For many of us, COVID-19 has focused our attention, however briefly, on the transient nature of life. Personally, I was able to resist the pull until last week, when a precious neighbor succumbed to the virus. The threat of death is lingering, and many of us fear the worst.
Helen Keller said, “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” I agree, but I know that my neighbor stood on the bold side, and I can’t help wondering if the outcome might have been different had he been more fearful.
Pandemic fear comes from two states: what we know and what we don’t know. Right now it sure feels like what we don’t know tips the scales.
A few years from now, the probability is that this virus will no longer be described as “novel.” Talented medical professionals are sciencing the heck out of the situation and will in due course convert the unknown fear into a known fear, which will no doubt lead to effective treatment and perhaps a vaccine. But for now, this elusive bug is tearing around the world at will, and we don’t know how to stop it.
As of mid-July, there were 15 million confirmed cases worldwide and 617,000 deaths. In the United States, there were 3.97 million cases and 144,000 deaths. Original estimates put our best-case scenario at 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. The worst case scenario, had we not embraced community efforts to slow the disease’s progress, would have caused 1.5 million to 2.2 million deaths in the United States alone.
To put that into context, about 2.8 million people died in the United States in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The top two killers were heart disease at 647,457 deaths and cancer at 599,108 deaths.
Coronavirus fears appear to be well-founded. Had Americans done nothing, COVID-19 could have wiped out more people than heart disease and cancer combined.
So the questions that remain are: How afraid should we be going forward? How do we weigh the importance of our economy against a 0.66% mortality rate? When will we get back to normal?
The one clear truth is that we are all going to die, yet we eagerly await a return to normalcy, when we aren’t confronted daily with the reality of ever-present death. Normally, we rest on the promise of an 80-plus year life expectancy. We live our daily lives perpetually putting off any serious thoughts or discussions about our feelings as they relate to our finite existence.
What if our willful delusion that death always comes tomorrow degrades the quality of our todays? What if the real tragedy of COVID-19 is not that we lost so many lives, but that those deaths did not sufficiently motivate us to break free from the inertia of the routine that consistently ignores our mortality?
I believe that nothing happens by accident – that there is a divine plan that we can’t know intellectually, but can glimpse if we only stop the inertia long enough to see. There is a gift here if we will but receive it.
Christina Pierce is the publisher of The PineBelt NEWS and Signature Magazine.
