What Is Even Happening Right Now?

So, astute readers will have noticed that I’ve been completely silent since February. Where’d I go for three months? This is going to be rambling and less focused than my usual posts, but perhaps my readers will forgive it.

Content warning: pet death, current events

Well…frankly, I haven’t been able to figure out how to write about what’s been going on. Despite years of editing and writing science fiction, including stories about or related to pandemics, actually enduring one myself was not something I seriously considered. I mean, I grew up in the era of both SARS and H1N1, the latter of which I actually contracted. It was a bit scary, and it sucked, but the deaths were relatively few in number, and fewer still, those who developed serious complications.

Now, I realise the case was different for those living in Hong Kong and China and South-East Asia in general, but that was my experience as a Canadian. I trusted the medical system to handle a disease of significant scale.

How fact and fiction differ

For starters, the contagiousness of a disease is inversely proportional to its ability to spread. This is something that sci fi usually gets completely wrong — diseases are portrayed as both easy to catch and very deadly. But an extremely deadly disease usually burns itself out. Bubonic plague was an exception to this in part because the way diseases spread in the ancient world is different from the way they spread now — there were a…