Nobody wants to kill their grandmother

Or, for that matter, Willie Nelson.

We shall return to this point.

The novel coronavirus, which causes the disease Covid-19, is shutting down the world’s economy. This would seem at first blush to be an overreaction. After all, relevant history — SARS, MERS, Zika, and so forth — tell us that the reaction of the media and others with a stake in, well, reaction, has been overwrought to the point of misleading or even counterproductive. In the fullness of time, if we are lucky, the same may reveal itself in the current case.

But that does not mean that the risk of Covid-19 is not different in important respects that carry the potential for enormous social change. We discussed some of the possibilities here.

We believe that the social and economic threat in the novel coronavirus is that it apparently has a long incubation period, and that carriers can transmit the virus before they are symptomatic. This fact, combined with delays in high volume testing in big countries like the United States, means that we actually do not know how many people there are who can transmit the disease, nor who they are. Quite honestly, any of us could be a carrier and in the moment feel just fine.

The problem, of course, is that Covid-19 is deadly, almost certainly several times more lethal on average than the seasonal flu. It does not kill consistently, though. Old folks, and especially those with some respiratory weakness or damage, are far more susceptible, with a 10-15% or greater mortality rate.

So, really, any of us could kill our grandmother without knowing we are doing it.

Living as we do in Austin, we are also worried about Willie Nelson, easily the most beloved living legend in town. Willie is in the backstretch of his 80s, and — rumor has it — has smoked a bit in his life. Covid-19 would be very bad news for Willie.

Nobody wants to kill their grandmother, or Willie Nelson, because they did not take every precaution.

The problem is that “every precaution” increasingly looks like it may involve shutting down the world’s economy. China did it, and now American businesses are doing the only rational thing from their perspective: Stopping all “non-essential” travel and in-person meetings, telling people to work at home, and so forth. Close to home, the massive SXSW conference is on the bubble, confronting a raft of corporate cancellations.

All of this may or may not be rational if the point is to stop the pandemic. Even the putative experts do not yet know enough to be confident that any particular measure – at least those among the policy options in a continental democratic republic riven with civic mistrust – will have a meaningful effect on the transmission of the disease.

So why are we, and the rest of the world, gripped by Covid-19 to a degree that we weren’t by SARS, MERS, Zika, or even Ebola? Why are we going to destroy trillions in economic value, throw people out of work, suspend schooling, give up the handshake, and reorder the supply chains of global industry?

Because we don’t want to kill our grandmother, or Willie Nelson.