The ‘Good’ Things About COVID-19 Are Also The Bad Things About It

Relatively low mortality rate and slower incubation period might seem lovely on paper but they can cloud perspective and complicate proper response.

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash

COVID-19 is not a nightmarish hemorrhagic fever straight out of an apocalyptic contagion movie. It doesn’t kill 90% of people infected by liquefying their internal organs within 48 hours of first exposure. Of course it is a good thing we are not facing something so horrifying and deadly. But the virus we are facing is potentially lethal, and not just to those in the most vulnerable demographics. The combination of its infectiousness, its capacity for being carried asymptomatically, and the two to three week lag between infection and onset of symptoms are its most insidious weapons.

People being contagious while completely without any trace of symptoms is obviously a massive challenge in terms of tracking and containing its spread. If you have never had any symptoms it would never occur to you to seek voluntary testing and in large industrialized countries it can be difficult to mandate universal testing, just in terms of logistics and supplies to say nothing of the certainty of seeing at least some societal resistance.

But a large number of people walking around asymptomatically contagious isn’t just a logistical problem, it can have a…