This pandemic is a lot of things, but one thing it isn’t is confusing.

Viruses are designed (and I use “designed” in the loosest possible sense, i.e. not actually designed but rather shaped by their environment and by evolution) to replicate and spread themselves as efficiently as possible. Some are very good at this and stay widespread and contagious for a long time, others are not so good and die out or are easily contained.

COVID-19 is pretty good at spreading itself. And once you know how good it is at spreading itself, then how it spreads becomes a pretty simple math problem. When plotted out geometrically, patterns emerge in the form of lines and curves.

These lines and curves are not confusing. As more people are exposed, more people contract the disease, and then those infected move on to expose even more people.

Again, these lines and curves and concepts are not confusing.

And yet so many people you meet in the world seem not to understand these simple concepts at all.

The pandemic is not confusing.

What is confusing is the way people react to the pandemic. Because it is very easy to pretend that it’s not a big deal when it’s not affecting you, but rather those people, over there.

But suddenly, when the pandemic affects somebody close to you, it becomes a lot more serious.

I guess some of us have forgotten that we all live in the same fishbowl.