is it because I am in my eighth decade of life and also because I am recovering from a recent surgery that my attention and interest have been so raptly caught by the spread of COVID-19? Of course, this is indisputable. For it does strike me as I write these words that I had never been as attentive to any epidemic or pandemic as I am now to the Coronavirus pandemic. Yes, I had once thought of and written about the Malthusian account of how and why plagues happen: that when populations rise exponentially in economic, physical and sanitary conditions of great insufficiency and insecurity for most people, plagues emerge to decrease the population in order to bring back a levelling, a reckoning. Of course, I was and I am a resolute anti-Malthusian, but short of considering the Malthusian account as truth revealed, I do admit to a willingness to grant Malthusianism some pertinence in explaining why and how the world’s national, regional and global populations go through periodic decimation. At this particular moment in time, I think that China has a lot of anti-Malthusian wisdom to teach us, indeed to bequeath to us if it can keep low the mortality rate from COVID-19.
In Samuel Beckett’s iconic play, Waiting for Godot, the characters wait and wait for Godot but he/it never comes. This is somewhat similar to what Donald Trump, the American president, hopes about COVID-19: that it will not come as the scientists, the experts are expecting. As a matter of fact, Trump seems to believe that the pandemic has come and is already on its way out! Trump is of course full of bullshit and cares not what the coming of the pandemic will do to people, but what it will do to the economy and his chances of reelection in November. He is willing to place his political fortune well before the health and lives of the American people and the world’s peoples. I despise Trump’s megalomania but this is one instance that I wish he is right! For if COVID-19 has already come and gone, I will not have to contend with a crisis of medical personnel falling to the pandemic as I recover fully from my recent surgery. In the months and years ahead, I shall keep in mind the remarkable resiliency of the human spirit that has confronted and outlasted the dozens of plagues that have come and then gone.
Biodun Jeyifo, bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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