There is hope: All the reasons to be optimistic about the end of the coronavirus crisis
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With the UK going into a total self-imposed quarantine, several large American cities in lockdown, and distressing scenes coming out of Spain and Italy, life right now feels chaotic and insecure. It's a crisis. The economy has ground to a halt.
These are the worst of times.So if you're feeling a bit hopeless, consider:
Deaths from COVID-19 are down to fewer than 10 per day - a tiny number for a country China's size.
Travel restrictions have been ended. People can leave their homes again. This is good news.
Twice now, Italy has recorded brief periods in which new cases of coronavirus infection, and new deaths, have declined. True, they may merely be blips in the data. On March 24, authorities reported another 5,249 new cases and another 743 new deaths. Both totals are below the peak.
The overall rate of the increase is slowing - as if the pandemic is losing momentum inside a country where it has nowhere to go.
China, South Korea, and Italy show that lockdowns, mass testing, and other aggressive government intervention seem to work. We have tools to deal with this. We can use them.
Several companies are working on therapies and treatments for coronavirus. Coupled with testing,
When bad things happen in the movies, the government collapses, cities explode, and zombies eat the survivors.
There's a particular strain in our culture that obsesses over these scenarios (think of "preppers," and their doomsday bunkers). But we have been through several "apocalypses" in recent memory - September 11, 2001; Hurricane Katrina; Hurricane Sandy; the Northeast Blackout of 2003 - and none of them turned into anarchy.
All round my neighborhood in London, people are posting notes volunteering to deliver food to elderly people living alone. Crisis tends to be met with kindness, not civil war.
There is hope!
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