It will be some time before the true story of the 2019–20 coronavirus can be told. As we write, in mid-April, the country is still struggling to get its bearings. We are all of us disoriented, wandering about in a veritable hall of distorting mirrors. Almost every datum comes to us festooned in garlands of static. Information bleeds silently into misinformation, which often comes back to us, trussed up, as disinformation.
Have you noticed that, quite suddenly, everyone is a budding epidemiologist? Some wag said that graduates of the storied École normale supérieure “know everything. Unfortunately, that is all they know.” So it is with our newly minted epidemiologists. Apodictic declarations come thick and fast, only to be contradicted the next day, sometimes by the same sources, by successor apodictic declarations. Where did the virus come from? A Chinese “wet market.” A Chinese level-four biological lab. The U.S. Army. How contagious is it? Not very. Prolonged, close-range contact is necessary. You can get it by touching a doorknob that an infected person has touched. You can get it by walking past an infected person and breathing the air around him.
Read Full Article »