How Air Pollution Saved China

I have said for years now that "the Chinese live in our future and we live in their past". My initial intent with that phrase was to express the everyday reality that they are always either 12 or 13 hours ahead of Pennsylvania, depending on the vagaries of Daylight Savings time. But recently, since the outbreak of the coronavirus this past January, this phrase has become even more significant. Rather than just 12 hours, they seemingly live 3 or 4 weeks ahead of us in the progression of this virus outbreak. They have had to deal with this on a scale that we are only beginning to appreciate. Now, as I write this two months later, they are finally finding some relief from the rapid, inexorable spread of the disease across their country. The jury is still out on how they were able to hopefully squash this plague before it ravished more of the country, but one explanation that I am offering is China's experience with air pollution. Anyone who has been to China is struck by the seriousness of the pollution problem. Because of it, the Chinese are therefore quite comfortable with being out in public with masks covering their faces. When this epidemic started to threaten their many population centers, their people with ready and willing to don any protective gear they could find when venturing out. Masks were not a stigma or a negative fashion statement for them. 

Did that willingness to adapt to masks in public save them as a nation? Obviously, not in totality. But it is hard to dismiss the positive evidence that something was working in their favor to slow the spread that has not been working in Italy -- or in the USA and Spain. When I told my one friend in Beijing that I could not get hold of masks here, she immediately, within an hour, had 80 of them packaged up and on the way to my doorstep. They arrived, miraculously, six days later. Does she believe in masks in public? The answer is obvious! Last night, when another friend in Beijing learned that my daughter in Florida was concerned that she might have contracted the illness, she had a package of masks on their way to Florida within 4 hours. She also seems convinced of their efficacy. China, as of today, is up and running with a capacity of 300 million masks a day. They were incensed with our sending empty airplanes into Wuhan to evacuate our citizens. "Could you at least have filled the empty planes with masks and medical supplies?" they asked plaintively. They had a gut-level feel that masks were a good thing. So, are they? Our gut-level revulsion to the use of them has certainly delayed our full-scale push to produce them on an industrial scale. Even Congress put their collective foot down on making masks readily available. There is, of course some wisdom in that position. Elevating the benefits of wearing masks to a level of a life and death concern, would have spawned violence on the streets and the kind of stockpiling that has become apparent with toilet paper! (That is why we had to shut down construction! All Job Johnnies have been robbed of their toilet paper!) 

What to do? I guess obey the rapidly formulated social distancing laws. But I think that restricting us from going out of our houses without masks at the beginning of March would have prevented some of this. But then, I live in the present and am only in touch with the future over WeChat!