Giving up
or
Getting ready
The election is drawing nearer and so are possible vaccines, neither matter much.
Any vaccine will be as good as the virus allows it to be, there is a reason we have no cold vaccines.
The specter of re-infection is rising as new stories point out it is happening in small but certain numbers.
That matters insofar as it is a indication of how long any vaccine might continue to work to stop the disease.
We are getting better at treating coronavirus but not at stopping it, we have no antidote yet.
The virus continues to challenge us economically, biologically, socially and mentally.
The patterns of economic damage shift rapidly, supply chain difficulties are affecting every effort.
Even highly focused and supported groups are encountering unexpected problems.
The ramifications of each incident are often only discovered when the problems occur.
For complex and difficult tasks the specialized corporations and industries that do that work are hardest hit.
And these difficult problems are forcing a rapid adaptation in corporate structures, the chickens are back.
Any complex task that depended upon webs of international entities working together is impacted.
Companies are being forced to reconsider decisions about everything.
The basic human model is pretty good and it can adapt quickly, ie third arteries in the arm
The corporate model has always been nebulous, who knows what they look like or what organs they have.
The coronavirus is changing that, it is affecting the basic human model but attacking the corporate model.
As businesses shutter and shut down, many to never re-emerge, the role of corporations may change.
I suspect the next 6 months will see many businesses either getting ready or giving up.
And not just small players, the stage is changing and the demands of the new environment are real.
And this is happening before the virus has had a chance to make one major antigenic shift.
A 10 point shift has to be considered a possibility, that type of viral weaponry could emerge at any time.
The flu has been hammered back this year by coronavirus caution, masks and hand sanitizer work.
But do not underestimate the danger of influenza as opposed to the flu, or shifts as opposed to drifts.
So get ready or give up.
But remember, you could give up today and before Memorial Day be fighting the coronavirus again.
Getting ready means anticipating that things could get much worse.
A quote from the Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.
Connie Willis is an American author and the book was written in 1992.
The hero of this book is a female student, Kivrin.
The book is a time travel book set in Oxford in the 2050s in a post Pandemic world.
It was a winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards.
An infectious disease has just emerged in Oxford and a quarantine has been announced.
A group of American bell ringers on a holiday tour has been caught up in the quarantine.
This is an encounter between an American bell ringer and a British academician trying to help them.
"I'm sure Ely is already aware of the situation, but I will be more than happy to phone the cathedral and explain--"
"Explain! Perhaps you'd like to explain it to me too. I'm not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this.
In America nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go"
And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking he thought.
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