That’s a good expression, “the hungry curve.”

I think the people who’ve been setting cellphone towers on fire all over the place in Britain, like the pitchfork-wielding mobs torching a mad scientist’s lab in a horror movie, are harbingers of something that could be as serious as the corornavirus outbreak itself if the hungry curve also rises sharply..

If there is too much unrest there’s a risk of the collapse of modern infrastructural networks like the Internet and the electric power grid, which are often surprisingly fragile and can’t afford to lose too many nodes at once.

This isn’t just a hypothetical. I still remember when the power went down in downtown Auckland for five weeks in 1998 due to a fault caused by years of skimping on maintenance.

Most major blackouts are over in a day or so of course. But just this one time there was too much damage, and they couldn’t source the necessary spares straight away.

There was a run on generators, just like the recent run on N95 masks, and if you couldn’t get one you missed out.

So, this sort of thing can happen. Certainly, if it had involved a larger area than a mirror-glass business district with few permanent residents at the time — at a time when continuity of the Internet was also nowhere near as critical as today — things might have got quite squirly after the first couple of weeks.

Such a collapse would also wreck social distancing strategies. For how can you work from home if the power or the Internet’s going to be down for weeks and there are no generators to be had? What’s going to happen to all the stuff in your freezer?

Maybe that’s one reason why countries with relatively wise leaders aren’t backing millions into a corner where they start to think, gee, maybe it would make sense to just burn everything down and see what happens.