Well, this week has been a rather dramatic chapter in the coronavirus saga.
We started this week as a relatively normal return after spring break, and we are ending it as temporary online students with UTM closed for three weeks.
Across the country, things aren’t looking much better. Coronavirus has spread to 47 states as of Mar. 13 and dozens of universities have closed down. The NCAA basketball tournament is cancelled. MLB spring training is cancelled. The office birthday party is cancelled.
Life is cancelled.
Between trips to the store to fight absolute strangers over six rolls of two-ply and browsing Twitter for portents of the apocalypse, you might have time this weekend to mull over what some other people have been thinking about our latest global pandemic.
A doctor from Western Europe shares their frustration with the relative inactivity of British and American society to the disease, which has ravaged Italy and is making the rounds on the continent. Young people shouldn’t be so blasé , the author argues, because even if you survive the disease it will do a number on your lungs. And if you can deal with that, don’t let your recklessness kill Grandma. You can read that in Newsweek.
Writing for NPR, Professor Muhammad Zaman of Boston University highlights the struggle that people living in the world’s refugee camps will face when the virus starts to circulate there. While I’m more concerned about elderly Europeans than those in European refugee camps (who tend to be younger on average), it’s undoubted that allowing the virus to spread in refugee encampments will worsen the pandemic in Europe.
Finally, if you’re someone that likes indulging in religious prognostications about the virus, I’ve got something for you as well. Marc Barnes, writing in Postliberal Thought, a Christian blog, suggests that coronavirus may facilitate a return to a spiritual understanding of epidemiology.
Barnes writes, “Obviously, coronavirus is a plague from God. God’s justice is always poetic justice, for the simple reason that men like poetry and tend to remember it better than prose.”
Whether or not you agree with Barnes, his analysis of the outbreak and Old Testament theology is interesting. You can read his essay, “Plague Nation,” here.
