Sometimes history comes calling, and sometimes it arrives with a truck full of body-bags when it does. As a history buff, recent events have filled me with a kind of morbid curiosity–at our shores, it seems, is a generational crisis one typically only reads about in the past tense. But what’s most alarming about the silent killer approaching as steadily as the entity in It Follows is just how hard it is to pin down its degree of deadliness.

This has led to all sorts of conjecture and wild speculating, as people entertain the natural human tendency to psychologically discount a threat seen at a distance. If we can’t grapple with a virus three weeks away, if the governments seemed only reluctantly spurred into action by the time things have almost progressed too far, then I’m not sure if we’re wired the right way for long term survival. Maybe the answer to the famous Fermi Paradox is simply: none of the alien races ever blinked soon enough.

In a way, this kind of makes sense. Perhaps procrastination is a survival mechanism, a built-in mode of operation that ensured calories weren’t wasted running from a forest fire spotted only on the far horizon, for example. Or, perhaps, the limit of our intelligence is seen in our inability to stretch our faculties beyond the concerns of the simian. I’m not sure.

What I do know is this: the data either is still not out there, or it’s out there and hasn’t been distributed, perhaps even deliberately. Matters aren’t helped by the reductionistas and dismissalists that have been hard at work. While yes, the wolf cried SARS and Zika and Ebola in recent history, the Chinese Government knew this bug was something different very early on, to the point that they suppressed information about it. The fact that they locked down so hard and so fast should have raised great alarm, and yet as I type this the WHO still hasn’t even mustered up the will to call this a pandemic.

Consider the thought processes of some of those you know. First, they assured themselves, it was an issue confined to China. Then it was spreading, yes, but the flu killed X number of people every year, so we could disregard it (which is a bit like saying one can ignore a chainsaw-wielding maniac because more people die from kitchen falls every year). After that apples-to-hand-grenades comparison began to wear thin, then came the cry that what was happening in China was because that area of the world lacked exceptionalism. When the virus touched our shores, then came the brigades on social media encouraging everyone to just wash their hands and be done with it, because apparently this was some grand and simple solution that no one upstream had thought of hence. I would imagine hand washing must be going on furiously in Italy and Iran at the moment.

The thing that makes this bug a nasty one is its fluid nature. Coronavirus doesn’t care about wealth, borders, race or political bent. It simply punches a hole through barriers like a knife slipping between a rib cage. If this were some hostile terrorist organization, randomly gunning down clusters of victims, our country would already be in full wartime mode. But we persist in disbelief because we can’t wrap our psyches around this threat. It manages to be something both existential and abstract, as it refuses to allow us to even pin down its fatality ratio while it goes about killing. It is is the boogeyman under the bed. In the coming weeks we will all be checking under the mattress.