Where’s the Rona?
The coronavirus is not only not everywhere, it is hardly anywhere
Our effort to control the coronavirus is based on a deep belief that we can tame nature.
Our fear of the coronavirus is based on a deep belief that the pathogen may be everywhere.
Neither belief is true, so we must change our minds in order to end this social crisis.
“I wonder where that fish has gone … It went wherever I did go.
Where can that fish be … Wouldn’t you like to know?
It is a most elusive fish!”
Monty Python: The Meaning of Life, 1983
A Deep Belief
What does it take to believe that we can control a viral pandemic?
The starting point must be the idea that people can tame nature.
Like the debate over climate change, we assume that our collective impact on the natural world can be reversed or altered to create a new situation that is more to our liking.
Otherwise, what is the point of trying to do anything about trends in the weather?
So too with the virus, we believe that our efforts to hide away from each other, avoid contagion, and monitor our contacts will break the back of the pandemic, not only flattening the curve but ultimately crushing the disease itself.
Since we have spent millennia bending wild beasts and plants to our will, something no other creatures have achieved, it is unsurprising that we believe that we can apply much more advanced ideas and technologies to defeat this pandemic.
Our presumed control over nature is the source for hope in an anti-viral vaccine and for the widespread belief that many of the government policies already instigated — from lockdowns and other contact restrictions to the use of masks and sanitizers — have been wildly successful.
And yet, it seems that we may be inflating our role in this very natural process.
There is little evidence, aside from selectively chosen anecdotes that can easily be refuted by other examples, that anything beyond basic hygienic practices and simple physical distancing have altered the course of the pandemic — and even those measures are not really proven.
After all, the global pandemic is still as strong as ever, after eight months as an intermittently stoked wildfire, and there is little evidence in rolling regional outbreaks and second wave eruptions to suggest an end to it any time soon. It is as if the virus has a mind of its own.
In days gone by (or at least just prior to 2020), some might have referred to this type of misplaced belief in our powers as hubris, a state of excessive and misguided self-confidence.
These days, we do not think so deeply, and so we are mainly told to buck up and do what our political leaders decree.
Either way, it is clear that a widely-shared belief in humanity’s ability to alter nature underwrites all of our counter-pandemic policies.
Another Belief
So, if a belief in our near omnipotence is a prerequisite for expecting policy progress, what is the deep-seated but unspoken assumption behind our belief in the very existence of the viral threat?
After all, we cannot see, smell, taste, or touch the coronavirus. Aside from some (false color) submicroscopic photos of the menace, we would not even know how to describe it to each other.
And yet, fear of this tiny critter has triggered a social crisis of historic proportions.
The only way to explain this is to understand that all of the fear and anxiety related to the virus has been internally generated within our minds.
We were given information from governments, experts, and the media, and we converted that dataflow into pure negative emotion.
We were presented with the anecdotal pandemic experiences from a miniscule sampling of seven billion people and so we imagined everything possible under the sun.
In essence, we have the hypochondriac’s curse: the more we think about something we dread, the more real it becomes.
But how then to understand what happens when we leave our homes and venture out into the untamed wilds of the world (formerly known as everywhere but the seductive safety of our warm beds)?
Don’t those encounters with reality lead us to question our fears when we fail to see anyone ever with the disease before us?
That mental disconnect leads us to the true underlying assumption about our belief in the coronavirus: we assume it exists as a profound threat because we believe that it may be everywhere.
Because it cannot be sensed, it is possible, we think, no matter how improbably faint the odds, that it is actually and literally right there before our noses.
It could be in our home, at our workplace, or in any public venue. It could be in the air, it could be in someone’s breath, it could be on any surface. It could be on our hands or on our faces or, God forbid, already in our lungs. It could, it could, it could.
We throw every bit of rational probabilistic thinking out the window and opt for a one-dimensional magical theory that the threat is actually all around us. We don’t know and we can’t know, so we assume it is here, there, and everywhere.
