One billion people! (say it in a Dr Evil voice, please)

I read an interesting headline the other day.

Not the article.  That would make me dangerously well-informed, and we know that's not how the Internet works.

It said that a billion people may catch Covid-19.  That's round about one-eighth of the population of this little blue marble.  That's a lot.  But my first thought was why stop there?

I mean, surely the more newsworthy story would be, 'Seven Billion Won't Catch Coronavirus'.  It's proving to be a pernicious little sod.  If it gets a billion, that sounds like an unstoppable momentum to me.  The rest of us won't be so much as a waffer thin mint to it as it gorges its way through us.  Like chickenpox, but with significantly superior firepower.  T-Rexpox, perhaps?

My understanding of the process is that, barring a vaccine, which isn't a given, you either contain it so it dies out, or the number of people who have had it and have built up resistance grows, meaning that remaining carriers get progressively worse at finding viral virgins to infect.  Quarantine or herd immunity.

The former strikes me as an impossible ask given how many cats are out of bags.  As for the latter... as an interconnected, global species the herd is a lot bigger than a billion.  I think you're talking pretty much the whole farm, all eight and nine noughts of us.  Okay, so as herd immunity builds up it becomes easier to contain an outbreak within a population that has built up resistance, but even so... a billion appears light to me.

There's lots of talk of finding a new normal after this is all over.  My fear is that new normal will be an old normal reborn.  That death is very much an everyday part of life.  And we'll look back on the last century or so as being a weird Elysian time, to life expectancy and health what the Renaissance was to art.

It's only in the last few generations (and particularly in the white, middle-class, Western world, to boot) that we have expected freedom from death.  I don't mean being so naive that we think we're immortal, but at least viewing the years from toddlerhood to retirement as being, for most practical purposes, free of natural death.  As if we have a right to life in a very literal sense, that the odds of dying without some human agency in the process can be disregarded on a day-to-day basis. 

In my family, I think pretty much every generation before mine has lost children at birth.  Wind the clock back further and cholera, diphtheria, influenza and the rest of them were standard issue disrupters.  Don't make plans, it may never happen.  Our teleological thinking lulls us into a belief that progress has been about taking a fixed list of problems and crossing them off, one by one.  With smallpox gone and HIV managed, it's as if we can kick our shoes off and relax at the beach with a cold one.  You don't have to look far on the Internet to find people asking whether they can sue doctors, not for negligence or malpractice, but because things simply didn't turn out as they wanted.  That's the sort of bizarre mindset we've ended up with. 

And then along comes SARS-CoV-19, and we're reminded that, in Humanity versus Nature, it isn't just one side that can develop new weapons.  Our blitzkrieg on all things natural has gone pretty well up to now.  We thought we had it subjugated.  We're Adolf on the French coast gazing at the white cliffs of Dover in the haze.  But plucky little Nature has found a way to fight back, for the freedom of the many (species) against the one.

And, yes, I did just paint Mankind as the bad guys.