Oops

 Two vivid images from my personal memory: One, I am standing in the kitchen of my apartment in Medford, a couple years back. I have finished a long day and an even longer commute from Boston's north suburbs. I am desperately hungry, having ordered some Thai food several hours ago. After a long wait, the food has finally arrived. I have dished out the entire steaming pile onto a plate. Then, I spin around, intending to carry the dish to the table, where I will finally and gratefully snarf it down. 

Instead, the plate falls through my fingers. It shatters on the ground. In a flash, in a twinkling, the entire heaping, steaming pile of noodle deliciousness is scattered across my dirty kitchen floor. Rendered instantaneously inedible. And as I stare down at the shattered plate, its shards mixed in with the clear strings of pad-woon-sen, I can picture in my mind's eye the plate reassembling itself. Like, it should be possible to rewind time slightly. Don't I get a do-over? 

A second incident. I am moving in to a new condo, a few years later. I am overjoyed. I am on my way to homeownership, for the first time. What could go wrong? I open the front door, peer around with glee, and then decide to descend into the basement. At once, I am struck with horror. There are a full two inches of flood water blanketing the basement floor. On my first day in the new place. Again, I have the same thought: Can't I just back my way up the stairs and say this never happened? 

So it often is with disaster; particularly when it is caused by a human mistake. Shouldn't we be able to just go back and try that again? Irreversible errors are simply too unjust to be allowed. The amount of time it takes to commit the mistake, versus the length of time its consequences will linger, seem too disproportionate to be tolerated. Why can't one just go back and redo it, or undo it?

As the criminal narrator observes at one point in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, in a passage that instantly brought to mind my Thai food and basement debacles: "the slightest carelessness—sometimes even less than a gesture, an unfinished gesture, one you would like to take back, to undo by reversing time, a gesture so mild and close, still in the present moment, that you think you can efface it—impossible!—can lead, for example, to the guillotine." (Frechtman trans.)

I was thinking of this today in reading the U.S. intelligence community's joint assessment of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The full report remains classified, but the various agencies late last week released an opaque two-page summary of its chief findings. It leaves things, if anything, even less clear than before, and seems to amount to a roundabout way of saying: We really have no idea! There still is no consensus on where this virus came from, or how it was first transferred to humans. 

The only scenario for the origins of the pandemic the summary excludes with any confidence is the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created as a bioweapon. Which is great to have cleared up, but I don't know any serious person who still entertained that as a plausible hypothesis. The more credible possibilities are that the virus either originated through transmission from an animal host (the zoonotic hypothesis) or by some form of human error in a lab that studies coronaviruses. 

In selecting between these two possibilities, the summary reports that four agencies who contributed to it leaned with "low confidence" toward the zoonotic theory, one plumped with "moderate confidence" for the lab origins hypothesis, and the rest simply declared that there was not enough information currently to judge. Of those who favored zoonosis as the origin, these agencies apparently pointed to Chinese officials' "lack of foreknowledge" of the virus, prior to the outbreak.

This to me, though, seems to misunderstand the nature of the leading contenders for the lab leak hypothesis, few of which require officials to have known about the virus ahead of time. It may, more plausibly, have come from researchers' contact with animal hosts in the field or the lab, which was known to be working with bat populations specifically in order to study coronaviruses. The point isn't that anyone knew this would happen: it's that it could have all been a massive, tragic human mistake. 

And this is the scenario—still unproved, but not unlikely—that haunts me most, and that puts me in mind of the sorts of irreversible catastrophes—stemming from the briefest of unfinished gestures—that Jean Genet's narrator has in mind. Suppose it really was just a single lab worker who made a mistake in the handling of a virus or an animal host? Just one innocent slip, just one day, and this monster was unleashed? And suppose it didn't happen in a lab, but in a wet market—is the situation so different?

Either way, the disproportion between the time and effort it likely took to make the mistake and the length of time—and cost to life and wellbeing—it will take for humanity to achieve a livable compromise with this virus strikes at our sense of fairness. This perhaps is why conspiracists have been drawn to theories of a deliberate release of the virus—the "bioweapon" account that the U.S. intelligence report conclusively rules out. If the result were intended, then the disproportion somehow seems less extreme. 

But no. It may very well be the case that one second's mistimed gesture resulted in decades of costs to human life and society around the globe. We are now more than 18 months into this crisis, after all, and COVID-19 had penetrated every human civilization. Millions of people have died. And it has become increasingly clear there is no way the virus will be eradicated; no way this genie can be put back in the bottle from which it erupted in January 2021—whether it was from a wet market or a test tube. 

SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants are here to stay. All we can do is find a way to live with them, to minimize their harmful impacts on human society, and to achieve enough herd immunity through vaccination, enough of the time, that it is relegated to the status of an endemic seasonal respiratory affliction. 

The thought that perhaps this didn't have to be so, that at some earlier stage a gesture could have been avoided or withdrawn, is one I can't help but replay in my brain... 

But so it goes with all disaster and tragedy, whether on the smallest scale or the grandest. Whatever evil befalls us or that we commit is one we would like to take back. But we can't. We cannot rewind the tape. Time's arrow only goes in one direction. "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on." All we can do is accept the past. Take care for the future. Try to make it one that will be more livable and tolerable for us all.