2020 vision: Look back and lean forward as we revisit COVID-19 and early scenes of a biological Armageddon

It was a time before social distancing, face masks and coronavirus vaccines. 

March 11, 2020 was a Wednesday. It was also the day the world changed.

On that day, a year ago today, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, after the novel coronavirus was detected in more than 100 countries.

That same day, the Dow Jones plummeted into bear market territory, the National Basketball Association (NBA)  abruptly halted its season, then-U.S. President Donald Trump announced a European travel ban in a national address and Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced they had contracted the virus while filming in Australia. That was one day: March 11, 2020.

March 2020 was simply the March that never ended. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end. Never mind notions of March coming in like a lamb and going out like a lion, or vice-versa, or beware the Ides of March, that sort of thing. A year ago this month was far more terrifying, yet simultaneously, surreal than anything so pedestrian as lambs, lions and ides.

The National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) at Fort Detrick, Maryland warned as far back as November 2019 that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population. The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. The medical intelligence (MEDINT) cell within Canadian Forces Intelligence Command (CFINTCOM) gave a similar warning in January 2020.

As early as Jan. 23, 2020, I had written here: 

Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV [as it was then provisionally known], which “shows signs of being far worse than SARS-CoV, has resulted in lockdowns today in two Chinese cities, Wuhan and Huanggang. The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is the entity within the International Union of Microbiological Societies, founded in 1927 as the International Society for Microbiology, and responsible for developing the official classification of viruses and taxa naming (taxonomy) of the Coronaviridae family, proposed the naming convention SARS-CoV-2 for COVID-19. The World Health Organization, perhaps finding the recommended name a tad too resonant politically to SARS from the not-so-distant past, opted instead for the official name COVID-19.

“Yi Guan, a Chinese virologist, who played an important role in tracing the development of SARS-CoV, said, ‘I’ve experienced so much and I’ve never felt scared before. But this time I’m scared,’ Nathan Vanderklippe, Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, and Alexandra Li, in Beijing, reported today.”

A few paragraphs later, I wrote “2019-nCoV was first detected last month in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and the virus did not match any other known virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it as ‘an emerging, rapidly evolving situation.'”

Yet that same day – Jan. 23, 2020 – the Geneva-based WHO said that “now is not the time” to call a global health emergency related to a new coronavirus that has left 17 dead and more than 500 others infected in China, according to reports from the Associated Press, CTV News Channel, and other media. A “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC) must be an “extraordinary event” that poses a global risk and requires co-ordinated international action, according to the WHO. Global emergencies had been declared before, including for the Zika virus outbreak in the Americas, the swine flu and polio.

That decision would be revisited just a week later on Jan. 30, 2020, when, following the recommendations of its emergency committee, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the novel coronavirus outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Less than six weeks later, the WHO said a Public Health Emergency of International Concern was now a global pandemic.

The day before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the New York State National Guard were  deployed to the New York City suburb of New Rochelle in Westchester County to enforce a COVID-19 containment area comprising a circle with a radius of about one mile.

In Italy, scenes from the new contagion were apocalyptic by mid-March of last year. “Unfortunately we can’t contain the situation in Lombardy,” said Daniela Confalonieri, a nurse at a hospital in Milan “There’s a high level of contagion and we’re not even counting the dead any more,” she said.

Underscoring the scale of the drama, soldiers transported bodies overnight March 18 and 19, 2020 from the northern town of Bergamo, northeast of Milan, whose cemetery has been overwhelmed.

An army spokesman said 15 trucks and 50 soldiers had been deployed to move coffins to neighbouring provinces. Earlier local authorities had appealed for help with cremations as their own crematorium could not cope with the huge workload.

One of the most chilling things on this side of the Atlantic, and there have been many, that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter last March 21. I heard this brief 30-second clip on Twitter March 24, 2020, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. Aside from the subject matter, there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out, with this message:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

Last March 30, I wrote on Facebook: “Consider this. Ordered earlier this month to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the U.S.Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday and arrived in New York Harbor this morning.

“The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

“Picture this.

“What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon.”

The following day, on March 31, 2020, I posted again on Facebook, “Waking up every morning in March 2020: ‘Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations’” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg).

Since Feb. 6, 2020, COVID-19 has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than influenza has in the last five years, notes the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.in Baltimore. COVID-19 has a higher severe disease and mortality rate than influenza in all age groups, except perhaps children under the age of 12. “Influenza is a significant burden on the population, but COVID-19 has had a vastly larger effect,” Johns Hopkins says.


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The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’

The fire this time?

