Will coronavirus change the world?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Will coronavirus change the world?
Position‹2 of 3›: Coronavirus will cause irreparable harm
Argument1 of 4›: Coronavirus is impossible to contain

The ease of person-to-person infection and difficulty of diagnosis make COVID-19's spread inevitable.

The argument

The coronavirus is easy to transmit and difficult to detect, a combination which makes its spread across the globe highly likely. COVID-19 spreads primarily through respiratory droplets, small drops of fluid which are released when an infected person, coughs, sneezes, or speaks. Infection occurs when respiratory droplets containing active coronavirus land on an uninfected person's face or are transferred there by the person touching their face with their hands. No vaccine or treatment for COVID-19 is currently available, so when an uninfected person encounters the coronavirus, there is nothing to prevent the infection from taking hold and running its course. Transmission of the coronavirus is made more difficult to avoid by the fact that it is hard to know who is infected. Typical symptoms of COVID-19 mirror symptoms of the common cold and flu, and symptoms can take up to two weeks to appear after exposure to virus. Some people may not experience symptoms at all. Without a reliable means of early detection, quarantine and social isolation cannot be effective containment strategies, because it cannot be determined who needs to be isolated in sufficient time to prevent further transmission. Epidemiologists characterize the transmissibility of a disease using the basic reproduction number, which is the number of other people each infected person is expected to spread the disease to, on average. COVID-19's number is estimated at between 2 and 3, which would make it sufficiently transmissible to spread through a large portion of the population if left unchecked.

Premises

[P1]The coronavirus spreads easily through respiratory droplets, and with no vaccine or treatment available, nothing stops an infection once it takes hold. [P2] It is also hard to detect, since its symptoms mirror the cold and flu, can take two weeks to appear, and may never show at all. [P3] Without reliable early detection, quarantine and isolation cannot work, and with a reproduction number of 2 to 3 the virus is transmissible enough to spread through much of the population. [C] Therefore, because the coronavirus is impossible to contain, it will cause irreparable harm.

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the premise "nothing stops infection" was time-bound to early 2020. Effective vaccines and treatments were subsequently developed, so the claim that an encounter with the virus must simply run its course held only before they existed. They add that several countries did suppress transmission through aggressive testing, tracing and isolation, showing containment was difficult rather than genuinely impossible. And even granting widespread spread, that does not entail "irreparable" harm — the leap from high transmissibility to permanent, unrecoverable damage is exactly what the position needs and the argument does not establish.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise that "nothing stops infection" was time-bound; effective vaccines and treatments were later developed, so it held only for early 2020. [Rejecting P3] Several countries did suppress transmission through testing, tracing and isolation, showing containment was difficult rather than impossible — and even widespread spread does not entail "irreparable" harm.