Transcript
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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, our children's. I'm your host, Richard Wolf. I must again with this ongoing coronavirus chaos and crisis, ask your understanding. We are producing this program in a new place, far from our normal studio, which has been closed as so many institutions have been, ours as well. And so we are having to make do under special circumstances. And so we ask your understanding that we are working under those special circumstances. But we have every intention of continuing to bring you right regular programming of the sort that we have produced in the past and that you've come to expect today. As before, I want to focus on an aspect of the coronavirus pandemic from a different angle, to look at the mental health dimensions of this crisis. You know, we've had a lot of attention to the physical dimensions, what the virus is, how it works, how to recognize the symptoms and all of that. And that's of course important. But there are just as many dimensions to the emotional, the personal, the intimate, the psychological aspects of all of this. And there, I mean, not only the illness itself, but also the anxiety about the illness which is separate from the illness itself. And that's an anxiety of one kind before it hits another anxiety, if it hits, et cetera. And I also want to look at the psychological implications of the fact that it took so long in the United States to formulate a response. Even now the response is half baked, unthought through partial, when what is obviously needed we can, you know, that from China, South Korea, Italy and so on, is a full throated holistic approach that uses all of our resources for so dangerous a threat. And the steps being taken, quarantine, isolation, social spacing, you know, them all, those too have enormously important psychological effects that haven't been understood, haven't been addressed, and certainly were never planned for as they should have been. So those are what we want to focus on. To conclude, before I introduce my guest and have this conversation about some of the psychological implications of all of this, a quick reminder. Viruses have been with us as long as there has been nature. They pre exist humans and, and they have coexisted with humans forever. Periodically, these kinds of crises, viruses can get very dangerous and kill large numbers of people. Perhaps the most famous one was over 100 years ago in 1918. The so called Spanish flu shouldn't have had that name because if it was going to be given a name, it should have been scientific viruses. Some people don't seem to get this, viruses don't have nationalities. People do. Viruses don't. The Spanish flu, which killed 700,000Americans at a time when our population was much smaller than it is today, began in Kansas on a military base of the United States. It's interesting. Why? Because we learned what a pandemic from viruses can be like. But we've learned it many times. A few years ago, we had the SARS epidemic, a virus for many, many years. We've had seasonal viruses that have killed sizable numbers of people. We had the MERS virus, We had the Ebola virus. The knowledge that viruses come and can be devastatingly dangerous is well established and has been for a century. The problem, therefore, is not that we have a virus. The problem is that the United States, and not alone the United States, but particularly the United States, was unprepared. Or if it was prepared, and there is evidence of preparation in various parts of the United States, that preparation was not activated. That preparation was not put into play when this virus became known, which was in December of the last year, 2019. Only now, in the last very few weeks, have we begun to see the kind of mobilization and the lost time. There is no excuse for that. Months during which we could have been prepared.