The COVID-19 Death Complex
When should (and shouldn’t) we mobilize to prevent death?
Five days ago, on September 5th, the BBC released an article called: “Coronavirus: Tests ‘could be picking up dead virus.’” The article highlights research indicating that coronavirus testing is possibly showing up as positive for “dead virus residue.” Prof. Heneghan, one of the study’s authors, suggests that alterations be made to testing to eliminate false positives. He also mentions that the faulty positives could explain current UK hospital stability despite a “rise” in circumstances.
The above scenario is yet another example of just how in the dark we are when it comes to COVID-19. Each week there are more twists and turns to how experts view the virus, the testing, the cases, and the deaths. Some observations are only hypothetical while others settle in the COVID-paradigm (whether factual or not) or are reversed in haste (as when the WHO called asymptomatic transmission very rare. There was uproar and then they quickly and greatly altered the statement).
And thus the adage “better safe than sorry” is the current, universal approach. Even as I, your writer, agree and follow the adage full-heartedly—I ask you, reader: How safe should we continue to be? For how long? And what level of death determines this?
Our Somewhat-Obvious Tendency to Forgo Death
Humans will go to the ends of the earth to avoid death. This is mythologically expressed throughout cultures and epochs.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, the oldest known poem from ancient Mesopotamia, demigod Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, becomes afraid of his own death. Gilgamesh takes leave of Uruk to seek Utnapishtim, a sage and survivor of the Great Flood. After failing a series of trials and losing his elixir of life to a serpent, Gilgamesh returns to his kingdom with nothing but the inevitability of his fate: death.
We can’t discuss monomythic tales without invoking the memory of Joseph Campbell, and perhaps there is no better occasion than now to summon this quote of his:
“Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.”
Do Campbell's words make you cringe?
Our culture is chronically disconnected from death. The thought of it makes us sick. We’d rather not see it, not think about it, not believe it will ever happen to us.
We keep our children bubble-wrapped in rules and our own clinginess to prevent x, y, and z from occurring. We use medical equipment to keep patients alive as long as humanly possible far after knowing their inevitable fate. Open-casket funerals make us sick.
So now, with a deadly (enough) pandemic within reach of the West, we shut down, close off, regulate. I specify “the West” to illuminate how, though global catastrophe was already imminent prior to the virus, we’ve reacted on a mass scale only when the elite are threatened. Global hunger is affecting 820 million people right now. Why haven’t we mobilized on a global scale for the hungry? Over 6 million people have already died from hunger in 2020. Many of the countries facing catastrophe have food shortages that are continually exacerbated by first-world, developed countries.
If it seems I’m digressing, stick with me. Our willingness to unite to defeat a semi-threatening (at least compared to other global dilemmas ) virus has everything to do with our distaste for death and our addiction to life.
Globally-dominant countries somewhat have power over who lives and who dies via their standard setting-media. If the media, for example, reported more on an urgency to mobilize and help save starving nations, perhaps more people in said starving nations would survive. But no, it’s our lives that are in danger—we and the elite who are concerned for both our own lives as well as the economy.
When Should We Mobilize to Prevent Death?
Virus or no virus, preventing death is on all of our agendas. It always has been. While, again, I agree with the “better safe than sorry” standard, I question: Is there a life-limit by which we should and shouldn’t mobilize?
If we knew beforehand that, just say, 30,000 lives would be at risk of succumbing to COVID, should we then mobilize via social distancing and lockdown to save those 30,000 lives? What if it were 100,000 lives? 200,000 lives?
Would you, reader, be willing, with the rest of the world, to go on lockdown to save my grandmother and my grandmother alone? Would you let the entire world go on lockdown to save your grandmother and your grandmother alone? What about your life? Would you have the entire world lockdown for you?
When should we and shouldn’t we mobilize as a world to prevent death? How many lives make it a “Yes, let’s mobilize!” or a “No, let’s continue as normal.”? Does it depend on whose lives are at risk? Is COVID a threat to the human race? Or are there specific people in death’s prospective line of fire, people who have the power to change humanity’s activity?
It’s important to keep these somewhat triggering questions in our pockets as we move forward, keen on keeping everything as clean, covered, and death-free as possible. Questions of death and dying are discomforting because most of us, including myself, find it difficult to think that “anyone who holds back [from death] is out of order,” as Campbell put it.
Since beginning this piece, hundreds of more people have succumbed to hunger-induced death. Yes, COVID-19 is undoubtedly aggravating economic driven-hunger for many people. This has simply been a thought experiment into why we haven't mobilized on a mass-level to stop these millions and millions of hunger-related deaths that occur every year.
COVID-19 is a deadly virus, and we should be taking precautions to end it. But is there a bigger virus here? Could it be our capitalistic preference to protect lives within thriving, globally-dominant countries while neglecting others?
