Where’s Goldbug?

By Clark A. Miller

Virtually everything about this virus is unnatural. At least as we understand it at the moment, it appeared first in a food market amid the concrete and steel of the modern city of Wuhan. How did it get there? Although some current theories point to an origin in bats, perhaps transmitted through another wild animal sold in the market, what is increasingly clear is that throughout human history, down to today, the human-wildlife interfaces across which zoonotic diseases jump to create plagues are deeply shaped by techno-human incursions into ecosystems inhabited by these pathogens and their hosts. Using technology, we carve new spaces for ourselves out of ecological systems and, in the process, transform those spaces, the creatures and microbes that live there, and the forms of potential interaction between those spaces, those microbes, and ourselves.

This is the second of a series of three articles. You can read the first part here and the third part here.

However it started, the virus didn’t stay in Wuhan long. In the first few days after it was transmitted to humans, as it leapt from one asymptomatic person to another, researchers estimate that over 7 million people a day were leaving Wuhan for other parts of China and the world. Riding in a combination of buses, trains, cars, and planes—just as Richard Scarry shows us—the virus traveled as a stowaway, moving more rapidly than any other in history. There’s a game for kids in Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go: to find Goldbug hidden in one of the cars or trucks on each page. Now replace Goldbug with COVID-19, and our problem comes into focus. Maps of the spread of coronavirus from China show clear patterns associated with core transportation corridors. By mid-January, at the latest, the virus had already reached the other side of the world.

January 2020 probably saw somewhere between 80 million and 100 million international travelers. As the virus traveled along with some of them, it cultivated patterns of sickness and death shaped by the invisible hand of technology. First, it hit those populations connected by air and rail transport networks, only later reaching more isolated rural populations. Dense urban neighborhoods, public transit systems, and industrial workspaces created very different playgrounds for the virus than expansive exurban communities in which everyone lives in a separate building, drives a separate car, and has a job that can be done from home. The highest killing rates of the virus occurred in communities where the virus quickly exploited technological vulnerabilities and overwhelmed hospitals and health care systems: too few devices to effectively track the spread of the virus, too little capacity to act on information to suppress it, and too little equipment to protect health care workers and to provide support to the bodies that contracted the virus.

Riding in a combination of buses, trains, cars, and planes, the virus traveled as a stowaway, moving more rapidly than any other in history.

We learned that the virus is selective. The health benefits of being techno-human have created new subpopulations of people in their eighties and nineties often living with artificial body parts and daily doses of novel pharmaceuticals, many grouped together in nursing homes and long-term care facilities that make them tragically easy targets for this voracious pathogen. Simultaneously, in African American neighborhoods, decades of exposure to unhealthy pollution in the air and water, consumption of highly processed, high-carbohydrate foods, and the stresses of low-income communities and low-wage labor have driven record rates of diabetes, lung disease, and heart disease. These turn out to be risk factors that put people at significantly higher risk for serious illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19.

It’s all there in Busytown, where we find two pig farmers using a combine and truck to harvest wheat and transport it to the mill. There, grain is ground into flour and shipped to the industrial bakery. At the bakery, the flour is mixed with water and other ingredients and baked into white bread. That bread—and other similar products fashioned from processed and refined flours and sugars—is now a foundation of global nutrition. According to the United Nations, roughly 20% of humanity’s calories are provided by wheat, and 60% by wheat, rice, corn, and soy. The World Health Organization has found that across countries, from 7% to 25% of energy intake is from sugars. The upshot, of course, is that we now inhabit bodies shaped by that consumption, bodies with rapidly growing rates of diabetes and heart disease, products of our technological foods that make us more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Of oil and toilet paper

This is a human-made disaster. We have sculpted the technological highways and byways that have made it easier for the virus to reach some people and harder to reach others, that have made some people more vulnerable to its weapons while rendering critical protections to others. As at so many other points of history, we have made techno-human systems simultaneously into instruments of human security and insecurity, in which the distribution of access to critical technologies and the opportunities they provide now help determine who is at profound risk from the virus and who isn’t.

