We Don't Have to Help it Fail

 Another thread by Conor Browne, bio-risk consultant specializing in Covid-19 forecasting:

Since January 2020, a substantial part of what I do has, quite simply, been trying to tell the future. That's fundamentally what forecasting is. I have been right far, far more times than I have been wrong. Much as my reputation hangs on accuracy of prediction, I would much rather have been wrong. This is the difference, I think, between people like myself and people who seek to minimise: they want to be right; I want to be wrong. These thoughts often crystallise for me when I write, rather than discuss. 

Today, I was writing a report for a client, and, completely unbidden, a fragment of a quotation from Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels came to my mind. I reached for the book on my bookshelf to read it; indulge me while I share it with you: 

'The vision was brutally clear: he had to wonder at the clarity of it. Few things in a soldier's life were so clear as this, so black-line etched that he could actually see the blue troops for one long bloody moment, going up the long slope to the stony top as if it were already done and a memory already, an odd, set, stony quality to it, as if tomorrow had occurred and there was nothing you could do about it, the way you sometimes feel before a foolish attack, knowing it will fail but you cannot stop it or even run away but must even take part and help it fail'. 

I'm telling you all now - and believe me, I want to be wrong - that if we don't slow transmission of this virus and develop new treatments and second generation vaccines, the damage we are allowing to occur to the health of our global population - not just the elderly, the disabled, the vulnerable - but everyone, well, that damage is unsustainable. And the vast majority of that population don't understand the risk, because they haven't been given the information. 

An odd, set, stony quality to it.

We don't have to take part and help it fail, but standing against the tide take considerable mental fortitude. Working to stop it by disseminating information that has little effect is exhausting. A few of us are still forging ahead, convincing one person at a time to start wearing an N95 again whenever they leave the house.