The Hammer and the Dance vs Send in the Clowns

Here in Macau we are seeing some kind of light, or at least an opening of what a "normal" life looks like and resembles what we did way back in January. My daughter's international school will resume classes in May, and my wife can start teaching private art classes. Both of them are very happy! 

Here at the university, we are not resuming in-person classes, but we can soon have in-person MA and PhD thesis defenses (after returning students are quarantined). Two of my MA students who finished writing their theses are trying to arrange their defenses. And some of the students - namely last semester, graduating undergraduate students - are back to take exams and attend their graduation ceremony. This past week it was almost a shock to see students walking on a campus that has been mostly empty for more than two months. These are all great signs that we have turned a corner here in Macau, a place that has not had even one new case of Covid-19 in more than two weeks. 

Yet this good news is tempered by the realization that our little land of peace and safety is connected to a much bigger world that still has many challenges. There is an increasing number of infections and deaths across the world. Indonesia, a place I have visited many times, is on lock down. And as they enter Ramadan, people there are not able to travel to their hometowns as they normally would. Brazil, a place that I have never visited, but is the home of one of my colleagues here, is led by President Bolsonaro, who has not taken the virus seriously, and is being abandoned by competent officials around him. And, most sadly, the President of the United States has shown himself to be a dangerous clown, who at a press conference this week openly wondered if injecting patients with cleaning fluids or shining ultraviolet radiation inside the body of covid patients, would be an effective treatment. Many here see this man as acting like a clown. 

The truth of the matter is that the road to recovery will be long and difficult. In a recent NY Times Daily podcast, the Science reporter for the New York Times, Donald G. McNeil, said that the best way to describe what we will face is called "The Hammer and the Dance." It is worth quoting what he said:  

Donald G. McNeil Jr.

It was on March 19, by Tomas Pueyo, a writer in San Francisco. And it was called “The Hammer and the Dance.” And the hammer is the lockdown. There was no question of social distancing light. It was more like, bam, everybody has to go into their houses. But then, once you get the deaths down to a minimum, then you begin the dance. And the dance is dancing a little bit out, and opening up some of the restrictions and seeing, you know, how far can you let people go. And then you see what that does to death rates. And once the death rates go up, you have to go back and leave the dance floor and go into lockdown again. And it repeats again and again. And it’s dance in, dance out, dance in, dance out. And basically that’s what the epidemiological models show we have to do.

So we are facing a future that can go in one of two directions. One direction is to go slow, to be careful, to follow the best known practices of public health, and dance forward and backward as shown by the conditions of the virus. The other is to be led by the clowns who put their own interests above that of their people. It is my hope that we follow the former direction rather than the latter.