Apollo's Arrow Quotes

“Plagues reshape our familiar social order, require us to disperse and live apart, wreck economies, replace trust with fear and suspicion, invite some to blame others for their predicament, embolden liars, and cause grief. But plagues also elicit kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, and ingenuity.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“For a few years after we either reach herd immunity or have a widely distributed vaccine, people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required, perhaps through 2024. I’ll call this the intermediate pandemic period. Then, gradually, things will return to “normal”—albeit in a world with some persistent changes. Around 2024, the post-pandemic period will likely begin.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Unlike war or famine or natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes during which people can gather together, an epidemic is a collective catastrophe that must be experienced separately.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“that routine childhood vaccinations might provide kids with cross-immunity against SARS-2. In particular, the tuberculosis vaccine BCG (not currently used in the United States) has received substantial attention due to its nonspecific protective role that could have an effect on novel viruses.36 Other”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“even if masks reduced the transmission rate of the virus by only 10 percent, our models indicate that hundreds of thousands of deaths would be prevented around the world, creating trillions of dollars in economic value. This is a big effect of a small thing.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Epidemics generally take advantage of the deepest and most highly evolved aspects of our humanity. We evolved to live in groups, to have friends, to touch and hug each other, and to bury and mourn one another. If we lived like hermits, we would not be victims of contagious disease. But the germs that kill us during times of plague often spread precisely because of who we are.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Whereas cells in men have just a single, maternal X chromosome, cells in women have both a maternal and a paternal X chromosome. Female cells inactivate one of the two X chromosomes, resulting in a mosaic of cells with distinct combinations of gene variants. This variety could result in an immunity advantage compared to the more fixed expression in males.51”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“helping the public grasp during the early part of the epidemic what is likely to happen later is essential. But this is also one of the reasons it’s so difficult to sound the alarm. If we say that many people will be sick and that our world will be changed “soon,” people will look around and conclude that everything seems normal enough, so no interventions are necessary, thank you very much. And it seems normal the next day too, so the Cassandras are seen as merely alarmists.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“There was the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague of Justinian in 541 CE. The Black Death in 1347. The Spanish flu in 1918. There were gods of plagues in ancient times—not only the Greek god Apollo, but the Vedic god Rudra and the Chinese deity Shi Wenye. Plague is an old, familiar enemy. And so, in 2020, a plague once again appeared.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“tension between civil liberties and public health.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“if we are unable to develop a vaccine, herd immunity is ultimately the path we will take as a society and worldwide, whether advertently or inadvertently.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“we need to distance ourselves physically,”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“contact-reduction interventions,”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“nonpharmaceutical interventions,”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“medicine has actually played a surprisingly small role in the decline of most infectious diseases across time.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“But how much did all of that really help us? We have not done much better at stopping a virus than our forebears did, and they had fewer resources.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Finally, the quantification of excess deaths allows us to summarize the overall impact of the pandemic on people’s health. The virus kills some people directly, by infecting them, and others indirectly, by, for example, prompting people to delay going to the hospital for other conditions and thus needlessly dying, or by increasing suicides as a result of depression due to job loss or social isolation.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Quantifying excess deaths is a statistical technique often employed by modern scholars studying epidemics, but it was first proposed by a founder of epidemiology, William Farr, in London in 1847. Farr defined this quantity as the number of deaths observed during an epidemic in excess of those expected under normal circumstances.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Ordinarily, pathogens evolve to be less deadly, since it does not suit their interests to kill their hosts. A dead host cannot easily spread the germ to others, so causing milder illness is “better” for the pathogen from a Darwinian point of view.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“This is also the reason, incidentally, that immunizing the elderly, while it will reduce their deaths, does not have much effect on the actual course of the epidemic. Immunizing working-age people helps break chains of transmission through social networks and can be much more effective in preventing deaths on a population level”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“In the winter, people are indoors and are more densely packed.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“But reality matters. One analysis estimates that, if control measures such as physical distancing had been implemented just one week earlier in the United States, the nation would have seen 61.6 percent fewer reported infections and 55.0 percent fewer reported deaths by May 3, 2020.65 Although responsibility for the pandemic cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of any single person, group, or institution—and the United States was not the only country to downplay early-warning signs of the virus—one of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic is that some of the worst outcomes could have been avoided had our predicament been acknowledged and acted upon at the appropriate time.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“the perplexing fact that when Europeans came into contact with American Indians, the transfer of deadly germs was all one way (with the possible exception of syphilis).12 There were no domesticated animals in the New World (other than the Peruvian llama), which meant humans there had no opportunity to evolve genetic resistance to particular diseases that originated in such animals before circulating among people.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, an almost inconceivably large trillion-dollar rescue package (we could establish a colony on Mars for less money).”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“In other words, Americans know they should wash their hands. They just do not translate that knowledge into action. This is particularly true for men. A quantitative assessment of eighty-five scientific studies found that, compared to men, women were better handwashers”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Rushing to bring a vaccine to market could also cause other sorts of safety problems in its manufacturing. Infamously, this happened in the Cutter Incident during the early launch of the polio vaccine, in 1955. When the polio vaccine was made available, mass vaccination days were organized by local communities. More than 120,000 children received a batch of the vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus was incomplete. Within days, there were reports of children developing paralysis, and the mass immunization program was abandoned within a month. Investigation showed that two batches of the vaccine, manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, had the live virus, resulting in symptoms in forty thousand people, permanent paralysis in fifty-one, and death in five; and this does not include cases of the virus spreading to other children.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Another risk is that if the wrong kind of immune response is elicited, the body might attack itself in what is known as an autoimmune reaction. This happened with the flu vaccine in 1976, when many patients developed a kind of paralysis (from which most people recovered) known as Guillain-Barré syndrome.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live