Mendocino County’s opinions on the issues

Check out today’s editorial columns and letters to the editor from our readers.

To the Editor:

I’d like to say something that I get the sense lots of us are feeling but not saying. The overall response to the virus — basically “shut down most normal human activity” — does not seem entirely proportionate to the actual threat of the virus. In fact, the response seems rather disproportionate and far more likely to do real lasting damage to civilization than does the virus itself.

There are lots of threats in the world that wreak tragically early deaths upon millions of people every year … nine million deaths from malnutrition, four million from bad air, two million from diarrhea, to name just a few. We don’t shut down the planet to prevent these millions of mostly poor mostly brown people from dying prematurely every year. What is different now? The best I can figure is that now, some small percentage of everybody — not just mostly poor mostly brown people but everybody — is suddenly at slightly increased risk of dying earlier than would be ideal. So now we must shut down everything. And what is the effect of this? Who is most harmed?

Saving some thousands of physical lives in the U.S. by sacrificing tens of millions of livelihoods (22 million new jobless in this country as of the last few weeks) does not seem like entirely sound moral reasoning, let alone sound economic or social reasoning. Forcing our children to stay home and away from other children does not seem physically or emotionally better for them, certainly not over the long-term.

Forcing so many stores to close while allowing a few to remain open does not seem necessary or just; if social distancing and sanitation are key, then these practices can be applied by all or most businesses just as they are being applied at grocery stores, hardware stores, fast food joints, etc.

The response to the virus also seems somewhat blind to biology and evolutionary history, with strict limits on our need for physical interaction and connection with other humans and a rejection of our eons- evolved cellular and collective immunity intelligence.

Where is this approach coming from? Why is it almost universally accepted as the only reasonable response? It appears to me that most of the thinking around the current response is grounded in one very narrow slice of reasoning from one part of the medical community. But there are lots of doctors and researchers all over the world who are presenting a very different kind of assessment of what is happening and what a reasonable response should look like. It’s unfortunate that so few elected leaders are listening to these other voices, who are talking about things like the evolution of the adaptive immune system and the intelligence of immune response, within each of us individually but also collectively, which are capable of navigating and responding to things like this new ripple in viral information coding. All that’s needed is a little time and for humans to at least somewhat keep behaving like humans.

We are all exposed to lots of variations of coronaviruses throughout our lifetimes. This new one, SARS-coronavirus-2, is particularly bad — for now. But it is circulating. And as generally happens with new virus variants as they circulate and interact with other variants, they mutate into something less lethal. Human interaction speeds along that weakening process.

So, at the very least, the “let’s make up an impossible new awful terrifying world” response that we are experiencing being proposed and imposed seems to not make total sense biologically, evolutionarily, or epidemiologically. And it makes no sense economically or socially; or from an equity perspective.

Can we please be smarter? Can we please manifest a better middle way? One that respects the severity of this new viral code, respects peoples’ frailties to it, respects the frailties of our medical system — but also respects our basic animal humanness, respects the ability of our bodies to deal with viruses and the necessary dance that happens between viruses and animal hosts, respects the needs of our children, and respects the reality that being physically with each other is one of the most important factors in our overall health and well-being.

We need not be so afraid of death. Some of us will not make it past today or tomorrow or next week or next month. Because of this virus or some other virus or some countless other million things. We know this. We grieve our losses and we go on living. This virus is not the thing that is going to get us.

What we need to solve for real is ourselves and our civilization.