I think of a literal fault line, where over time the evidence gradually mounts in favor of its existence in the form of little tremors issuing as the plates grind and slip, and the tremors might grow in frequency and amplitude as the tension builds up, until something gives and you get a massive earthquake.
Over long stretches of time, there have been a wide range of explanations for these phenomena - all with an internal logic and consistency of their own - using data gathered from the senses and daily experience and memory and collective tradition, to attempt to piece together some sort of model to explain and anticipate these subterranean movements. Moving earth set into motion by the activities of great beings for example, or the machinations of angry gods.
Even the sciences of geology and tectonics are comprised of vast mosaics of accumulated theory and pieced together data sets: the inferences drawn from observable geological phenomena on the surface, or data taken from drilling and core analysis and dating, measurements of continental drift and the study of the movement of bodies of water in relation to the earth, measurements and historical data sets of the frequency and amplitude of tremors and quakes, the geometrical and mathematic descriptions of planes and landscapes, and so on.
What got me going on this though was something more biological, and by extension socioeconomic and political in nature. That's right, that subject near and dear to my heart - both literally physically and metaphorically - the socioeconomic and sociopolitical dynamics of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. What we're becoming ever more aware of, through the study of Long Covid cohorts especially, is the sheer depth and complexity of the damage being done, with the passage of time being an additional confounding factor.
The passage of time especially has some salient implications. We've talked about the longer term social and economic implications of the damage being done by Long Covid, but there is more to consider in even longer arcs. For example, the science communicator Eric Topol likes to bring up the fact that researchers have barely started scratching the surface of what Long Covid is and what it is doing, and we only have 3 years of observation to go by. Covid is a strange and baffling disease, and it is easy to forget that the multi-system disorder took everyone by surprise initially, where everyone was looking for respiratory issues.
But as Topol has pointed out, this has been the case for over a hundred years: viruses do some very strange things to people over time, and we've been ignoring a lot of it, or at least not understanding the data sets well until there is enough to go on. For example, there was a large growth in Parkinson's disease cases some 15 years after the 1918 influenza epidemic, which has increasingly been traced to it. Or the explosion of post-polio disorders that arose some 30 to 40 years after that epidemic. In the early years of the pandemic we're very much in the dark, and one can only speculate about the cumulative effects of very slow and invisible structural damages that are mounting over time on top of other forms of damage, which are growing more frequent and more extensive: it has been pointed out that given the acceleration in velocity and reach of global industrial civilization, we could only expect more pandemics coming down the pipe at greater frequencies and greater levels of destruction.
This is just one of the many fault lines, on a multidimensional axis, that we're simply choosing to ignore, like some sleazy developer building out a sprawling grid of single family housing over a known quake zone, or a flood plane, or deeper and deeper into the woods, or what have you, with full knowledge of what it means, and deliberately setting that knowledge aside and tucking it away, while pocketing the cash and leaving the area in good time.
I use this image deliberately because as I write this, much of the limited funding going to studying Long Covid - and let's be clear, a lion's share of this funding is for observation, with very little going towards therapeutic solutions, of which there are currently zero in accepted practice - is scheduled to dry up, nearly simultaneously with the abandonment of testing and tracking and environmental mitigation like ventilation and masking.
I mean, having Long Covid in a society that has abandoned even mitigation...in microcosm it is kind of comparable to someone with asthma living with a smoker, in a house with poor ventilation and nowhere really to go. Wave after wave of infection, triggering the affliction all over again and setting back the healing process and doing ever more damage...I can say with personal experience, living with Long Covid is many things, but one of the most insidious on a social level is the sheer alienation to the experience of others involved.
I watched Parkinson's advance in my step mom - the complications eventually killed her - and one thing you see happen over time is the subjective wall that goes up between that person's experiences and the rest of the people around them. You can sympathize and be present with them, but nothing will really penetrate into that person's experience. The more she started shaking, the more her speech started to slur, the more trouble she had supporting her own weight and chewing her own food, the more she simply wanted to be alone, and away from the observation of others.
We're talking about enormous amounts of slow, distorted, hidden, grinding human suffering that will happen between countless closed doors over longer periods of time, which will be heaped upon many other converging political, economic and environmental dislocations and traumas in the coming decades. There will be consequences, and that is putting it lightly.
To dramatize and compress and simplify what will take place over decades, with some irreverence to balance the spicing: you've been following the steadily growing trail of destruction, trying to make the shape of the problem out, until the thing itself rises up from the depths and breaks the surface, showing its face, and then you get that Jaws "we're going to need a bigger boat" moment, much too late of course, when the only recourse you have is shooting a gun at some oxygen cannister - or whatever the hell that thing was - in the hopes of simply blowing everything up.
