A disaster occurs when the public resources set aside to deal with any upending of social life prove insufficient to deal with the extent of the insult to the social structure. That makes a real disaster different from what might be called a local disaster, such as the forest fire that consumed Paradise, California, because that was very restricted, there not being enough fire engines to save the houses in the area, but also because local forest fires are already baked into the social structure of California in that people buy a lot of insurance and are not surprised if they have to move from one abode to another in the wake of a fire that burns up parts of the Oakland Hills. Also to be distinguished from a true disaster is what might be considered the collective tragedies regarded as just part of ordinary life, as the fact that tens of thousands of people die every year from influenza, hospitals and morgues and funeral parlors prepared to deal with the influx and processing of victims. And then there were the people who died during summer heat waves in cities because of the lack of air conditioning, that absence not considered a failure of public services to intervene in what was a public health emergency.
A true disaster is one in which public services are overwhelmed because either a familiar scourge or an unfamiliar one are not addressed with sufficient resources so as to allow only the usual parameters of damage. Ordinary life and the social structure are kept in place. There are bad flu seasons but schools do not close down and social life is not dislocated. The coronavirus pandemic is a case of a true disaster.
The most usual way to understand a biological disaster is through telling the tale of contagion. Where did it start and how and where did it spread? The Black Plague started in the East and then spread to Italy and then to the rest of Europe and did not finally disappear for three centuries. The population of Europe knew how to deal with it even though they were not possessed of the germ theory of disease. They isolated themselves by going off to the mountains or a summer villa if they were rich and isolation was forced on households that included any sufferer from the disease, carts provided to come round to pick up the dead. There was no therapy for the disease, just the appearance of grotesquely swollen lymph nodes in the neck and the groin. Sometimes blame was placed, as on the Jews for the Fifth Century plague, but later on not on the Jews, perhaps because later Popes thought less well of this expedient as a way to get a handle on what was, after all, a disease.
The thing about the coronavirus pandemic is that it spreads so quickly that we do not have time to see much of the spread, the first case in the United States occurring at the same time as the first case in South Korea, in early January of this year. What everybody looks for instead is at the curve of cases: the time it takes for the disease to peak and then go down, the size of the peak lessened by the extent to which containment measures are effectuated, thereby lessening the extent of the disaster, which means the time when hospitals will be overburdened with cases. What we already know is that the coronavirus is very contagious but that its death rate is very low, something like one percent of diagnosed cases. The dislocations that are arising and that will rise have to do with hospital capacity and the consequences of people staying at home.
What we do know from previous disasters is that whatever is the primary disaster will soon be followed by a consequent disaster made more probable by the first. So the San Francisco Earthquake was followed in days by the San Francisco Fire because there were open gas lines as a result of the earthquake and people were outdoors cooking their meals over open fires and so explosions took place that resulted in the fire. In the present instance, the secondary disaster is the economic one that has resulted from the fact that so many people are either laid off or cannot go to work or to restaurants and bars that are locked down. So the government has to deal with the economic turndown that was caused by the biological disaster. In doing so, however, it has to be careful not simply to reward the usual lobbyists who will take coronavirus as an excuse for demanding economic aid even though they are in a good position to weather the storm on their own, that including cruise lines and airlines.
Another thing that happens quickly after a disaster is that supplies are rushed in from nearby points not affected by the disaster. So supplies were shipped to San Francisco from Oakland, which is just across the Bay, and trains carrying food and other supplies were dispatched from Los Angeles within days. In the present instance, there is a question of how to get masks and other medical supplies to the hardest hit areas, which are major cities like New York and Los Angeles, in case the worst happens and there are too many serious cases for the hospitals to handle. The idea that supplies become limited only in a disaster is not true, however, There are shortages of food or jobs or educational opportunities all the time and economists spend their time on calculating what people do to manage shortages. Do they pay more or do without or make do with less or buy inferior products? What is distinct about a disaster is that there is little time for the supply chain to adjust so as to fulfill Say’s Law that all goods can be priced by a market and so made available for use. Required or commandeered production becomes the law of the day, though the Trump administration seems to be relying on voluntary adjustment to the shift in demand from automobiles to ventilators. The corporations, he claims, are rushing to get into the new business, though we don’t know at what price, although it would be reasonable to just sign them to cost-plus contracts, which are very lucrative and was the way business was done with procurement during the Second World War.
People are concerned about what will happen if we reach a crisis point where social services and social life break down because the coronavirus gets “out of control”, the hospitals not able to deal with cases, the economy frozen and so people starving, the population hunkering down in their homes afraid to go out. Are we going to be in a Hobbesian state of nature where everyone is at war with everyone else for basic supplies and for life itself? That is the vision H. G. Wells proposed when he told of an invasion of Earth by the Martians, one that comes to an end only because the Martians are susceptible to Earth germs, but the Martians would otherwise have conquered and killed everyone if they had wanted to. The truth of the matter is that disasters very rarely reaches that point, even if it ever has. The Black Plague disrupted but did not destroy European society. Class relations were changed but the rich retained their wealth, and courtship went on, and so did the influence of the Church and so did all the other things that make life recognizable. Germany remained an organized society up until the very end of the Third Reich even though almost all of it had been overrun by Allied troops. The police remained at work as did the cooperation of Berliners to get through the day. It is reasonable to expect, therefore, that American society will sustain itself even if the worst happens. What is left of the Congress can remove itself to underground bunkers, as can the Executive Branch, as can state governments, and people are not likely to try to kill one another in the streets when they go out foraging for food lest they become infected from other food scavengers. Instead, just a lot of people might die in place, which is what happened during the Spanish Flu epidemic which took place almost exactly one hundred years ago. People will just go on with their lives, just as John Updike predicted would happen in his “Towards The End of Time”, a novel set in a near future where the United States has been in a limited war with China. Updike counters any Apocalyptic vision. Life might be grim, Updike was suggesting, but it would go in in recognizable form. That is a very deep insight of the sort with which Updike is not usually credited.
