COVID-19, rightly understood, is a crisis of ecology. It is also a crisis of hermeneutics, much of it traceable to the “geologic fault” that Wendell Berry exposes in “the mentality of institutional religion.”
This story originally appeared on STAT, a health and medicine website that provides ambitious coverage of the coronavirus. Go here for more stories on the virus. Try STAT Plus for exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences. And check out STAT’s COVID-19 tracker. Patrick Skerrett edits First Opinion, First Opinion, STAT’s perspective and opinion section, and is the host of the First Opinion Podcast.
This week marks two pandemic “anniversaries” the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and former President Trump declared it a national emergency two days later.
Tragically, there have been more than a half million deaths in the United States and more than 2.6 million globally since then.