As a new virus, C-19 seems to be highly opportunistic, taking advantage of its youth and anonymity to attack whatever systems it comes into contact with. Symptoms are all over the map and unpredictable, and I've heard all sorts of stories of strange and unexpected complications, depending on the patient.
Further there are unsettling reports of either reinfections, relapses, or both. The befuddled immune system fumbles it and the virus comes back, again and again for some time, for some people. Patients recover, and are cleared, and then return to the hospital at a later time. And what of contagion in that period? And that is for cases under medical supervision.
In the United States, if we look at the sorry state of testing, the waters grow ever muddier. Setting aside the early development phase of the tests themselves, and the limited availability of those resources, there is the open question of testing penetration into a populace that have been instilled with a mortal fear of finance and the medical industry. Even the cold hard numbers at this point cannot be trusted.
In an environment where clinical experience is not yet developed, and research is still in its early stages - and worse, the centralized political and economic systems have abdicated their responsibilities, leading to further confusion and uncertainty - the virus' continued perpetuation looks to be wide open, as it silently claims its footholds amidst the noise. And part of that noise was discovered in the wild some time ago by our propagandists, who learned to produce and cultivate it into perpetuity, to sustain accumulation.
It could very well be the case that the virus itself stumbles and burns out in the summer sun. This is exceedingly generous, as we know the virus is doing fine in warmer climates, and there is the matter of the vast archipelago of climate-controlled space we've produced in the form of the built environment. Further, there is always next winter. But given the ideal pandemic scenario with the current regime of political economy, and its concomitant hands off approach and pathetic fixation on restoring the engines of accumulation, our whole collective pandemic strategy amounts to an enormous gamble with immense risk in human well-being. The recklessness and lack of discipline will remain as the virus is vanquished.
Out here it is only chaos. And for the Masters - who desire to keep their loot - the primary concern is to manage images, and maintain a narrative which ultimately stabilizes their position when the chaos finally settles into itself and a new tenuous stability is achieved, regardless of the consequences that may follow that.
Their heroic task before them is to boldly stride forth and construct the most irresistible propagandistic imagery, with the most compelling sets of doctored numbers and the most appealing narratives to our national sensibilities, to assure a great enough mass is frozen into fixation on the constructed number and image, and which continues to orbit in place and behave as it did before. Even as the tension between its own stasis and the ecological waves of destruction set in motion against it threatens to rend it asunder.
They still have to see to the treatment and recovery of those who "matter," and the rest can fend for themselves, and those who survive can then assume their positions and pay their back rent for the good of civilization. The increasingly kinetic mass of that which doesn't "matter" is another thing altogether though.