Eventually, the epidemic will end, either because it burns itself out when most people on the planet have developed immunities, or because of a vaccine, or because there are valid therapies for the illness, however many are the deaths that occur meantime. What are likely to be the changes that linger on after the pandemic has passed? Remember that the War on Terror is largely over, and we still have, as a result of it, airport security lines for which we remove our coats and shoes and get x-rayed. We are not likely to return to the airports of the Seventies where people just rushed off to their departure gate unencumbered by the need for a security check. We are also likely to have FISA Courts and other aspects of the Patriot Act with us for some time even if they are intrusions on what were once the standards of civil liberties, as is also the case with the presence of numerous cameras in sensitive places like Times Square and Lower Manhattan and London which means that the idea of a privacy right while in public is hardly recognized any more as being a right. Many of these violations of privacy came along with other developments, such as opening yourself up to financial scrutiny every time you applied for or used a credit card, but certainly 9/11, which was a disaster because we did not know at the time how many other attacks of a similar nature were on the way, and it took a while to put safety measures into place, was a major impetus for converting the United States into a surveillance state.
Here are some of the likely consequences of having lived through the current pandemic. Working at home will have proven a remarkably efficient way of working and so many offices will disband or become a skeleton of what they were, there to coordinate the people who work at home who can teleconference more briefly and effectively than when they attended in-office meetings, these people working largely in front of computer terminals anyway. That means less demand for office space, which will create problems for real estate dealers, but also less need for cleaning services, local restaurants and busy subways. Work will be reintegrated into family life in a way that hasn’t been true since the cottage system of manufacturing, whereby people earned their livings at home looms, were replaced by the factory system which required people to go to a place of employment for most of the day or even from dawn to dusk.
The availability of home entertainment through streaming services may also kill the theatre and movie house industry, though not movies themselves, as people will learn from hunkering down that their lives can still be full, even though I am sure that young people will still feel the need to congregate, that being their wont, though one should never underestimate the ability of the young to flirt through their smartphones and other devices.
Education may also be profoundly transformed in that trends already there will be accentuated. More and more classes will be on-line. That means students will get assignments and teacher comments on their submissions through the internet instead of experiencing the magic that happens when a teacher meets a set of students and lectures or makes comments on the discussion that goes on before the teacher and which results in students operating on a slightly higher level of discourse than they would without that interaction. Whether that is because students are more engaged or whether the teacher serves as an intellectual model for how to discuss something is not clear but it presumably works and teachers are likely to say that on-line instruction does not work as well because the learning is more likely to be rote or make work exercises than is true in the dynamics of conversation, where people learn in real time to modify their responses and take different positions than they did just a few minutes before. On-line instruction is more like going through a workbook though it has the advantage of allowing students to move much more quickly through the material they are to learn about calculus or history. We shall see what are the educational results of introducing such practices though universities and even high schools are reluctant to use the already available tests to measure the efficacy of various learning practices.
What can be said, however, is that more on-line instruction will lead to less use of on campus facilities, such as dorms and eating halls, and so universities and colleges will be encouraged to take a cut in tuition. Even if such cuts are not nearly as much as the money they save on facilities and staff (in that part timers can be hired to do the gut work of online instruction), that will lead to lowered college tuition costs and people are already on the verge of counting up what they are buying with their educational dollars. Ivy League schools will probably continue to trade on their names and so charge whatever the market will bear, which is clearly a lot, but other schools may engage in the price competiton that goes with a more competative market, the school name less important than how quickly a person can move through a program if they do a lot of on-line courses.
People may again come to see the importance of government intrusion in their lives, at least as a structure to stand by in case of emergencies so that it can do the things only a government has the power to do: demand supplies, manage the public order, provide definitive information. Leaders will be judged on their ability, their competencies, to carry out such responsiobilities. Not everyone is fit to be President. A downside of the recovery from the pandemic is the residual anxiety it may inspire as well as the trauma to public consciousness. But public consciousness is resiliant and amnesia sets in about bad things. The terrors of the Cold War--that we might all be dead in thirty minutes from a missile attack--passed away or subsided for most people who lived through the Cold War and the current generation seems oblivious to them. Similarly, the image of children in iron lungs that resulted from the Polio epidemic of the late Forties also seems to have passed out of public consciousness, alive only to some of the people who lived through it. And so, come fall, the coronavirus epidemic may seem a bad dream and we will see if politicians can make an issue of it in the presidential campaign.