Next time?

Are we just waiting and watching for the “big one,” knowing it is just a matter of time, or as a headline on Laurie Garrett’s story in Foreign Policy put it so succinctly last September: “The World Knows an Apocalyptic Pandemic Is Coming.”

Garrett, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer, and author of the landmark 1994 book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, argued some 26 years ago now that human disruption of the global environment, coupled with behaviours that readily spread microbes between people and from animals to humans, guaranteed a global surge in epidemics, even an enormous pandemic.

How quickly we could we make a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5^th to 11^th centuries?

Mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti’s 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything looked at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, sounds a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages, and how the global food supply system could collapse (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/what-if-the-22nd-century-means-staying-at-home-with-long-distance-travel-a-thing-of-the-past/). Or the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the internet. Or what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000, and how any of those scenarios leave us vulnerable in overly complex technological societies to an “X-event” that would send us back to a pre-modern world – and again, a world without air or other long-distance travel – virtually overnight.

New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, her fourth novel, published in 2014, is centred around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV) in 2003, and the novel influenza A (H1N1) pandemic of 2009. “Georgia Flu,” is a flu pandemic so lethal, named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.

Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town-to-town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

Sadly, novel influenzas, unidentified forms of pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses, incubating in the reservoir of wet markets, live poultry markets and farms in cities in both mainland China and Hong Kong is not a new story, but rather one that dates back at least to May 1997. The relevant questions are always the same, including how bad is it and when will we know that truth?

The Huanan Seafood Market in  Wuhan is where Chinese officials believe the latest coronavirus outbreak may have originated in a wild animal sold at the food emporium, which sold live foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, koalas and game meats, the Daily Mail and South China Morning Post report. The market has since been closed and has been labelled ‘ground zero’ by local authorities.

We now also have time-lapse tracking of the transmission and evolution of Influenza A (H7N9), the most deadly flu on Earth, which has been circulating in China for the last five years or so. It has a mortality rate of 40 per cent, making it about 200 times more deadly than this season’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus circulating in Canada is expected to be. Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data (https://nextstrain.org/flu/avian/h7n9/ha?dmax=2019-04-06&dmin=2012-03-23&fbclid=IwAR0uzebD_Fpv1UGNP3tybCf8txl3m1dpm8O7CqOkhhnXmfdQILbtQszb-bA&l=radial)

Not all pandemic news is necessarily bad news, at least in retrospect historically speaking, some academics have suggested in recent years.

In May 2014, a study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, located in Levi’s Plaza (as in Levi Strauss & Co. jeans) in San Francisco, and authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then, as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/).

“The Black Death Actually Improved Public Health,” read the headline at the Smithsonian, the official journal published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. When it comes to science, you don’t get much more prestigious than the Smithsonian. On the more populist end of the online spectrum, AOL Inc., based in nearby Dulles, Virginia, went with “Black Death may have improved European health” on its AOL.com website.

DeWitte’s study of the Black Death suggested it was not an indiscriminate killer, but instead targeted frail people of all ages and that survivors experienced improvements in health and longevity, with many people afterwards living to ages of 70 or 80 years old. While improvements in survival post-Black Death didn’t necessarily equate to good health over a lifespan, it did demonstrate a hardiness to endure disease, either directly or indirectly, powerfully shaped mortality patterns for generations after the epidemic ended, she argues.

The skeletal samples for DeWitte’s study came from medieval London cemeteries and are curated at the Museum of London Centre for Human Bioarchaeology.

The pre-Black Death samples came from St. Mary Spital, Guildhall Yard and St. Nicholas Shambles, dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, based on stratigraphic and documentary data and artifacts. The post-Black Death samples came from the cemetery associated with the Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary Graces, which was established in London in 1350, as the Black Death was about to end, and it was in use until the Protestant Reformation in 1538.

As it happens, I find the particular subject of La moria grandissima fascinating. Way back on July 14, 2008, I fired off an e-mail to Sheena Spear at the Thompson Public Library, trying to borrow a copy of John Hatcher’s The Black Death: An Intimate History of the Plague on inter-library loan. Alas, as it had just been published a month earlier in June 2008, that wasn’t happening.

But on Oct. 13, 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan a copy of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague Of All Time by John Kelly, published in 2005. Good enough.

The Black Death swept across Europe, killing a third of the population. As Kelly, and others have pointed out, it proved a major challenge to the Church, striking down both believers and non-believers alike, testing religious faith. If anything priests were at higher risk than most, as they were called onto minister to those gravely ill.

