Who caused the pandemic?

Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a lot of people trying to find someone to blame. Republicans want to blame China as well as anyone who looks Asian, Democrats want to blame Donald Trump due to his bad pandemic policies and promotion of wacky, counter-productive ideas (like chloroquine and “it will just vanish in the spring”). I’d like to point out to you, though, that a pandemic can’t happen unless the virus travels. If the virus doesn’t travel, you get an epidemic, not a pandemic.

A virus can’t travel by itself. It needs to be protected inside a host or it is quickly destroyed. Black Death was able to travel in fleas (both on humans and on other animals, like rats), and that travel was facilitated by human beings, primarily traveling by ship.

Similarly, the Spanish Flu, which killed more people than the total killed in World War I and ended that conflict, was spread by travel. The second wave of Spanish Flu was particularly deadly; it was a mutation of the original disease and was spread by the movement of soldiers around Europe. (Incidentally, the Spanish Flu probably came from Kansas, but Spain was the first to report the widespread outbreak of disease, so people blamed it on that country.)

If we’re wanting to blame someone for the COVID-19 epidemic, who did it?

We have all these borders in this world we live in. From a leftist perspective, there’s no good purpose to these borders except one — to stop the spread of a pandemic. However, closing a border to travel is something politicians wait to do until the next wave has already arrived inside the border, making the border shutdown pointless. Why do they wait?

The group of people who travels the most, and with the least limitations, is the wealthy. When people without money travel, there is always someone trying to stop them from crossing a border, but when the rich travel, they (and their money) are welcomed with open arms. Because travel is something the wealthy want to do, governments wait to shut down travel — especially air travel, since that is the way wealthy people travel. I do realize that air travel is affordable enough that normal Americans sometimes get to fly, but please realize that Americans are, on average, much more wealthy than the average person on this planet.

Wealthy people keep traveling — especially by air — so the virus is flying all over the globe faster than epidemiologists can analyze our blood and waste water to figure out what’s going on. A new strain of COVID-19 that crops up in San Francisco could travel to South Africa and back before anyone realizes what’s going on because some tech guy just really needed to meet with an investor in person, or take his family to Kruger National Park.

Even if only one passenger is infected with a virus at takeoff, the tiny size of a plane means that masking is completely pointless (masks are only effective for about 15 minutes), and by the time it lands, the majority of the passengers will be carrying the disease. Every flight is a potential superspreader event.

As a concrete example, consider a recent event in the Netherlands. Authorities there tested 600 air travelers arriving from South Africa and found that 61 of them (more than 10%) were positive for COVID-19 with 14 of them having the new, more contagious omicron variant. To make matters worse, rapid testing is not anywhere close to 100% accurate, and failures tend toward false negatives (showing that the person does not have COVID-19 when they really do). Specifically:

  • For people with symptoms, the false negative rate is 18%.
  • For people without symptoms, the false negative rate is 42%.
  • During the first week of symptoms, the false negative rate is 22%, but if tested in the second week, the false negative rate is 49%.

Let’s consider, too, the fact that air travel is extremely expensive in terms of fossil fuels burned and climate change gasses emitted, but we just keep doing it. Greenhouse gas emissions from commercial flights (never mind private and military flight) make up 2% of global emissions and are expected to triple by 2050, which is interesting since we have to become carbon negative by then or the whole human species will likely die out. It’s nice that Google has a tool to help you find flights based on carbon emissions — but every flight emits a huge amount of carbon. Meanwhile, the powers-that-be are doing everything they can to keep the airline industry going.

You could make the argument that without airlines rapidly transporting COVID-19 all over the globe, the disease would have been able to move in a more traditional way — via international shipping. That’s probably true, but on the other hand, we probably could have come up with humane ways to continue shipping without spreading disease and, more importantly, global capitalism is not a good thing. Globalism has many serious problems, including: Reliance on far-away production (that is inevitably disrupted), huge amounts of resource waste, ability of capital to better hide its abuse of human beings, alienation of consumers from the source of the things they consume, and segmentation of the labor market that capitalists leverage to push down wages.

To summarize: It was capitalism that made the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, China into a pandemic. The biggest factor was wealthy and relatively-wealthy people flying internationally. Politicians repeatedly chose to close down borders after a new variant had already arrived because they felt they had to satisfy the needs of the wealthy and, in richer countries, consumers. If you want to effectively fight a pandemic in the future, shut down the borders when the case count is declining rather than when it is increasing.

Let me also clarify that I’m talking about what caused the pandemic. The pandemic is here and isn’t going away, so if you’re vaccinated, feeling well, and are willing to comply with pandemic-related protocols when you fly, I will not be holding it against you if you choose to fly, and I think you will probably be fine if you do so. The same goes for other risky activities.