The Interconnectedness of Us All

I suppose I shouldn’t admit this, but up until a few weeks ago I don’t believe I had ever heard of Wuhan. Given that Wuhan is a city of eleven million people (which makes almost a third larger than New York City), that is probably not something I should be particularly proud of. On the other hand, one of the more amusing side-effects of the information-overload age is the way in which people (and, yes, myself included) regularly speak with easy familiarity about people and things they hadn’t actually heard of twenty minutes earlier. Also in that category are ethnic groups like the Rohingya or the Uighurs or the Yazidis that up until just recently were familiar names in the West solely to professional ethnographers. But so are places. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Hubei Province either—despite its huge area and more than 58 million residents. Of course, now I mention Hubei Province and its capital city, Wuhan, in the same offhand way I naturally speak about Oslo or Madrid without pausing to identify them as the capital cities of their respective countries. Nor is “information-overload” an exaggerated turn of speech: I just googled “Wuhan” and Google returned 250 million hits in 0.61 seconds.

And while I’m in confessional mode, I suppose I could also admit that I hadn’t ever heard of coronaviruses until just a few weeks ago although I, of course, mention them in my daily speech without any further explanation as though any educated person would naturally know what they are and why they matter. This is slightly less embarrassing to me than not knowing where Wuhan is—coronaviruses were only identified in the 1960s, when scientists first saw the link between something called “infectious bronchitis virus” that attacks chickens and two different kinds of viruses that are found in the nasal cavities of human beings suffering from bouts of the common cold. So at least in that regard I’m only sixty years behind the times. (There have apparently been people living in Wuhan, on the other hand, for about 3,500 years.) But even now that I’m all caught up on coronaviruses, there are still details that surprise. One is that there are only seven strains of human coronaviruses known to exist—some relatively well known (like the one that causes SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—or the one that causes MERS—Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome), others (like the so-called New Haven coronavirus, correctly called Human Coronavirus NL63) dramatically less so. Of course, all seven—including SARS and MERS—have now been eclipsed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. (Here too, I surprised myself by not understanding until just a few days ago that the 19 only references the year in which it was identified, 2019, or that the name for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 was chosen specifically—so the head of the World Health Organization—for its blandness…and to avoid irritating the Chinese government by naming it after the country in which it was first identified.)

For a person like myself with no training in epidemiology, it’s hard to keep track of the statistics that have been coming out so quickly over these last days and weeks or to know what to do with them exactly. On the one hand, this is a very new thing: it was not even three months ago that the virus was first identified in Wuhan. In that time, though, more than 80,000 cases have been confirmed—in every province of China and in more than two dozen other countries including our own. The first individual definitely known to have succumbed to the disease only died in Wuhan on January 9, but since then there have been just over 2,700 deaths attributed to COVID-19. As of this week, however, just 38 of those deaths have taken place outside of China. Should that statistic be more reassuring or more upsetting? It’s not that obvious to a lay person like myself. Nor am I sure how to pair the number of confirmed cases with the parallel statistic that more than 27,000 people diagnosed with COVID-19 subsequently recovered from the disease—and that, despite the fact that there is no specific antiviral treatment available. It’s even less obvious to me how to negotiate the outside-of-China numbers with respect to three specific countries: Iran (with 95 reported cases and 15 deaths), South Korea (with 977 cases and 7 deaths), and Italy (with 260 cases and 7 deaths). Of course, since there appears to be about a ten-day window between infection and detectability, these numbers will all be entirely wrong within a few weeks. But the new numbers we will surely have in two weeks’ time too will be unreliable, of course, thereby leading us even further down the rabbit hole in terms of understanding how much of this is hyped-up newsfeed and how much, a serious threat that we should all be taking very seriously. Nor do I want to fall into the trap of assuming that if the Stock Market is reacting to the fear of a global pandemic, those jitters must be justified!

In terms of our own country, the numbers are also hard to understand. As of last Thursday, there are exactly 53 cases of people sick with COVID-19 in the United States. Of them, twelve were people who traveled to China and became sick there, three are American citizens who had been living in Wuhan and were evacuated back to the U.S., thirty-six are U.S. nationals who were passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and only two were made sick through human-to-human transmission inside the U.S.  Are those very low numbers a sign that we should all relax and not panic? Or would taking those numbers as a sign that this is basically a problem for China, Iran, and a handful of other countries be precisely the head-in-the-sand approach our nation should definitely not be taking…and particularly not while our numbers are still low enough for us to respond meaningfully to keep safe the rest of the population? That the President has named Vice President Pence to spearhead the American response to the COVID-19 outbreak is also confusing: should we be more relieved that the government is at least doing something, or should we be more worried that the man at the helm has no background or training of any sort in epidemiology or public health policy? It’s hard to say!

The world is filled with experts who will weigh in and attempt to chart a course forward for our nation—and for the other nations of the world as well, of course—that somehow manages to contain the threat from becoming an unstoppable menace. But what I myself have learned from all my recent reading about COVID-19 has less to do with virology and more to do with the spiritual principle I see shining through all those numbers and predictions.

The story of Adam and Eve, perhaps the most famous of all biblical stories, has at its core the simple idea that all human beings, descended from the same two ancestors, are therefore reasonably to be taken as each other’s kin. (This apparently is not merely a spiritual truth either: click here or here for some serious scientific support for that notion that there once actually was an Eve from whom humankind is descended.) For me, that is the lesson that underlies the whole COVID-19 crisis as well.

On the first of December, a single man is hospitalized in a huge Chinese city that most people outside of China have never visited or even heard of. Eventually, he is diagnosed with a coronavirus that no one has previously identified. Not two months later, there are cases in every province of China. By the middle of February, there are cases in countries as far apart as Australia and Germany, and as disparate as Finland and Cambodia. There are confirmed cases in forty countries on all five of the world’s five continents. In our own country, the confirmed cases are weirdly spread out in states as distant from each other as possible: Massachusetts, California, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Washington.

It seems all to have happened so quickly, far more like the way children living in the same home or attending the same school would easily infect each other with the flu than the way you would expect a virus to spread across the entire world in a matter of weeks. But embedded in the COVID-19 story is a deep truth unrelated to the ill ease the concept of a world-wide pandemic engenders naturally: that the biblical narrative had it right when it described humankind as a vast, interrelated network of distant cousins…and that the prophet has it exactly correctly when he wrote about all humankind having one heavenly Parent and about there being one God who made us all in the divine image not arbitrarily or accidentally, but specifically to embed in our history and our nature the fact that we are truly each other’s kin in this world and so neither naturally nor inevitably each other’s enemies.

That even writing that out has a certain mawkish, Pollyanna-ish feel to it is not at all a good thing. It sounds that way to me as well! But behind my own disinclination to embrace this notion of an intertwined humanity (reflective, in its own strange way, of the intertwined helices characteristic of the recombinant DNA that truly does link all human beings to each other) lies the challenge to set aside the natural prejudice we all bring to our analysis of the world and our place in it and to embrace in its place a sense of us all as extended brethren, as members of the same human family, as passengers in the same boat that either will or will not survive long enough to bring those traveling on it to their desired destination before foundering on the shoals of our own fractiousness and quarrelsomeness. If any good comes from the sudden spread of this terrible virus, it will derive from the degree to which its almost instant spread throughout the world is able to suggest—and to how many—the deep truth that we truly are all in this together.