The Wider Implications of Epidemics

Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "epidemic" is illness.  Hundreds of people sick, many dead, more joining them every day.  But it is also important to keep in mind the wider implications of an epidemic.

When there is an epidemic, particularly one that is proving to be virulent, people stop going out.  No one wants to come into contact with more people than is strictly necessary for survival.  Think about all the people you come into contact to on a daily basis.  A rough estimate of my number from today is 40, and that is just the people I actually saw and interacted with.  We should also consider everyone who touches the self check out unit I used, everyone who sits in the Metro North seat I sneezed on, or touches the bathroom door handle, or sits in the seat I sat in at the Red Hook Diner this morning.  That is a significant number of people and they are all now likely to find themselves waking up in three days with a sore throat and unreasonably itchy nose, all because I traveled from Bard to New York this weekend.  When you really think about how easy it would be for you to come into contact with the carrier of a deadly disease, it becomes easy to see why epidemics have a massive negative drag on economies.

Particularly for countries that depend on tourism for large segments of their economies, epidemics can be crippling.  If no one travels to your country you cannot make money from a tourism sector.  So to do the economies that feed those tourism industries suffer.  If no one is going out to fancy dinners in southern asia, there is going to be a sharp decline in the amount of fish sold from Australia.  this dip in sales then impacts the australian economy, and the effect continues to trickle down.  The interconnected nature of our globalized world means what happens in one country is not confined to its borders, whether that thing be illness or economic stress.

This potential for suffering makes countries that discover epidemics less likely to tell anyone else about them for fear of losing out on foreign economic support, and domestic spending lost to fear of contact with other people.  This is a real problem for the global health community, particularly if they want to build a robust health infrastructure with failsafes to prevent a global pandemic.  We are all going to have to trust each other more, and be willing to support those who are suffering from illness so they will feel safe warning us that the illness exists in the first place.