Each new day, the world turns, and with the passing of the sun and the daily accelerated motion of living things, the virus is spread further and deeper, and the information feedback of its progression refreshes and focuses into view anew as the stewards of the industrial media apparatus awaken and are moved to production. Apathy, complacency, and denial are given to panic in waves as the sun rises.
The virus is poised to wreak havoc in the Western world, and indeed it is already doing so now. As a communicable pathogen, its perceived danger lies in its transmission, or in the daily physical relations of people. So it intensifies and raises the stakes of what relations are already in place and in effect. It has proven to force pathological relations - across scales large and small - into compression with each other, intensifying their effects.
It took the porosity of a highly dysfunctional human society, and the virulence of a highly contagious virus, to cover the ground required to put many disparate and partially insulated points of risk into closer and more consequential contact with one another: bad cultivated social and public relations, bad medical and political institutions, bad economic arrangements, bad resource distribution, and so on down the line. To put it another way, as we have in a situation with a drought, famine, or large scale foreign or domestic war, say, it is the very real possibility of death of the individual that is at stake in the course of regular systemic dysfunction, which heightens the consequence of dysfunction by a different order of magnitude altogether.
A severe strain can have curiously diverging effects, depending on what undergoes the strain. Say, a harrowing battle may confirm in the minds of the generals and tacticians of the victorious party that whatever arrangement or technology or set of tactics was in place was just the sort of secret sauce needed to do the job, and by golly things should stay that way indefinitely. In the losing party, of course you get: my god things need to change quite dramatically! A sentiment of the surviving members anyway, who have escaped the whirling tempest of failure and catastrophe.
