The Basic Assumptions
When the virus first hit, early in 2020, we tended to ignore what was happening right in front of us. In part, ignorance was easy to engage because the virus produced very few noticable symptoms. As Nicholas Christakes (2020, p. 204), a quite knowledgeable documenter of COVID-19 has recently noted, this virus produces no grotesque physical symptoms (such as diarrhea, vomiting, odors and discoloration of skin). Furthermore, most of the early victims of this virus were outside of public view. Many sick people were sequestered in rest homes, and other health-care facilities or were alone at home with no one to witness their suffering. As Christakes (2020, p. 205) observes, there was a divide early on “between those who know someone who has died and those who do not”. As the virus became more widespread this divide went away. Furthermore, COVID-19 seemed to become more “democratic”—it seemed to infect and kill without regard to socio-economic status or race. More recently, the epidemiologists have provided us with “less convenient truth.” We have come more recently to the painful recognition that there are major differences in the rates of infection and death resulting from income and skin color.
By the middle of 2020, we were coming in many societies, to the collective realization that COVID-19 was to be a much more challenging enemy than many other viruses. While other viruses in recent years (including an earlier version of the current virus) have had a major impact in some countries, the current COVID-19 virus was having an impact in virtually every country—including the United States. Several important decisions needed to be made individually and collectively. At one level, the decision was quite easy. It was guided by a basic, shared assumption: we simply had to act in a thoughtful, compassion manner. We all knew that the correct thing to do was to engage in a series of actions (or inactions) that would assist in ameliorating the impact of COVID-19. We were all to observe social distancing when going out in public. We were to stay at home whenever possible, as well as wash our hands and engage in other sanitizing practices. All of these were deemed important. A simple term was even coined to subsume all these practices: “nonpharmaceutical interventions” or NPIs.
