Crowding and Infectious Disease
Mar. 29th, 2020 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutWe have all been getting immersive history lessons in the 1918 flu pandemic, and the outbreaks which preceded and followed the one(s) that ended The Great War. Yay, history! Might as well try to learn something from it when we are motivated.
The people (I suppose we have to call them that) who ran The Great War were quite proud of themselves for finally having definitively licked (ewwwwww) diarrheal illness in camps. Sooooo many battles were defined by which side had the worst runs currently or recently in previous wars. Wars had ended because of the impossibility of continuing.
Well, the Great War was the first one (probably -- but feel free to correct me in the comments!) to be ended NOT by mosquito borne disease, or diarrheal illness, but rather by respiratory illness. Ya gotta really crowd people in persistently in order to do that, but they did, and they resisted all efforts to stop.
How did we get back to this place?
My husband's jobsite recently told everyone to work from home for a period of time (before this crisis), so they could remove all the cubicles and replace them with smaller cubicles. He likes to describe call centers with multiple shifts a day, no assigned seating and company supplied keyboards, headsets, etc. He points out that this is as petri dish as it gets, and people cannot stay home when sick because they will be fired if they miss a day, and then they will not pay the rent and they will be evicted. The End. Recently, coverage of our current crisis has brought to my attention that there are people who drive a different truck every day. The cleverer drivers figured out a while back that if they did not want to have the sniffles or worse every day forever, they should sanitize all surfaces first thing in the morning. But then I saw a sad, sad tale of someone who lost his partner to coronavirus. She drove rental cars to reposition, and she had not been clever enough to figure that out, suffering from years of bronchitis before finally felled by this outbreak.
We rent cars several times a year. I never, ever thought of them as a meaningful vector. I mean, I am not licking things in there. But you do not have to.
We have packed ourselves into coastal cities, sure, fine. But I am only half convinced that the size of our residences is the problem. I think we have a lot of work practices (call centers, the rental cars, the newly assigned truck each day, etc.) that are going to wind up regulated by the health department. Once, it was restaurants that were the vector of disease, and were subject to mandatory training, licensure, inspection and regulation. But anything that gets touched by a new person every day is going to be looked at with a lot of suspicion and a fair amount of statute going forward.
That whole sharing economy that rose from the ashes of the Great Recession is apparently going to experience a trial by fire in the Pandemic. We shall see which are phoenix like and recover, and which go the way of flop houses of days gone by.
The people (I suppose we have to call them that) who ran The Great War were quite proud of themselves for finally having definitively licked (ewwwwww) diarrheal illness in camps. Sooooo many battles were defined by which side had the worst runs currently or recently in previous wars. Wars had ended because of the impossibility of continuing.
Well, the Great War was the first one (probably -- but feel free to correct me in the comments!) to be ended NOT by mosquito borne disease, or diarrheal illness, but rather by respiratory illness. Ya gotta really crowd people in persistently in order to do that, but they did, and they resisted all efforts to stop.
How did we get back to this place?
My husband's jobsite recently told everyone to work from home for a period of time (before this crisis), so they could remove all the cubicles and replace them with smaller cubicles. He likes to describe call centers with multiple shifts a day, no assigned seating and company supplied keyboards, headsets, etc. He points out that this is as petri dish as it gets, and people cannot stay home when sick because they will be fired if they miss a day, and then they will not pay the rent and they will be evicted. The End. Recently, coverage of our current crisis has brought to my attention that there are people who drive a different truck every day. The cleverer drivers figured out a while back that if they did not want to have the sniffles or worse every day forever, they should sanitize all surfaces first thing in the morning. But then I saw a sad, sad tale of someone who lost his partner to coronavirus. She drove rental cars to reposition, and she had not been clever enough to figure that out, suffering from years of bronchitis before finally felled by this outbreak.
We rent cars several times a year. I never, ever thought of them as a meaningful vector. I mean, I am not licking things in there. But you do not have to.
We have packed ourselves into coastal cities, sure, fine. But I am only half convinced that the size of our residences is the problem. I think we have a lot of work practices (call centers, the rental cars, the newly assigned truck each day, etc.) that are going to wind up regulated by the health department. Once, it was restaurants that were the vector of disease, and were subject to mandatory training, licensure, inspection and regulation. But anything that gets touched by a new person every day is going to be looked at with a lot of suspicion and a fair amount of statute going forward.
That whole sharing economy that rose from the ashes of the Great Recession is apparently going to experience a trial by fire in the Pandemic. We shall see which are phoenix like and recover, and which go the way of flop houses of days gone by.