A Tale of Two (or more...) Cities

The storming of the Bastille by French Painter Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houël. During his long life Houël witnessed the reign of Louis XV, the French Revolution, and the period of Napoleon's First Empire. (Wikipedia)

One of my favorite books is A Tale of Two Cities which was written in 1859 by Charles Dickens. It is a historical novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution and tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he has never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The book opens with a paragraph that could well mirror the times we are living through right now: 

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

We, you and I, are now in month nine (it seems so much longer...) of the 2020 pandemic. Literally and figuratively we are now entering "the season of darkness" having set our clocks back just a couple of weeks ago and with the COVID virus seemingly completely out of control going into the Holiday season. Whether the next few months will live up to "the winter of despair" remains to be seen.

Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution of 1789-1799 much of his stirring account takes place during the Reign of Terror, perhaps the most violent period of the revolt. From the summer of 1793 through the summer of 1794, more than 50,000 people were killed for suspected counter-revolutionary activity or so-called “crimes against liberty”. One-third of this number died under the falling blade of the guillotine. Some accounts put the number of victims actually closer to 250,000. As I write this, more than 249,000 Americans have fallen victim to our own current reign of terror for which we, as of yet, have no real cure.

Just as historians and authors look back upon the past so too will their counterparts in the future look back and study the time we are living in. It may sound cliché, but we are living history. Living through history of course means that we are feeling our way, charting our own new path through the perils of our time. No one of us has all the answers, though collectively we may have a few if we can ever reach consensus. 

One of the things historians of the future will surely look at are all the statistics being generated in the information-overload culture of today. There is always a story to be told behind the numbers and already, just 9 months into our current predicament, there is a story to be read by simply looking at one statistic - the number of new COVID cases. If you do a Google search for COVID in your location you're likely to be given a chart, courtesy of the New York Times, that gives the number of COVID cases by day from  March to present. The numbers by themselves are of course staggering - who back in March, "...the spring of hope", would have guessed that cases in the U.S. would be upward of 11 million and that a quarter million of us would not be here this Thanksgiving to break bread with family and friends. To me though, as staggering as the numbers are, its the pattern of the charts across different locations in the U.S. that speak to how we have taken such a divided approach on how to deal with the unfolding nightmare of this newest of new viruses. 

Lets start with the chart for Colorado:

It would appear that Colorado was able to largely contain, though never eliminate, the spread of COVID-19 at least until recently. Compare the shape of our graph to another U.S. location:

Clearly what was going on in location "D" was very much different than what we lived through in Colorado. 

Let's look at another location's graph (see if you can guess by its shape where it is):

Think about why a location might see such a pattern of new cases. What was going on - what were they doing, or perhaps more importantly what were they not doing, to see new cases behave as they are reflected in location "B".

Here is a location that was perhaps as unique in its locale as any...

yet it's graph nearly mirrors that of location "B". In terms of geographical distance location "C" couldn't be further removed from location "B" so why are the two graphs so similar to each other and so dissimilar from Colorado's?

OK, you get the point; its this type of data and the behavioral questions it raises that will keep PhD candidates busy for years to come. You don't need these graphs to know that different places in the United States have had widely different responses to dealing with COVID. Some were pragmatic and scientific in their approach while others to this very day continue to downplay the seriousness of the situation. To use another historical reference, they say that Nero played his fiddle while ancient Rome burned back in the year 64. His supposed fiddling now has come to represent the epitome of acting irresponsibly in the midst of an emergency. It would appear from the graphs that some today have as much of an affinity for fiddle playing as Emperor Nero did nearly 2,000 years ago.

Here are just a couple of more to show the disparity between U.S. locations:

So, have you figured out where some of these locations are? Here are the actual locales:

A: Colorado

B: Florida

C: Hawaii

D: New York City

E: Texas

F: Utah

G: Washington D.C.

H: Washington State

I'll leave it to far greater minds than I to further extrapolate the real meanings behind the disparities in the data but I'd hazard my own guess that in the years to come some of these locations may look back on their graphs and raise the question: what could they have done differently? 

In the end, A Tale of Two Cities is a classic love story about the love two men share for a woman, and ultimately about Man's love for his fellow Man and the sacrifice some are willing to make for that Love. In that, there are lessons to be learned by all of us.

Here's hoping that the "season of Light" still awaits...