Something that has dawned upon me as of late is the cruelty of COVID-19. I’m not talking about the fact that it’s a virus that makes us sick, as all those suckers do. I’m talking about this cynical and downright insidious cruelty that’s putting the human race squarely upon the horns of a moral dilemma.

Let’s put this disease in perspective. If you’ll remember, when the news of COVID-19 first broke out, many were comparing it to the common flu. In a previous post I introduced a statistic called the reproduction number (or R0). The R0 of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (the disease that results from infection) is estimated at around 2.2, versus 1.3 for the flu. If you read my post, you’d know that R0 is the average number of people a given person with the virus will infect. So, it appears that COVID-19 is significantly more contagious than the flu.

It’s also far more deadly. It’s still uncertain, but most experts put the COVID-19 fatality rate at between 1 and 2%. The fatality rate for the flu is well-known to be .1%, so COVID-19 is anywhere from 10 to 20 times more deadly.

Now, we don’t put the brakes on the entire economy due to the flu. And granted there are virus-borne diseases out there, like Ebola, that are far more deadly than COVID-19. So, why are we eager to inflict so much damage to ourselves over COVID-19?

Consider what the results would be if we just let COVID-19 run its course. How many people would be infected? Well, the flu infects around 9% of the world population annually. We already established that COVID-19 is more contagious, so let’s say that if we just stepped aside and did nothing, 10% of the world would get infected and 1.5% of those infected would die. There are approximately 7.8 billion people on our planet, so if COVID-19 infected 10% of them, that would mean 780,000,000 infected and at a fatality rate of 1.5%, about 117 million people dead!

If what I just wrote seems outlandish to you, consider that the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed between 17 and 50 million (with some estimates as high as 100 million).

As alarming as the numbers I just presented are, the dilemma posed by the cruelty of COVID-19 nevertheless remains…

It’s the age-old utilitarian argument of John Stuart Mill versus the moral imperative of Immanuel Kant.

If you think about it, capitalism is largely justified by the utilitarian argument. That is, at least in the U.S. and other democratic regimes, we choose the utilitarian benefits of a capitalistic economy that flow to society at large, even though a smaller portion of the populace is damaged by it. And now you have Trump, a staunch capitalist, trying to make that same argument when it comes to COVID-19. He does this by arguing that we should open the economy back up even when doing so probably means a much larger percentage of the population will become infected and many more deaths will occur as a result.

Now, I’m no hard-core capitalist and certainly no fan of Donald Trump. But even for me this is a hard one. I’ve already been affected by this thing economically and I’m afraid more damage is yet to be personally experienced.

In Costa Rica 90% of the infections have occurred in the metropolitan area around the capital city of San Jose. In Perez Zeledon where I live, there have only been 3 confirmed cases and it’s been that way for going on 3 weeks now. So, why does the economy of the entire country have to be shut down? Why can’t I go to my favorite watering hole for a beer? Why can’t I drive my car on the highway today? Why are my real estate customers being denied entry into the country?

Why? Why? Why?

It just doesn’t seem fair!

The moral argument of Kant, his “categorical imperative”, tells me that I should judge a certain personal behavior as moral only if its universal application (that is, by everyone) would render an acceptable result. In other words, whether or not I should just go about my daily living as if this COVID-19 thing never happened, depends on the result that could occur if everyone did the same thing. And I believe we know the answer to that question…

The whole concept of social-distancing falls in line with Kant’s categorical imperative and is diametrically opposed to the anti-altruism espoused by the likes of Ayn Rand (the godmother of modern-day neoliberal capitalism). Rand was no fan of Kant, by the way.

COVID-19 presents a moral challenge for us. Do we go the more well-worn capitalistic utilitarian route, even if many of the older and weaker among us die as a result, or do we act, not so much for our own benefit, but for the universal benefit of the human race writ large?

I said before that this disease is going to test us and test our systems, especially those that are built around that Mill utilitarian argument…

What do you think?

I’m pretty sure that viruses aren’t conscious, but this little bugger sure as hell seems to know exactly what it’s doing…

to US.

Image Credit: Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris / CC BY-SA