In our society, one way in which we often go wrong is that we assign too much weight and importance to feelings and care too little about facts. This becomes obvious in how we handle the topic of death. We, as a society, think that the act of death is extremely important, but we care less about the life that’s lost through death.
Life is an exercise of changing the world. One day at a time, we exchange our lives for what we do. This is the value of life. What we do with every day we live. The books we write, the things that we discover, the lives we start, and the lives we change. For a scientist, like me, the value of life is changing the world through mathematics. For a writer, it is through the books they write.
In Italy, in the COVID-19 pandemic, the average age at death is close to 80 for coronavirus victims and 82 for the general population. Thus, on average, each victim loses perhaps two or three years of remaining life. Potentially, it’s even less, as, in each age group, the people with several pre-existing conditions have a lower life expectancy than average. Thus, the average 80 year old that dies today of the coronavirus would, most likely, have lived less than the country’s life expectancy of 82 years.
If one in 1000 people die, and the average age of death is 80, each person who dies loses years — typically the 81st and 82nd years of their lives. If in order to save those two years, we keep 1000 people in quarantine for a little over one month, we will be wasting 100 years worth of freedom for people of all ages for the sake of the two years, a good portion of which is end-of-life care. Is this the right thing to do? Would the grandparents choose to have this extra year of life in isolation? End in a plastic bag? No family? No children nearby? Does that time make such a difference?
If life was thought to be truly valuable, shouldn't we be allowed to go on living our lives instead of being prisoners in our own homes at the whim of politicians who have suddenly found new power in becoming dictators?
Do we trust them to give us back our freedom, the freedom that generations fought so hard to achieve over hundreds of years and we just relinquished so willingly over a period few days? Do we trust them now when we did not trust them before this pandemic and would not have re-elected them?
Is it just a drill? Is this why we plunged the world in war?
Are we mad?
Do we just want war for other reasons?
Is this some brilliant plot that will result in splitting the world up, yet again at the whim of a few dictators and in the destruction of democracy?
What remains to be done
Each life lost has value and I am not trying to say otherwise. However, in these extreme circumstances, it might makes sense to have a fact-based assessment of life, its loss, the impact of the measures taken, and I (and the brilliant women who have helped me write these posts much better than I would have otherwise) believe in speaking up against public panic fostered by most of the mass media at the moment.
A lot of work still remains to be done for the scientific community. Once the epidemic is over and the dead can be counted, we will have to assess the true meaning of the virus for our societies.
Many questions remain. Will my proposed 0.2% hypothesis be confirmed? Will the wheel of restricting everybody's lives be turned back? Will we be allowed and enabled to change the world again, each of us in one's very individual way? Once absolute power is given and dictatorships established, will it be relinquished? will this world ever look the same again?
Each of us is longing for the day when we can leave the house again without communicating to the government where we'll go and how long we'll be out. We all long for the day when we can use our passports, spread our wings and fly to change the world again.
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