Infected rats aboard Genoese sailing ships piloted by Italian sailors, returning from the Far East and docking in Sicily, carried fleas that spread the disease when they bit humans. Think Ground Zero.

The plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Pneumonic plague is characterized by lung infection and spitting blood and occurs when Y. pestis infects the lungs. This type of airborne plague can spread from person-to-person through the air. Transmission can take place if someone breathes in aerosolized bacteria.

Bubonic plague is characterized by swollen lymph glands, known as buboes, a type of boil, and is the most common form of plague. It occurs when an infected flea bites a person or when materials contaminated with Y. pestis enter through a break in a person’s skin. Patients develop swollen, tender lymph glands, called buboes, and fever, headache, chills, and weakness. Bubonic plague does not spread from person to person.

A third type of plague, septicemic plague occurs when plague bacteria multiply in the blood. It does not spread from person-to-person.

Novel influenza A(H1N1) hit parts of Northern Manitoba hard in 2009, especially south of Thompson, in places like the Island Lake First Nations of Wasagamack, St. Theresa Point, Red Sucker Lake and Garden Hill.

The novel H1N1 influenza pandemic, which started in Mexico in March 2009, albeit with relatively mild symptoms in most cases, was the first pandemic since the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. It originated in Guangdong Province in southeast China, but the first record of the outbreak was in Hong Kong on July 13, 1968.

By the end of July, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. By September 1968, Hong Kong Flu reached India, Philippines, northern Australia and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California via returning Vietnam War troops but did not become widespread in North America until December 1968.

A vaccine became available in 1969 one month after the Hong Kong flu pandemic peaked in North America. About a million people died worldwide in what are described as “excess” death beyond what be expected in a normal flu season, but still only half the mortality rate of the Asian flu a decade earlier. H1N1 swine flu is the first worldwide influenza pandemic since the Hong Flu of 1968-69.

A decade earlier, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957 was an outbreak of avian-origin H2N2 influenza that originated in China in early 1956 and lasted until 1958. It originated from mutation in wild ducks combining with a pre-existing human strain. The virus was first identified in Guizhou and spread to Singapore in February 1957, reaching Hong Kong by April and the United States and Canada by June 1957. Estimates of worldwide deaths caused by the Asian Flu pandemic vary, but the World Health Organization believes it is about two million.

The Asian Flu strain later mutated through antigenic drift into H3N2, resulting in the milder Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968 and 1969.

Three subtypes of haemagglutinin (H1, H2 and H3) and two subtypes of neuraminidase (N1 and N2) are recognized among influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease, says the Public Health Agency of Canada. “Since 1977 the human H3N2 and human H1N1 influenza A subtypes have contributed to influenza illness to varying degrees each year.”

Influenza B viruses have evolved into two antigenically distinct lineages since the mid-1980s, represented by B/Yamagata/16/88-like and B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses. Viruses of the B/Yamagata lineage accounted for the majority of isolates in most countries between 1990 and 2001. Viruses belonging to the B/Victoria lineage were not identified outside of Asia between 1991 and 2001, but in March 2001 they re-emerged for the first time in a decade in North America. Since then, viruses from both the B/Yamagata and B/Victoria lineages have variously contributed to influenza illness each year.

In Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) reports:

• Influenza A(H3N2), A(H1N1) and B continue to co-circulate;
• Influenza A remains the predominant circulating type and influenza B continues to circulate at higher levels than usual;
• A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) are circulating in almost equal proportions. For the season to date, there is a slight majority (53 per cent) of A(H1N1), due to an increase in detections in recent weeks;
• The highest cumulative hospitalization rates are among children under five years of age and adults 65 years of age and older.

Although influenza A remains the predominant laboratory-confirmed circulating type, influenza B continues to circulate at higher levels than usual. In addition, while A(H3N2) remains the predominant subtype for the season to date, the proportion of A(H1N1) appears to be increasing.

Differences in the predominant circulating type/subtype by age-group are observed. The majority (90 per cent) of sentinel site hospitalizations among adults are associated with influenza A, while pediatric sentinel hospitalizations are a mix of influenza A (46 per cent and B (54 per cent).

Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes based on two surface proteins: haemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA).

Of these, the influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease over the decades are:

Three subtypes of HA (H1, H2 and H3)

Two subtypes of NA (N1 and N2)

Influenza B has evolved into two lineages:

B/Yamagata/16/88-like viruses

B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses

Over time, antigenic variation (antigenic drift) of strains occurs within an influenza A subtype or B lineage. The ever-present possibility of antigenic drift requires seasonal influenza vaccines to be reformulated annually. Antigenic drift may occur in one or more influenza virus strains.

