As Bernie S. Siegel, a surgeon who taught at the Yale School of Medicine, wrote in his best-selling Love, Medicine, and Miracles (1986), “There are no incurable diseases, only incurable people.” It’s no coincidence, then, that much of the nation responded to the novel coronavirus along these lines, with many Americans suggesting that those who were at risk—the elderly and people with certain underlying conditions—should just stay home so the rest of America could skip wearing masks, even though such a strategy would have ended up killing even more people than the virus already had.
