Essays On Surviving COVID-19 and Beyond: Lessons Learned from the Ancients to the Present

By Dr. Jules Mitchel

This book is a culmination of thoughts and reflections triggered by the initial devastating wave of deaths from COVID-19, together with the mishandling of the responses and the manifestation of human fantasies, all of which were quite similar to what occurred during the Spanish flu pandemic at the time of World War I. Research on the history of plagues, wars, tyrants, and human behavior reinforced that there was "nothing new under the sun." As a biologist with an interest in evolutionary biology, I was curious to see if there were any insights we could learn from other species, but especially how mammals deal with behaviors such as competition, cooperation, empathy, and altruism. I discovered not only the well-known survival differences between the bonobo and chimpanzee but also how totally unrelated species can work together for the common good. One example is how the honeyguide bird in Africa helps humans find beehives and then how the honeyguide bird eats the leftovers. It also has become clear for humans to reflect that based on the complexity of societies and living organisms in general, there are no simple solutions to the survival of any species. However, one thing is clear: only through cooperation, empathy, and acts of altruism, like firefighters entering a burning building, soldiers confronting the enemy, and police protecting our schools, will the human species be able to live in harmony. Also, only by confronting selfish, greedy autocracies, plutocracies, and kleptocracies will the human species be able to survive on planet Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886546804

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Essays On Surviving COVID-19 and Beyond

Lessons Learned from the Ancients to the Present

Dr. Jules Mitchel

Copyright © 2022 Dr. Jules Mitchel

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 979-8-88654-674-3 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-680-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

1

Evolutionary Biology

1.1 Who Survives and Who Lives? Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 1)

1.2 Learning from the Past: Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 2)

1.3 It Is All About Education: Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 3)

1.4 Homo Neanderthalensis: Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 4)

1.5 Lessons from Biology, Immunology, and Human Behavior

1.6 Is the Evolution of Bonobos and Chimpanzees Telling Us Something?

1.7 Is COVID-19 Driving Human Evolution? Questions to Think About

1.8 Examples of Cooperation from Nature

1.9 Could Anti-Vaxxers Change the Gene Pool When They Die?

2

Pandemics

2.1 With Civilization Comes Pandemics and Fears of the Unknown

2.2 History of Viruses

2.3 History of Pandemics

2.4 Lessons Learned from Smallpox Starting 12,000 Years Ago

2.5 How an African Slave in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox

2.6 In 1905 the Supreme Court Rules 7 to 2 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts

2.7 Polio Pandemic (Ancient Egypt to the Present)

2.8 The Recent Story of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD)

3

Hope during the Current COVID-19 Pandemic

3.1 Hope Is All about Leadership

3.2 Five Basic Relationships in Confucianism

3.3 Native American Teachings and Modern-Day Democracies

3.4 Importance and Benefits of Human Relationships

3.5 Is The Future Here Already? Growing Food Indoors

3.6 Growing Food on Fifth Avenue in New York City

4

What Is It to Be Human during Pandemics?