Busytown also helps us understand the wreckage COVID-19 is making of the economy. What happens when all those busy animal-people stop being so busy? One thing that happens is that everywhere around the planet, petrochemicals are being poured into storage facilities, of all sizes, shapes, and colors, from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to oil tankers to gas cans in the woodsheds of preparedness fanatics. In fact, so much oil is now being stored that the world is quickly running out of places to put it. The reason: lack of busyness has led to a massive disconnect between the supply and demand of this ordinarily highly valuable and used substance.

We have sculpted the technological highways and byways that have made it easier for the virus to reach some people and harder to reach others, that have made some people more vulnerable to its weapons while rendering critical protections to others.

The same problem, in reverse, bedevils another industry: toilet paper shelves in stores everywhere are now empty. Most people did not, however, go out and buy extra toilet paper. They didn’t have to. The world of toilet paper is relatively simple. Globally, on average, human beings use the same amount of toilet paper in any given week. Thus, global toilet paper manufacturing and distribution systems are optimized to make and deliver just that amount of toilet paper each week, with just enough slack in the system to fill the shelves of grocery stores and account for minor variations. We wouldn’t want them to make more, in fact. If they did, we’d have to figure out how to create a strategic toilet paper reserve to handle an ever-growing quantity of extra rolls. (Toilet paper, in case you’re curious, is one of the few aspects of our modern lives that does not show up in Busytown.)

But what happens when a few people begin to become concerned that they might run out of toilet paper? They go out and buy extra toilet paper to store. Grocery stores, which don’t have extra supplies, very quickly run out. There’s just no slack in the system. Nor should there be. After all, there’s not even any need for manufacturers to ramp up production to meet this new demand. The global public will still use the same amount of toilet paper next week that they used last week.

It turns out that our systems are optimized around the belief that today will be just like yesterday. That’s why Busytown is so busy. When we start to think otherwise, as a global community, system performance begins to falter. People cancel trips. Airlines cancel flights. Global supply chains begin to break. Stuff backs up, like the excess oil that we have no place to store. In a little over two months, as people around the world have slowly stopped going places, oil prices have dropped from $60 per barrel to $18 to, on April 20, $37 below zero.

It turns out that our systems are optimized around the belief that today will be just like yesterday. That’s why Busytown is so busy.

Empty grocery store shelves, along with closed restaurants, are the visible sign that with the pandemic, our food systems—the vast technological assemblages through which grains and animals are harvested, ground, slaughtered, processed, packed, transported, and transformed into the industrialized, packaged foods we find in our refrigerators and freezers—are creaking under the pressure of people’s new beliefs. The less visible signs are perhaps more worrisome. People who have lost their jobs are turning to food banks in record numbers, even as food banks struggle to keep their staffs healthy while serving those in need.

Entire countries face similar fears. Kazakhstan, a major wheat producer, anticipates food shortages and is halting exports. The same for Vietnam, a major exporter of rice. Russia, one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, has now established a quota on exports of grain.

In the United States, food processing facilities have come under new scrutiny for the arrangement of their machinery, which puts workers in close proximity on the job. Some companies are promising to pay workers to stay home if they are sick, in part to protect worker health but even more crucially to keep workers coming to work at a time when a fear of exposure to the virus in the workplace could significantly disrupt operations. Fearing such exposure, workers at a variety of food delivery services walked off the job to protest what they considered unsafe working conditions. Dairies began dumping milk that could not be accommodated in local supply chains, major meat packing facilities closed, and farmers began to express concerns about recruiting the labor force necessary for planting the nation’s crops. Planting is time-critical. It can’t wait a few months for the virus to die out. Yet it is also backbreaking labor in which people often work in close proximity to one another.

Will people will be willing to take that risk?

What if they just decided to stop?

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This is the second of a series of three articles. You can read the first part here and the third part here.