Dancing with Death

On March 1, The New York Times reported that two coronavirus infections in Washington State, discovered six weeks apart from each other, had been sequenced and found to be genetically related. [1] The infected people, though residing in the same county, had not been in close contact, and at any rate, the second case had occurred long enough after the first for the virus to have remained viable. The conclusion was that the virus had likely been spreading in the community for several weeks.

Though at that point, there were only a small number of cases reported in the U.S. (about 75), the genetic sequencing news was chilling. The virus had been spreading for weeks. There were travel restrictions already in place and more were about to be enacted, but it became rather unclear how much that would help. The virus could be lurking anywhere and everywhere.

One month later, there are 200,000 reported cases in the U.S. How many actual infections there are we can only guess.

This situation is reminiscent of the one described by Edgar Allan Poe in his Gothic story, "The Masque of the Red Death." In Poe's story, a deadly disease plagues a country, feeding on its victims. Prince Prospero hatches a plan for protecting himself and his friends. He gathers a thousand happy, healthy friends, and the group takes refuge in one of his remote palaces. The socialites bring everything they need to eat, drink, and be merry, and they seal the gates:

There was music, there was dancing, there was beauty, there was food to eat and wine to drink. All these were within the wall, and within the wall they would be safe. Outside the wall walked the Red Death.[2]

Red Mask

Source: Nice Guys/Pexels

The prince, a lover of extravagant entertainment, organizes a masquerade ball. Everyone is asked to come with a face covered by a cloth mask. The ball is lavish and beautiful. At one point, however, masqueraders notice a very strange guest, whose attire is strikingly irreverent, and who stands out even in this group of eccentrically dressed people. Fear and horror grip the hearts of dancers. Poe writes:

In such a group as this, only a very strange masquerader could have caused such a feeling. Even among those who laugh at both life and death, some matters cannot be laughed at. Everyone seemed now deeply to feel that the stranger should not have been allowed to come among them dressed in such clothes. He was tall and very thin, and covered from head to foot like a dead man prepared for the grave.[3]

Suddenly, the dancing ceases. No one can go on being merry in the presence of this persona non grata. Prince Prospero cries indignantly, "Take him! Seize him! Pull off his mask so that we may know who we must hang at sunrise!" [4] Some of the dancers rush toward the stranger but stop in their tracks. Fear prevails over obedience to the prince. (Hobbes would have argued that the covenant between subjects and sovereign is voided at the point at which disobedience rather than obedience increases one's chances of survival.)

Prospero is outraged enough to overcome his own fear. (Anger has this peculiar ability to suppress fright.) He runs toward the extraordinary stranger, holding a knife with a shiny blade above his head, ready to strike. But when the stranger looks into Prospero's eyes, the knife falls, and a minute later, so does the prince, dead. The mysterious masquerader is revealed to be Red Death himself. The palace had been sealed, as it turns out, to no avail. The deadly disease was already inside. The ruler and his revelers had quarantined themselves with death.

Our situation is not quite so grim, but Poe's story nonetheless captures some of its aspects. The main problem with a danger such as a deadly pathogen is that it is insidious. The virus is too small to see with the naked eye, and none of its effects are immediately obvious. For this reason, what is happening currently is much like what happens to Prospero and his guests. And that's true at both the national level and that of individual households: Many people apparently went into self-isolation together with family members and roommates who were already infected and didn't know it. The disease appears to cluster in families and small social circles. [5]

There is a chance we'd find a cure within a reasonable amount of time (developing a vaccine is months into the future according to estimates, if it can be done at all), but even in the absence of cure, widespread testing is no doubt gravely needed. There is simply no place where one can be safe from an invisible threat. What you have to do is shine a light on it, not in the sense of helping understand it — though that's crucial too — but more urgently, in exposing it so you can then head in the opposite direction.

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There is a final point I wish to make: I suspect we could have dealt with the disease spread sooner if we had taken aggressive measures earlier, when the very first case was reported. I am not an epidemiologist, but I would conjecture that had we done that, we would have likely stopped the spread by now. Since we didn't do it, we'll have to remain under lockdown for a long time, and there will be thousands of deaths that could have probably been prevented. (There are 4,000 deaths in the U.S. alone already at the time of this writing.)

But human psychology is such that anyone suggesting aggressive preemptive measures would have been called an alarmist. Neither would that have been an irrational response. We were operating under a good deal of uncertainty and would have had to trade the certain costs of shutting down the whole economy against great but merely hypothetical benefits. What is worse, we would likely have learned no lesson had we adopted that strategy and had it worked. As then, those who were against early measures would have said, and not unreasonably, "See, we told you there wasn't anything to worry about." We appear not to have evolved to guard against non-immediate threats. That's just how and why death may sneak in on us, as it did on Prospero.

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