Blindingly grey

In my teens and my early 20s, I often dabbled in Taoist (Dao) philosophy and sometimes aspired to get my head around the esoterism of Buddhism. But I was a shopper of ideas, I took what I liked and called myself what I wished. One of the core beliefs for both of those though was a negation of duality. Even if the Yin-Yang symbol was a swirl of black and white it was clear that there were degrees. And even the complete black could collapse into white and vice versa. It was a bit like a tonic for the mind when I was young, but the conclusions are all the more obvious as you age and gather experience. The black and white truths that you hear around the place become a bit ridiculous.

From chapter 2 of the Daodejing (Laozi/Laotzu):

"Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty,
only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Being and nonbeing produce each other.
The difficult is born in the easy.
Long is defined by short, the high by the low.
Before and after go along with each other.
So the sage lives openly with apparent duality
and paradoxical unity."

Paradoxical unity where good and bad are part of a single whole. Can you find a pole on a circle?

Anyhow, the more I manage a team the more I wade in the grey. The more I cross cultures the more hazy things appear. I can't live in apparent duality when its only really apparent to others. In this interminable moment in time, the duality is crisis/no crisis; pandemic/common cold; correct approach/foolish incompetence; infected/pure; young/old; others/self; overreaction/prudence. Why does it really have to be one or the other? And how can you know when you're in the dark in world of paradoxical unity. 

Truth and reality are textured and not polar. Perhaps it's only in the spheres of life that we're familiar with that it's clear things are in degrees and the art is clear; perhaps it's only the unfamiliar terrain of other topics where we use duality as a heuristic. There are some many angles of this pandemic where a little grey goes a long way. There is a lot of dispute how fatal covid-19 is. From the "official" statistics for any country right now, an initial fatality rate can become clear, but it almost every place but China and the Diamond Princess the "smoke has not cleared". There is still some grim accounting to do... But the Diamond Princess shows a 1% fatality rate; China has a 3.5% fatality rate, although all provinces apart from Hubei have barely 1% fatality. Trump famously spoke from his gut and said he thought it was below 1%, more like the flu, and that most cases aren't counted. But not all flu cases can be counted either. And now Italy and Iran seem to be outdoing even Hubei, and even if they had tested everyone. Previous I did mainly through the prism of response time and approach. But there are other angles, too.

What is infection? I speak now with no epidemiological knowledge, but just empiricism. Being marked as "infected" is not actually whether you "a virus detected" It touches some and even with exposure doesn't others. The first drop of grey is the assumption that all people are the same in the face of a virus. Texture. The other assumption is that we meet the virus in the same way, that it's either a hit or a miss, a binary. What an infection is whether it be viral, bacterial or fungal is when a particle or particles of the disease successfully establish and propagate themselves. For covid-19, the action is mostly in the lungs so how much of the virus gets in them, where it manages to get to and whether it is on more than one occasion must be a factor. So grey. And then is it detectable? Maybe a healthy well slept person inhaled one particle and overcame it without it becoming noticeable or even detectable, did it really make a sound? A paler shade of grey? And in many countries they are more thorough and transparent than other countries so 

On the contrary, there had been a lot going around that this disease only kills the old and for the rest it's a bad flu. So much black and white in that thinking. Chinese will be quick to raise that Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing doctor and many other doctors died young, showing that the amount of exposure and stress does a lot. There is a chain reaction when the virus becomes so prevalent that people can't avoid multiple infections and the fear and anxiety deprives people of sleep and immunity. I believe in the other provinces in China, there was never much density in cases, and people masked up quickly, especially the sick ones, so the infected people only ever had a few particles to deal with, and so then it was only the elderly failed to cope. 

The only duality should be whether you live or die. (Unless you're Buddhist.) Deaths may be absolute but causes of death are not mutually exclusive. If someone with "pre-existing conditions" has covid-19 and in the stress of the disease has a heart attack, what exactly killed him? (What really killed Rasputin, anyway?) It doesn't take bias to induce some different standards in reporting. And if the fatality rate is officially assigned deaths over official verified detected cases, any single percentage is not really comparable. 

But at the end of the day, over 400 people died each day in Italy over the last two days. No matter how you cut that, it's a slaughter. I like to go back a week, the global death count was just below 5000, with just over 3000 of those in China. This evening it topped 10,000, with about no movement in the Chinese numbers. Outside of China it essentially went from 2000 to 7000 in just 7 days. It is clear exponential growth. Italy was also locked down 7 days ago. It's been speculated that with the usual course of the cases, it takes 3 weeks for the cases done before an action to fully bite. That means that they need to hold themselves together for another 14 days before the worst will be over.

Back last Friday we had just 5 cases and now we're at 39. Currently all of them are considered to be imported cases. That might change. We're in the early stages where people who get it might only get a single particle and fight it off asymptomatically, perhaps even undetectably. The actions to close the border might have been timely enough to create a "small peak" of infection, which is ideal. But with 2 weeks for symptoms for the sicker of them to become apparent and 3 weeks for the worst of those to hit the ICU's and respirators, it's far too early to tell. At 39 cases, it's already close to the point that we may have a death. And that's when people really start to lose their minds. Crisis/No crisis.