The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 “Spanish Flu” pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that 10 to 20 per cent of those who were infected died.

2019-nCoV is a novel coronavirus, the first such outbreak in eight years.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), was first reported in Saudi Arabia, but later retrospectively identified and traced to the first known index case of MERS-CoV having occurred on the Arabian Peninsula in Jordan in April 2012; most people infected developed severe respiratory illness, including fever, cough, and shortness of breath. About three or four of every 10 patients reported with MERS-CoV died, a 30 to 40 per cent mortality rate.

Almost 10 years earlier, in November 2002, the first known case of an atypical pneumonia, later identified as Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS–CoV) occurred in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a total of 8,098 people worldwide became sick with SARS during the 2002-2003 outbreak. Of these, 774 died. Since 2004, there have not been any known cases of SARS reported anywhere in the world, but on Oct. 5, 2012, the Federal Select Agent Program, a national registry program jointly comprised of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Division of Select Agents and Toxins, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service/Agriculture Select Agent Services, published a final rule declaring SARS coronavirus a select agent. A select agent is a bacterium, virus or toxin that has the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety. The program oversees the possession, use and transfer of biological select agents and toxins, which have the potential to pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health or to animal or plant products.

2019-nCoV, which shows signs of being far worse than SARS-CoV, has resulted in lockdowns today in two Chinese cities, Wuhan and Huanggang.

Yi Guan, a Chinese virologist, who played an important role in tracing the development of SARS-CoV, said, “I’ve experienced so much and I’ve never felt scared before. But this time I’m scared,” Nathan Vanderklippe, Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, and Alexandra Li, in Beijing, reported today.

“’Conservative estimates suggest that the scale of infection may eventually be 10 times higher than SARS,’ said Dr. Guan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, told China’s Caixin media group on Thursday,” the Toronto-based paper reported. Dr. Guan spent two days in Wuhan this week.

2019-nCoV was first detected last month in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and the virus did not match any other known virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it as “an emerging, rapidly evolving situation.” Elizabeth Cohen, CNN’s senior medical correspondent, reports that a single patient, what’s called a “super spreader” or “super shredder,” has infected 14 health care workers (https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/health/wuhan-virus-super-spreader/index.html?).

The Geneva-based World Health Organization said earlier today that “now is not the time” to call a global health emergency related to a new coronavirus that has left 17 dead and more than 500 others infected in China, according to reports from the Associated Press, CTV News Channel, and other media.

The World Health Organization made the announcement in Geneva at a press conference after the second meeting this week of a WHO emergency advisory committee on the new virus.

It was “a bit too early to consider that this event is a public health emergency of international concern,” said Didier Houssin, the chair of the emergency advisory committee, noting that there remained strong divisions during discussions.

“The emergency committee members were very divided, almost 50-50,” he said. Some felt the severity of the disease and increase in cases warranted a global health emergency, he added.

“Several others say that it is too early because of limited number of cases abroad and also considering the efforts which are presently made by Chinese authorities in order to try to contain the disease,” he continued. “Declaring a public health emergency of international concern is an important step in the history of an epidemic.”

A “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) must be an “extraordinary event” that poses a global risk and requires co-ordinated international action, according to WHO. Global emergencies have been declared before, including for the Zika virus outbreak in the Americas, the swine flu and polio.

Key to the announcement were recent extraordinary precautions already in place around China. Beijing announced it would cancel public celebrations of Lunar New Year, which is typically one of the busiest travel seasons of the year.

“They’re making a very concerted effort in China to try and contain things. We’re making efforts worldwide. That’s the most important thing,” said Susy Hota, the medical director of Infection Prevention and Control at the University Health Network in Toronto, on CTV News Channel. The committee was likely attempting to strike a “balance” to avoid negative consequences, Hota added.

Global health emergencies often prompt foreign governments to restrict travel and trade to affected countries. In 2003, WHO issued travel warnings for Toronto during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which impacted the Greater Toronto Area economy at the time. Hotels in the area lost $39 million in revenue in one month, according to the Canadian Tourism Commission.

“It would be very similar for China,” said infectious disease physician Michael Gardam on CTV’s Your Morning. “People would definitely avoid the country.”

There are still a number of “unknowns” to be probed, the WHO said at the Thursday press conference, including the possible animal source of the virus, its mode of transmission and the quality of containment measures.