4.1 How Did People Behave and Cope during the 1918 Pandemic?

4.2 What Was It Like Living during the 1918 Pandemic?

4.3 What Did Society Do in Order to Battle This Unknown Enemy?

4.4 How Did Society Emerge after the 1918 Pandemic?

5

Getting Through the Challenges of COVID-19

5.1 Music and Humanity: Famous Quotes

5.2 Music and the Brain

5.3 Music as a Healer during COVID-19

5.4 Cognitive Dissonance

5.5 Freudian Theory

5.6 Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego

5.7 Is Cognitive Dissonance in Wartime a Surprise?

5.8 Attack on the United States on 9/11/2001

5.9 Modern Day Cases of Cognitive Dissonance

5.10 Where Do We Go from Here?

5.11 The Value of Relationships during COVID-19 and Beyond

5.12 Lessons Learned about Health Issues from the 1918 Spanish Flu

5.13 Diseases Related Directly to the Spanish Flu

6

History as Our Teacher

6.1 Populism vs. Autocracies vs. Democracies

6.2 Governing against Droughts, Rain, Bugs, and Mice

6.3 George Orwell Said It All in Animal Farm

6.4 George Orwell Again Said It All in 1984

6.5 Never Again: Lessons Learned from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

6.6 Hope, Cooperation, Empathy, and Altruism

7

Leadership during COVID-19 and Beyond

7.1 Since All Leaders Have Followers, Caveat Emptor

7.2 Some Fallacious Arguments that Confuse Those Vulnerable to Lies

7.3 Great Leadership During the COVID-19 Epidemic

7.4 The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

7.5 Why Do Some People Not Trust Governments?

7.6 Attributes of Leadership

7.7 Qualifications of Leaders

7.8 Training Future Leaders

7.9 Psychological Reactions to Crises

7.10 Advice to Decision-Makers

7.11 Is Vladimir Putin a SARS-CoV-2 Virus in Hiding?

7.12 Addressing the 1% Psychopaths That Inhabit the Planet?

7.13 Are War Leaders No Different than the SARS-CoV-2 Virus?

7.14 Are Matriarchies and Democracies Needed to Save the Planet?

7.15 Since We Can Get to the Moon and Mars, Why Not the Rest?

7.16 Lessons Learned from Joseph in Egypt

7.17 Baby Formula Shortage and McDonald's Exiting Russia

8

Warfare

8.1 Why Aren't We Now at a War Footing Against SARS-Cov-2?

8.2 The Attack on Civilians by SARS-CoV-2 Began in November 2019

8.3 How to Kill an Enemy that Will Never Give Up

8.4 Is a Pandemic an Adequate Metaphor for War?

8.5 America Today: Battles with Selfish Greed as the Enemy Within

8.6 Current Signs of War

9

Going Forward

9.1 Education for All for Our Planet to Survive

9.2 Clinical Research in the Time of COVID-19

10

References

About the Author

1

Evolutionary Biology

Charles Darwin, circa 1854

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the US Copyright Office before January 1, 1925.

1.1 Who Survives and Who Lives? Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 1)

With the rapid and very deadly advent of COVID-19, it has been reported that certain subpopulations within our society are more vulnerable as to their morbidity and mortality. The deaths in the nursing homes, the elderly, prisoners, people with concomitant diseases, and the poor show that Darwin in a certain sense was right when he wrote:

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, November 24, 1859).

However, as human beings, we do have alternatives to the basic notion of survival of the fittest. We have the ability, which we share with other species, to evolve socially so that those most vulnerable among us, even though they may be viewed as physically weak, offer much to make us strong. Think of the theoretical physicist Steven Hawking, who was diagnosed with ALS in 1963 at age twenty-one. If we only lived by the dogma that the physically strongest live and the physically weakest die, then all the physically weak and disabled leaders like Hawking and FDR would be left to die, and all the bullies of the world, most of whom are mentally weak and emotionally disabled, would take over.

What we are seeing now are two evolutionary forces at work. One is the killer battle with SARS-CoV-2, which we are fighting with all that we developed over time using our brains rather than our brawn. The second is a selection process using social and political pressures and ultimately the power of We the people., to select and elect leaders, who value life and all that it brings, rather than those who only believe in themselves in a zero-sum game society.

1.2 Learning from the Past: Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 2)

Question 1: When The Weather Channel announces that there is a hurricane coming to Florida, there is incredible planning to save lives and property. Why the disconnect with the pandemic?

Question 2: If we are currently dealing with Darwin's Origin of Species, who will be the strongest and who will be the weakest?

Here are also some relevant and famous quotes from Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in jail for fighting for human rights:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

It always seems impossible until it's done.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

A winner is a dreamer who never gives up.

It always seems impossible until it's done.

In order to manage the pandemic, we must use all of the skills that human beings have developed over time. The main reason we must do this is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus knows how to:

Fly internationally without a passport.

Travel on airplanes without buying a ticket.

Asymptomatically hide in humans as it spreads.

