“Why do you have such a hard time going back to normal?” — the Medium COVID-19 response worth repeating

Christopher Eddy

I read a pretty good Medium article written by a well-meaning scientist today: he mentioned Roman aqueducts, John Snow the quintessential epidemiologist, and an oft-repeated and dogmatic belief that public health and modern science have essentially beaten down infectious disease. The author even ventured to suggest that we may benefit from consuming natural, or raw water, completely untreated. I assume that it was in part a joke (completely unreferenced from an evidentiary perspective, and he backpedaled by the close of the article), supportive of the assertion that tap water is perfectly okay, and, of course, it is. Beyond our fond hopes for deliverance from this pandemic, we see existential Pandemic COVID-19 continue to rekindle around the world, most notably in Sydney, Australia, now in complete lockdown, and the threat to the Tokyo Olympics, with Ugandan athletes — the first to arrive in the capital testing COVID-19 positive. I trust this greatest of all international sports gatherings does not become a global disease amplifier.

The statement that triggered my response: “One of the strange phenomena about modern society is we’ve become so clean and relatively free from infectious diseases; we have largely lost our fear of…