
Six Hopeful Sci-Fi Stories of a Post Covid-19 World - jamesjyu
https://sudowriters.com/anthology/fever-dreams/
======
lacker
I don’t want to post a spoiler, so I will just abstractly say that I like the
concept that children will remember this completely differently than adults
do. For my little children, it’s interesting and different to be sheltering in
place. It’s annoying they can’t go to the local park, but they don’t have
anything near the stress and worry that adults do.

~~~
Loughla
I'm with the other poster. Child experience and their memories will vary
greatly (mainly around socioeconomic status).

I can't help but be afraid this will only bake in the inequality already
present.

For my kids, this means more enrichment time, more time spent outside
exploring the woods and streams around our home, and generally more quality
creative time.

For the family down the street, this means more time in an abusive/shitty
situation, less food, and more instability in the present and near future.

I feel like this is going to have a real, lasting impact on inequality, and
not in a good way.

As an example; my grandfather talks about the great depression. He always says
it wasn't that bad. But his family were already dirt-poor subsistence farmers.
So for them, it was just less noise from other people. They had food, they had
water, they had livestock.

But for my grandmother, who lived in town and was the daughter of a banker,
the experience was very, very different.

And you could tell by the way they acted. Grandpa was free to give out
food/money to anyone who he thought had a need. Grandma hid silver and various
other valuables in floorboards and in wall-slats.

I can't help but feel like this is going to have a similar outcome for many
people.

~~~
finnh
Society-wide, though, the Great Depression led to the New Deal, which
radically reduced inequality, created our first social safety net, and set the
stage for decades of public policy whose net effect was to reduce inequality.
Hopefully we will see another silver lining with such lasting impact on
society.

[edit: typo s/last/lasting/]

~~~
Loughla
I don't know enough about it to infer anything. Is there anyone reading this
thread that can speak to political leadership and social will today compared
to immediately before the New Deal?

My take is that we're at a place in politics where any positive change is very
unlikely. Maybe I'm wrong.

------
narrator
There's this really brutal and obscure documentary I watch about the Congo War
in the late 90s whenever I need to appreciate life. It's called "Kisangani
Diary." It's far more terrifying than any horror movie because it's real.

It's a documentary about a relief mission that goes out into the Congo using
disused railway tracks in order to feed 10s of thousands of Hutu refugees
wandering around in the forest fleeing reprisals for the earlier genocide in
Rawanda. They are starving to death and being chased by militia who are
shooting at them from time to time from the forest. Absolutely no one except
for the people in this relief mission cares about what happens to them.

The movie begins with the narrator saying that almost everyone you see in this
film will be dead by the end of the movie. When I rewatched it lately, I
wondered about those lines and what the future holds for us. What kind of
documentary are we in? What if ending shelter in place fails. What if a
deadlier strain shows up? What if this is the early days of WW III? All things
to contemplate in my opinion, because I've been watching this since January
and every week I expected things to get better and they've just been getting
worse.

~~~
redis_mlc
> What if ending shelter in place fails.

98% of people who contract corona virus recover just fine, So lockdown is
unnecessary.

The original reason for it was to not run out of ventilators, but we know now
that ventilators have a mortality rate of 66% to 90%, so use a cannula instead
as long as possible.

We should let corona run its course like every other flu year.

> What if a deadlier strain shows up?

Ebola is deadlier than corona. So's obesity.

But the flu we're dealing with is only about 2% fatal.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" 98% of people who contract corona virus recover just fine"_

I don't know where you get that number from, but there's still not nearly
enough testing to know what percentage of infected people recover, and not
enough tracking of recovered individuals to know if they're doing "just fine"
afterward, suffer debilitating health issues, or something in between.

 _" lockdown is unnecessary. The original reason for it was to not run out of
ventilators"_

This is not true either. There are multiple reasons for the lockdown.

One of the primary reasons is to buy us more time to develop treatments and
vaccines, and for more testing to be rolled out.

Another major reason is not to overwhelm the health care system. This has
failed to some degree, but it would be way, way, way worse if there was no
lcokdown at all and exponentially more people got sick all at once.

Yet another reason is to buy those people who haven't yet gotten sick more
time and more life. If these people could hold out for a year or two, or even
some months, that could mean more months or years of life for them. The
importance of this can not be understated, and even if they do get infected
eventually there'll hopefully be treatments available by then, and they'll
stand more of a chance of survival.

Yet another benefit of a lockdown is to keep the disease from spreading
further. The outbreak can be managed if we test enough people and quarantine
them as infected people are detected. This is the main hope that increased
testing give us, and that testing just wasn't even available in the US a month
ago, and even now we're just beginning to get that capacity, though we still
need way more tests.

 _" ventilators have a mortality rate of 66% to 90%"_

According to Daniel Griffin of the infectious disease department at Columbia
University, and chief of infectious disease at ProHealth Care Associates (the
largest physician-owned multi-specialty practice in the country, with about
1000 physicians and 3 million patients in the Tri-State Area, with 240
practices, 24 urgent care centers) and on the COVID-19 response team and his
boots on the ground in NY hospitals, the survival rate for people on
ventilators is about 50%.[1]

 _" We should let corona run its course like every other flu year."_

This is an invitation to let millions of people die.

COVID-19 is not "like every other flu". First, it's not a flu at all. Second,
we don't know what the mortality rate of it is as there's not enough testing,
and also many deaths from it seem to be happening but not being counted as
COVID-19 deaths due to lack of testing and an overwhelmed health care system.
Even morgues are getting overwhelmed. Gigantic convention centers and Central
Park in NY are being converted in to makeshift hospitals. I've also read that
death from COVID-19 is the leading cause of death now in the US.

This does not happen with "every other flu".

[1] - From about 13 minutes in to episode 595 of _This Week in Virology_ :
[http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV595.mp3](http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV595.mp3)

~~~
shadowprofile77
On your last point, you do know that even a very low-lethality virus,
spreading through a completely virgin population with no established immunity,
will easily overwhelm a healthcare system used to working on tight margins, in
very scary looking ways. This however doesn't speak of the virus's actual
threat level in an absolute sense, and it leaves us far from the terrifying
end-of-the-world hyperbole im seeing in this HN post so far.

Even at overwhelming healthcare, Covid has been far from nightmarish. In most
of the world so far, things like what happened in New York, Italy, Spain,
haven't been the case. Furthermore, even in Italy, New York, Spain and other
places, evidence is clearly indicating a notable downward curve of saturation,
already.

I can't speak for the near future and other potential changes, especially on
the economic front (caused more than partly by a great deal of new rules that
might actually be artificially making worse things that could have been
handled much more calmly) but We are not in the apocalypse so far people, get
over yourselves.

There are even several countries that haven't even applied quarantine models
or lockdowns and they're doing okay so far despite being well into the general
curve of the spread.

------
rrrrobi
I haven’t read all of them, but so far, I’ve enjoyed “Sheltering Notebook” the
most. Nice work!

~~~
jamesjyu
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it :)

------
nshm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Darkness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Darkness)
definitely which tells the story of Wuhan-400 virus.

