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ignore it and thus break its grasp? So, back to our story, imagine
that, upon encountering Death on the market, the servant would
address it: “What’s your problem with me? If you have something
to do with me, do it, otherwise beat it!” Perplexed even more, the
Death would have mumbled something like: »But... we were suppo-
sed to meet in Samara, I cannot kill you here!« and run away (pro-
bably to Samara). Therein resides the wager of the so-called herd
immunity coronavirus plan:

“The stated aim has been to achieve ‘herd immunity’ in order to
manage the outbreak and prevent a catastrophic ‘second wave’
next winter /…/. A large proportion of the population is at lower
risk of developing severe disease: roughly speaking anyone up
to the age of 40. So the reasoning goes that even though in a
perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection,
generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting
the population as a whole.”

The wager here is that, if we act as if we don’t know, i.e., if we
ignore the threat, the actual damage might be smaller than if we
act knowingly. This is what conservative populists try to convin-
ce us: the Samara of our appointment is our economic order and
our entire way of life, so that if we hear the warning of epidemolo-
gists and react to it by escaping our reality (isolation and lockdown,
etc.), we will bring forth a much greater catastrophe (poverty, suffe-
ring…) than the small percentage of deaths from the virus.
However, as Alenka Zupančič pointed out, “let’s go back to
work” is an exemplary case of what is false in Trump’s care for
the working class: he addresses ordinary poorly-paid people for
whom the pandemics is also an economic catastrophe, who cannot
afford isolation, for whom economic collapse is an even greater
threat than the virus. The catch is, of course, double here. First,
Trump’s economic politics (dismantling welfare state) is to a large
extent responsible for the fact that many poorly-paid workers find

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