Et in Arcadia ego

My friend Carsten just updated me on the curfew situation in Germany where outdoor runs apparently are still exempted as long as you do them alone or with the people you live with.

Continuing my tradition of naming blog posts after Star Trek episodes, I am thinking back on when Anna and I were in West Africa last summer, how open and welcoming the world seemed then, and how closed and fragile it has suddenly become. So far, I think it has been possible to stave off most alternative epistemologies but, as the situation escalates, I fear that the need for culprits will grow, to say nothing of how for instance the anti-vaxxers will react when a vaccine is finally found. Horrifying as Covid-19 may be as a disease, I also do not want to imagine how the world would have reacted to something like the Spanish Flu which mostly affected young people between 20 and 40 years of age and those with a strong immune system.

The problem is that pandemics of all sorts are likely to become more frequent as long as we keep animals in factories or other confined spaces. As such, the best way to permanently reduce the risk of pandemics is to quickly move beyond meat and dairy products towards a future of synthetic biology and veganism.