Quotes from Nicholas A. Christakis

But many other activities also called for greater independence, from home cooking, to home haircuts, to the performance of minor home repairs. Why risk having a plumber come over if he might have the virus?

The experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us."11

While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

Ensamhet sprider sig också mellan grannar, så att tio extra dagar med ensamhetskänslor leder till två extra dagar för personen på andra sidan staketet. Grannar och vänner som bor mer än en och en halv kilometer bort överför däremot inte ensamhetskänslor till varandra.

Seeing people only as members of groups is, he says, "inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure." Real, personal identity, he argues, "springs from the capacity of human beings to resist these influences and counter them with free acts of their own invention." 5

The CDC defined a close contact of a person with coronavirus as someone who was "within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 48 hours before illness onset until the time the patient is isolated." This is a somewhat arbitrary criterion, given that the virus can spread much farther than six feet.57

Nonetheless, it captures most circumstances of transmission.

Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies.

A key feature of awe, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued, is that it quiets self-interest and makes individuals feel part of the larger whole. 12

K.G. Andersen et al., "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," Nature Medicine 2020; 26: 450–455; P. Zhou et al, "A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated with a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin," Nature 2020; 579: 270–273.

Doctors also think that many patients may have long-term consequences of infection with SARS-2 in many organ systems, in what is called "post-COVID syndrome." Such patients may have permanently scarred or injured lungs or kidneys or hearts, for example, or even, in rare cases, neurological deficits.

There was the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague of Justinian in 541 CE. The Black Death in 1347. The Spanish flu in 1918. There were gods of plagues in ancient times—not only the Greek god Apollo, but the Vedic god Rudra and the Chinese deity Shi Wenye. Plague is an old, familiar enemy. And so, in 2020, a plague once again appeared.

On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, an almost inconceivably large trillion-dollar rescue package (we could establish a colony on Mars for less money).