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Anyone who says that one country or jurisdiction is “doing better” than another regarding COVID is being dishonest, for the simple reason that it’s not over yet.
Nor has anyone devised a universally accepted formula for weighing all the consequences of whatever measures are taken in the name of fighting the virus against the consequences of not taking those measures. Nor can anyone design such a formula,
because what you think is “worth” doing in order to, according to some probabilistic model, reduce instances of or deaths by COVID to a certain level will depend upon what you think things are “worth” in general.
And has anyone gone on the record on that question, beyond the obvious “reducing cases is good”?
It’s worth noting that, much like with “climate change,” the dominant forms of the discussion focus on abolishing the phenomenon in question,
with the issue of mitigation receiving little attention. It’s at least possible that,
even if we accept the worst-case scenarios of climate change, taking action to respond to the most likely destructive consequences will be more effective and less disruptive than efforts to reverse the process.
Even a broader analysis of all likely effects of climate change, which must make things “better” according to some measures, in some places, is taboo.
Regarding COVID, rather than the utopian goal of eliminating the virus altogether, or even develop a vaccine that would cover all forms and future mutations of the virus,
wouldn’t it make sense to keep working on treatments that can be continually tested and refined by health care workers so that it becomes an increasingly minor disease?
Mitigation is less “interesting” because all the “action” is in the “middle,” with professionals doing their daily work, forming teams, testing things out, drawing on scientific work,
forming networks of communication and canons of verifiability, “harvesting” trust, and reaching out to other institutions, like schools and workplaces, to develop “best practices.”
Responsibility is distributed universally, but unevenly. Talk of abolition or prevention, meanwhile is “fascinating” because you can feel you’re fighting at the summits,
taking the side of one set of elites vs. another in a high stakes game. The other side can always be completely at fault, and you can know this with complete confidence:
as Biden said to Trump, “it is what it is because you are who you are.”
Mitigation is more like “deferral”—you can’t even be sure what you’re doing now will make things better;
only over time can you develop the (always revisable) models that suggest things are going in more or less the right direction, while always keeping an eye on signs of backsliding or unanticipated dangers.
The most “interesting” part of the “game” is trying to maintain standards rigorous enough to exclude hoaxes and crackpots but flexible enough to be “actionable” and testable on a changing field,
and to assess coworkers not on individual mistakes but whether they submit and contribute to the process of correction—
and, to control and frame information so that those in power who are at least marginally more likely to set aside factional disputes and short-term political gain
can give you the breathing space you need. And in this way a little bit is done to reorder power, and model further reorderings:
a moral order is sustained, without which social order is impossible.
Making the middle as interesting as the top, and interesting in relation to the top, seems a worthy goal of a “cultural politics.”
