WEC Class Notes

 In the run-up to a bout with Evander Holyfield in 1996, a reporter asked reigning American boxing champion Mike Tyson about his opponent’s fight plan. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Tyson sniffed. The global response to Covid-19 could elicit a similar response. After a year in which the coronavirus killed more than 3 million people, it is re-accelerating in India. But even though the global crisis is far from over, it has already planted the seeds of a conflict over which economic and political models were reinforced by the pandemic, and which were weakened by it. In “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”, historian Niall Ferguson seeks to put Covid-19 in context by reviewing nearly everything bad that has ever happened to humanity. Seeking an analytical framework to apply to human miscalculation in the face of cataclysm, he ranges far and wide. He offers the example of Pliny the Elder, the otherwise clever Roman philosopher, who having watched Mount Vesuvius

They are being offered little more than a couple of masks, some hand sanitizer and social-distancing guidance that may be hard to abide by.  For Olympic host cities, one of the keys to a successful Games is the army of volunteers who cheerfully perform a range of  duties , like fetching water, driving Olympic vehicles, interpreting for athletes or carrying medals to ceremonies.  If the rescheduled Tokyo Games go ahead as planned this summer, roughly 78,000 volunteers will have another responsibility: preventing the spread of the coronavirus, both among participants and themselves.  For protection, the volunteers are being offered little more than a couple of cloth masks, a bottle of sanitizer and mantras about social distancing. Unless they qualify for vaccination through Japan’s  slow age-based rollout , they will not be inoculated against the coronavirus.  “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do this,” said Akiko Kariya, 40, a paralegal in Tokyo who signed up to volunteer as a