This deep assumption helps to explain why people wear masks when hiking alone, while laying at the beach, or when driving between one possibly disease-laden place and another.
It explains why so few will touch or hug other people, why we wash our hands incessantly, why we refuse to touch door handles, and why we look so crossly at those who would dare approach us too closely.
The reasoning of almost everyone is simple and incredibly powerful: the virus could be anywhere and so it might be everywhere.
True or False
So, even as we believe ourselves to be omnipotent in order to defeat the disease, we also assume the virus to be omnipresent, setting up a mighty clash of titans between humanity and nature.
Yet, more supple minds might ask: is this a proper view of reality (that thing that causes such trouble for us when our beliefs collide with its implacable existence)?
Just because something could be somewhere, does it make it likely or even possible that it actually is there?
This is a deep philosophical issue and definitely causes heads to spin. I know my mine is a bit off kilter from the effort to consider it.
As a result, I prefer to look at the issue more practically, and so I went and cracked some numbers to understand the prevalence of the coronavirus.
First, I wanted to understand the playing field, where it was possible for the virus to exist.
Using my home Vancouver as an example, I calculated the indoor and outdoor spaces of the city, the only areas where the virus is likely to lurk. I used property inventory and land area estimates and converted those from surface measures to volume measures, since we interact with the virus in three-dimensional space.
Accordingly, I estimate that such residential space is approximately 13,400 million cubic feet (mcf), industrial is 1,600 mcf, and commercial is 400 mcf, for a total of just over 15 billion cubic feet of interior space in Vancouver.
The exterior space comes to a much higher total, just over 160 billion cubic feet, and includes spaces where we are unlikely to mingle, such as roads and treed areas. Let’s cut the outdoor space in half to accommodate those provisos. That gives us a bit under 100 billion cubic feet of total indoor and outdoor potential viral space in the city.
Next, I calculated the storage space in the primary resting place for the virus: our lungs. The number is around 80 mcf for all the people of Vancouver, since lungs have such a large surface area, though the effective number will be much smaller, since this assumes complete coating of everyone’s lungs with Covid.
Regardless, the degree of viral transmission is actually set not by the storage volume in our bodies, but rather by the flow of potential viral transmission through our breathing, the number one transmission vector.
Taking normal daytime breathing flows and the potential number of infected people in July, I estimate that there is at most about 40 mcf of virus-infested breathing in Vancouver over the course of a month.
Comparing this viral transmission volume with the total indoor and outdoor space, we see that it is but four hundredths of one percentage point. The virus is most certainly not everywhere.
Of course, in order for contagion to take place, someone else needs to intercept that viral breathing in close proximity and with a sufficient enough dose.
There are perhaps 5,000 people in Vancouver right now who are infected with the virus. On a completely random basis, with an urban population of 2.7 million, we might expect to bump into such people in 1 out of 500 contacts, and even then we would need to have a close and intense interaction to create contagion (certainly with odds well below 50:50 for each contact).
This takes the existence of the virus down from four hundredths of one percent of the potential viral space to at most four hundred-thousandths of one percent of what we can call the active potential space.
At that level of possible exposure, it is fair to say that the virus is not only not everywhere, it is for all practical purposes hardly anywhere.
So What?
The arguments and calculations set out above point to our minds as the thing that must change in order to end this social crisis.
We need to better understand the risk of the virus and we must choose to incorporate that information into our thinking and actions.
We need to stop assuming knowledge and powers that we do not possess and set forth policies that are proportionate to the actual viral risk.
We need to accept that the virus is here to stay and so come to grips with it in the same way that we accept other viral infections like colds and influenza.
Most of all, we need to talk to each other fully, openly and with respect, so that the best and most correct ideas (those closest to reality) are put into play as our social reaction to the pandemic.
This social crisis can only be ended by coming to terms with our mental failings. We will not solve the problem with social engineering or biotechnology. It is not a public health issue.
The proper question is not “Where’s the Rona?”
The real question is “Where’s the Wisdom?”
