Coronavirus a truly social disease

Back when I was a kid, just saying the initials ‘VD’ aloud would make the words “Do you eat with that mouth?” come to mind. So for many people that ailment - venereal disease - was given a nickname for polite conversation: social disease.

That’s a shame, because social disease seems the perfect term for the coronavirus.

We are, of course, what biologists call social animals – animals that hug, talk, shake hands, high-five and both work and play together. All these things are part of our collective human nature.

They are the very things COVID-19 seems ingeniously designed to exploit.

If the virus were a company, let’s call it Coronavirus LLC, its marketing strategy would focus on what direct sales companies call theme parties. Those parties have been with us as long as Tupperware and the pink Cadillacs driven by the top sales women for Mary Kay cosmetics.

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The key advantage of the coronavirus is that it doesn’t care what brings people to the party: bowling, a concert, poker night, even a gathering of researchers at a lab. The coronavirus will crash the party.

Most churches are well aware of this and have shifted to services in recognition that, for the time being, whenever two or more of us are gathered in His name, there is likely to be the coronavirus as well as love.

The virus changes the rules of any – and I’ll use the words here – social gathering.

Because wherever the party is, there is the traditional host and the disease’s host – the person who might be infected. We might call that host the COVID-19’s designated driver; that is, the person who unknowingly drives the spread of the virus.

The disease can spread on the faces of the kings and queens when the cards are dealt or on the bag of chips or cans of beer when they are passed around. Or it can spread through an uncovered sneeze.

But it’s worse than that. Because most of the innocent victims aid and abet the spread. We don’t wash our hands. And although we’re warned not to do so, we touch our faces with our fingers. The habit is so ingrained in us that it seems as much a part of our nature as socializing in the first place.

The result can be that everyone at the party is dealt a bad hand during the evening – and takes the virus home.

All know by now that COVID-19 is a stealth fighter – that the infection can be passed before the virus shows symptoms. While most people who are aware of the disease know enough to stay home if they are infected, others seem not to care.

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Some of those others have come to believe that in mandating policies aimed at suppressing the disease, health experts are trying to suppress people’s political rights.

Protesters are fighting the wrong war: the real enemy is the disease, and that in failing to protect themselves from it, they are more likely to advance its cause, spread infection and deprive others of their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Their most likely victims: family members.

Some of the protesters also have chosen the wrong weaponry.

In the way that night vision equipment is required for night time warfare, testing is required for us to detect the presence of the invisible enemy. The tests serve as our eyes to identify where the infections are. Contact tracing is the reconnaissance needed to carry on the fight.

And how a safe reopening of our community can work without those tools fully deployed escapes me.

What worries me most is that, in the absence of testing, we may discover that the most significant difference between the meat packing plants that have been hot spots for infection and other factories across the nation is that the meat packing plants have been open for the past month and the other factories have not.

The stakes involved seem clearest to me when I think of the reopening of schools.

Each fall, a certain number of children are not allowed to enter school because they lack vaccinations.

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I assume that, at some point – at all levels of face-to-face education — records of vaccinations for the coronavirus will be required. For although children in general seem to suffer the least with the disease, who wants to take a chance with their health by putting them at risk for infection?

And even if most do well, they will carry the in home to their families along with their bookbags.

In the end, instead of calling the coronavirus a social disease, I’d like to rebrand it as VD for Virulent Disease. And just as we used some tools to stop the spread of VD, we should begin wearing masks to lower the risk of passing along the current form when we’re out .

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