"One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects..."

"... on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness. The sane thing right now is not to hope for a miracle cure but to accept that maximal measures might have usefully minimal effects."

From "The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics" by Adam Gopnik (in The New Yorker).