How COVID-19 Infected My Syllabus
By Carlos Mariscal
I couldn’t stop thinking about COVID-19, so I taught it instead. It was a class focused on the intersection of science and society. We were supposed to start a module on Human Enhancement, but that seemed so trivial when the world was facing a new and largely unknown pandemic, exponentially increasing. I pivoted: switching to COVID-19, hoping to put my countless hours of doom scrolling to good use. I felt it was urgent to contextualize this time in our life for my students, who were reacting to events instead of processing.
I’d been stressing about COVID-19 for months by the time we shut down. On December 31, I saw the alert for the novel coronavirus. This was the third pandemic scare I remembered (SARS in 2002 and H1N1 in 2009). Being fresh from a heartbreak and looking to trade depression for anxiety, I spent much of January finding any news I could on the matter. I grew increasingly concerned throughout January, as Wuhan went on lockdown and the virus spread to nearly two dozen countries including the United States. I grimly contemplated the poor decision of evacuating U.S. citizens from China only to let them loose to cause infections nearly immediately. By February, I was hair-on-fire certain that we were going to have an outbreak in the United States. We’d gone from 41 cases in one country to 41,000 across more than 70 countries in less than two months.
Then March happened. As study abroad programs shut down and places started transitioning online, I warned my class that we would likely not come back to campus after Spring Break. No amount of warning could have prepared any of us for the out-of-stock toiletries, hearing that Tom Hanks was diagnosed, the NBA shutting down, and New York City having to use refrigerated trucks to hold the excess corpses. Like the public at large and our elected officials in particular, my students were caught off-guard by how quickly the pandemic changed the world. I, too, was surprised, albeit more by our response than by the disease itself.
One thing that genuinely surprised me was that so many places went into lockdown. I had considered Americans too individualistic and obstinate to do something like that, so when businesses shut down in March, I was surprisingly optimistic. If the NBA could shut down in time, it meant that some people in charge could see the problem we were facing. If Mitt Romney could propose a Universal Basic Income as the stock market tanked, then maybe we would finally come together as a nation.
I’m not often accused of being optimistic. But in late March, my class was terrified, we were starting a new segment in a related topic, and I felt like I could synthesize what was happening in a way that would not only educate, but be therapeutic. Although the nature and effects of COVID-19 were still being understood, the epidemiology was as clear as could be: test, trace, treat, and triage. The scientists had done their job, the rest was a communications, logistics, and healthcare issue.
This is not to downplay their task. Exponential growth is so hard to understand. It’s called the “Paradox of Precaution.” Act early enough to be effective and everyone thinks you overreacted; act too late and everyone blames you for underreacting. This disease faced that classic problem in public health along with new problems unique to COVID-19: asymptomatic spread, the smorgasbord of symptoms, long incubation period, and so on.
As a teacher, my task wasn’t to do the science, but to communicate the nature and scale of the problem. I looked to countries that had excellent responses and studied what worked: targeted travel bans, ensuring supplies, extensive testing, thorough contact tracing, and physical distancing. I compared it to the U.S. response of poorly targeted travel bans, a one-time stimulus package, and months of debate as to whether masks were effective means of mitigation, “political correctness,” or unfair encroachment into our personal liberties. The differences were stark, but connecting individual decisions to the outcomes was a slow task.
So I restructured my syllabus. I spent two weeks in March researching. I learned how our healthcare system moved from a pay-as-you-go model to what we have now, how the 1918 and subsequent flu pandemics turned out, how the HIV crisis overcame its marginalization by appealing to a telegenic child. I churned through dozens of articles and analyses to stitch together the best evidence and visualizations I could. Although I had a segment on conspiracy theories and COVID-deniers, by the time the semester ended, it became obvious that the political aspects of COVID-19 were going to be more serious than I’d thought.
This fall, I had the opportunity to teach the class again. This time, I assigned readings that went along, and moved around material to make it fit. By sheer coincidence, as I began to record my lectures, COVID-19 began encroaching in my personal life. My mother became ill with COVID-19. She recovered, but her friend that also caught the disease passed away. Then my hometown of El Paso, Texas, became a front page headline as local and state officials debated shutting the city down while nearly a dozen refrigerated trucks held the excess bodies the city couldn’t process. Lastly, I decided to move in with some friends in order to see humans outside of a Zoom screen, only to have them catch the disease shortly thereafter (I never caught it, but it was a consistent fear).
It’s November as I write this. All of my class materials are available on YouTube. If you’d like to see what I did about COVID in the Spring and how I updated it, the videos are available here. I also hosted an event on the topic for a series I co-founded, Thought on Tap.
I go up for tenure next year and there’s a version of 2021 in which I might regret sinking several weeks of research time into developing entirely new material. If that happens, I hope I’ll still think of it as worthwhile. What made COVID-19 so bad in the U.S. was administrative and logistical, not a lack of science or well-meaning healthcare providers. But those situations would have been vastly improved if we'd had effective communicators and the undivided attention of a public. It’s my hope that, by preparing the material and making it public, I’ll be a small part of helping us move us forward in this pandemic and the next.
Photo/Mart Krupovic.
Carlos Mariscal is a professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno. He teaches issues in science and technology and researches life, its origins, nature, extent, and distribution. He’s been published in a number of places, which you can find if you head on over to carlosmariscal.com. In his hypothetical spare time, Carlos enjoys learning the guitar, kickboxing, writing, and drawing.
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