Kill health care workers who want to kill it.

Enter the brains of decision-makers to have them make decisions to make it easier for the virus to transfect others. For example:

There are no consistent mandates by global leaders for the population to wear masks.

Some individuals have stated that:

Wearing a mask challenges my rights under the American constitution.

Wearing a mask causes transfection.

It is not manly to wear a mask.

I do not look good in a mask.

1.3 It Is All About Education: Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 3)

Think about it, why can the National Basketball Association (NBA) comply with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and use common-sense controls to ensure the safety of their players, but our government cannot insist on the same controls to ensure the safety of all of us?

Most people think of Charles Darwin as the father of evolutionary biology and rightfully so. However, most are not aware that survival of the fittest is not a Darwin quote, but rather a phrase that Herbert Spencer first used after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. When confronted by Spencer, Darwin agreed that survival of the fittest more clearly defined what he, Darwin, intended to convey when he coined the phrase natural selection.

What does all of this mean during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that is taking place just one hundred years after the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918? The 1918 pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, which represented about one-third of the planet's population and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including approximately 675,000 Americans.

However, to put the current crisis in perspective, the following are some of the great accomplishments of modern times:

Humans have learned how to control and/or eliminate pandemic diseases such as smallpox, polio, and measles.

Humans landed on and returned from the moon.

Humans invented the Internet, thus enabling global connectivity and the unlimited sharing of creative ideas.

Humans have invented multiple methods of alternative energy, namely, solar and wind energy.

Humans are offered medical miracles by great institutions like the NIH and the pharmaceutical industry.

Yet despite these and other success stories, we have failed miserably to educate people throughout the world to recognize the value of truth over lies, science over wishful thinking, and evidence-based decision over fake news.

Being the strongest, most intelligent, and most adaptable to change are all noble traits, but without an educated society willing to take on civic responsibilities, societies acquiesce to the whims of the unscrupulous, who may not only be strong and intelligent but also gain power by forcing decent citizenry to comply with their imposed changes. Thus, without having an educated society, there is no path to the survival of the human species. The reasons are that (1) none of us is totally self-sufficient, (2) we all need others to survive, and (3) we are all in this world together, with each person optimizing his/her contributions for the betterment of all.

Think of the complexity of societies where even the super elite, with all of their resources, cannot by themselves survive a planetary catastrophe such as the imminent climate change predicted in 1998 by James Hanson (then Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) or the global viral pandemic that we are currently experiencing.

While now defunct and debunked, social Darwinism reflected various theories of society that emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s. Social Darwinists tried to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics, and politics and argued that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak did not deserve much of anything. Various sects of social Darwinist had differing views regarding which groups are to be considered the strongest and which groups should be considered the weakest. They also held different opinions about the precise mechanisms that should be used to reward strength and punish weakness.

We are seeing during the current COVID-19 pandemic that some people are asymptomatic while others are becoming morbidly ill. Why do some die and some survive with sequelae? Perhaps biology tells a better story as to how advanced societies should and could manage these crises and adapt to change.

Almost 700 years ago in medieval Italy, the overwhelmed physicians and health officials fighting a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, had no notion of viruses or bacteria, but they understood enough based on deductive reasoning to implement some of the world's first anticontagion measures. Starting in 1348, soon after the plague arrived in cities like Venice and Milan, city officials put emergency public health measures in place that foreshadowed today's best practices of social distancing. The Adriatic port city of Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) was the first to pass legislation requiring the mandatory quarantine of all incoming ships and surface caravans in order to screen for infection. The order, which survived in the Dubrovnik archives, reads that on July 27, 1377, the city's major council passed a law that stipulates that those who come from plague-infested areas shall not enter [Ragusa] or its district unless they spend a month on the islet of Mrkan or in the town of Cavtat, for the purpose of disinfection.

Several Darwin quotes noted below are worth considering.

…But if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

1.4 Homo Neanderthalensis: Darwin Nailed It, But (Part 4)

Homo