Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD - Apollos Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading government agency charged with epidemic control, based in Atlanta, Georgia.

COVID-19: The clinical disease caused by SARS-2, involving a range of symptoms and severities; also used to refer to the pandemic itself.

NIAID: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the leading government agency charged with scientific research into infectious disease, based in Bethesda, Maryland.

NPI: A nonpharmaceutical intervention, such as quarantining, used instead of or in addition to drugs to combat an epidemic.

PPE: Personal protective equipment, such as masks, face shields, gloves, etc., worn by health-care personnel and others to avoid contracting an infection.

SARS: Severe acute respiratory syndrome, a serious clinical illness involving shortness of breath that can result from infection with various pathogens or from other injuries to the lungs; also used as the name of a condition caused by the SARS-1 virus.

SARS-1: Virus from the coronavirus family that emerged in 2003 and caused a small pandemic.

SARS-2: Virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, from the coronavirus family that emerged in 2019 and caused a large pandemic.

The gods of Greek mythology were ever present in my childhood. They were constant companions of my imagination, the subjects of my immigrant parents bedtime stories, and even the names of children I played with when we visited our cousins in Greece. I was fascinated by the gods duality: immortality and power contrasted with frailty and vice. The god Apollo, for example, was both a healer and the bringer of disease. During the Trojan War, with his silver bow and quiver of arrows, he rained a plague down on the Greeks to punish them for kidnapping and enslaving Chryseis, the daughter of one of his favored priests.

I found myself thinking again about Apollo and his vengeance as I contemplated our own twenty-first-century barrage more than three thousand years after the events described in The Iliad. It seemed to me that the novel coronavirus was a threat that was both wholly new and deeply ancient. This catastrophe called on us to confront our adversary in a modern way while also relying on wisdom from the past.

Despite the advances we have made in medicine, sanitation, communication, technology, and science, this pandemic is nearly as ruinous as any in the past century. Lonely deaths. Families unable to say goodbye to loved ones or perform proper funerals and acts of mourning. Destroyed livelihoods and stunted educations. Bread lines. Denial. Fear and sadness and pain. As I write, on August 1, 2020, over 155,000 Americans and over 680,000 people worldwide have died, and many more are still uncounted. A second wave of the pandemic is imminent, whether or not the hopes for a rapid vaccine are realized.

However, even in the midst of the onslaught, many people believe that the efforts to contain the virus have been excessive. Some Americans feel that our response has been overblown, yet another reflection of this nations modern inability to accept hard realities. But I believe this thinking is wrong on two counts. First, it has required extraordinary force, including all our twenty-first-century wealth and know-how, to contain the virus to only this many deaths. I share the view of many good scientists that vastly more Americans would have diedperhaps a millionhad we failed to deploy the resources we marshaled, belatedly, in the spring of 2020 to cope with the first wave of the pandemic. To compare this COVID-19 pandemic without mitigation efforts (or even with mitigation efforts!) to a typical flu season, as some have done, is a misreading of reality. Second, it is a misreading of history to think that in our time we would somehow be spared the burden of having to deal with a pandemic or that other people in other times have not faced the same fear and loneliness, the same polarization, the same fights over masks and business closures, the same call to neighborliness and cooperation. They have.

In late January 2020, as the virus was gathering force, I shifted the work of the many talented young scientists and staff in my research group at Yale to focus on it. First, working with Chinese colleagues, we published a study that used the mobile-phone data of millions of people in China to track the spread of the virus in January and February 2020. Then my lab began to plan studies of the biology and impact of the virus in the isolated region of Copan, Honduras, where we had a long-term field site and close relationships with thirty thousand residents in one hundred seventy-six villages. We also started exploring how mass gatherings, like elections and protests, might intersect with the spread of the virus throughout the United States. And in May 2020, we developed and released Hunala, an app based on network science and machine-learning techniques that people could use to assess their risk of infection.