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“If some other dumb fuck can do it, so can you,” he liked to say.
The gist of it was that people don’t learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need. For people to learn, they need to want to learn.
“There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
Where their strategies failed was when a virus had a reproductive rate above 3‡—when each infected person infected more than three others, or when the society’s rate of compliance fell below 30 percent.
The CDC recommended that schools close, for instance, only when some new communicable disease was projected to kill more than 450,000 Americans.
A case fatality rate of 1 percent implied a terrifying pandemic.
There was, Carter thought, a downside to experience. “Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,”
and she was struck by how private American forces of mercy were straining to offset America’s public agents of cruelty. She herself became a force of mercy.
A few didn’t even have functioning fax machines, and so the Biohub got into the business of buying and delivering fax machines along with test kits.