The WHO announcement was encouraging for Neil Rau, an infectious disease specialist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

“If they had said it was an emergency, it would mean they were more concerned,” he said, adding that the announcement underscored the fact that the committee still needs more information on two key things:

First, how deadly is the virus? “What percentage of people who get this infection actually die from it? Based on my calculations it looks like it’s only about two per cent.”

Second, how contagious is the virus? “It’s looking right now that there are no chains of transmission beyond what we call a secondary chain,” he said. “In other words, a person has it, then a person in close contact with them gets it, but it doesn’t keep transmitting person-to-person after that.”

The committee added Thursday that they would be prepared to convene again “as soon as necessary” as more information emerges.

A global health emergency likely would not have changed much in Canada, according to Gardam, much in thanks to 17 years of preparation for another outbreak after SARS.

“We learned a lot from SARS. We also went through the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. So there’s been a lot of preparation done quietly in the background,” he said.

In Canada, travellers from Wuhan are screened, others are put in isolation who have symptoms, and hospitals have stockpiled necessary equipment for an outbreak. Those procedures would continue, said Gardam. It’s possible that a broader screening process to include travellers from Beijing or China in general may be implemented, he added. But that is less about the declaration from WHO, and more about where the virus is linked to in China.

“We may start to broaden our screening criteria. As we do that, we’re going to start screening a lot more people,” he said.

On the ground, that process would have a major impact for health care workers. “That’s going to be quite disruptive for the running of our hospitals,” he said. “We’re already pretty full dealing with all the other respiratory viruses.”

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Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, versus young earth creationist Ken Ham, with some cautionary words of advice from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine

Phil Plait, who likes to be known as The Bad Astronomer, is a 51-year-old Boulder, Colorado writer, popular science blogger and a leading promoter of scientific skepticism. His PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1994 included a dissertation on SN 1987A, a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team and is a very bright guy. But he’s also the kind of science zealot that puzzles me, such as here on Slate May 12 in a post headlined “Ken Ham Really Doesn’t Understand Science”
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/12/creationist_ken_ham_tweeted_a_series_of_very_bad_claims_meant_to_be_scientific.html) when he takes on Ham, the young earth creationist behind the Answers in Genesis ministry, the $27-million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which opened  on May 28, 2007, and the “Ark Encounter,” which opens July 7, and bills itself as a “one-of-a-kind, historically themed attraction” and at 510 feet in length, “the largest timber-frame structure in the United States.”

Plait accuses Ham of refusing to listen to “anything science has to say” and propagating falsehoods.

Writes Plait: “And I know this for a fact. That’s because Ham took to Twitter recently, posting a series of tweets that are not just wrong, but completely wrong, again demonstrating not just a misunderstanding of the topic, but a deep – I daresay fundamental – lack of understanding of even the most basic facts about the science he’s trying to deny.”

OK.

As a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight, as the idiom goes.

As Pope Francis noted, speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 2014, theories such as the Big Bang and evolution are not contrary to Catholic beliefs. Nothing Plait writes here is beyond the pale theologically for Catholics. But at the same time, as fashionable as it is intellectually to do so, we don’t dismiss creationism and folks like Ken Ham out of hand either. Why is that? Could have something to so with the fact professing Christians subscribe to a religion whose origin rests on accepting on faith the truth claim the founder rose from the dead after three days. The resurrection is the lynchpin of Christianity. In Chapter 15, Verses 14 to 19, of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth, he writes of the resurrection of Jesus as being the central doctrine in Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul observed. And if Christ has not been raised, he added, God is being misrepresented because “we testified of God that he raised Christ.” Therefore, if Christ has not been raised, “your faith is futile: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

The entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, and the hope for a life after our own death.

“Credo in Deum – ‘I believe in God’ the opening words of the Apostle’s Creed.” Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who in 1996 purchased Hull’s Family Bookstores in Winnipeg, which has been in business since 1919, from the Hull family, suggested on their website in 2014: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”

If you profess to be a Christian, with the Apostles’ Creed, this is what you are assenting to:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.   I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.

While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Catholics think in terms of cosmological evolution, biological evolution and human evolution. One’s opinion concerning one of these areas does not dictate what one believes concerning others.

People usually take three basic positions on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans: special or instantaneous creation; developmental creation or theistic evolution; and non-theistic or random forces evolution.

The first theory holds that a given thing did not develop, but was instantaneously and directly created by God. The second position holds that a given thing did develop from a previous state or form, but that this process was under God’s guidance. The third claims that a thing developed due to random forces alone.

Related to the question of how the universe, life, and man arose is the question of when they arose? Those who attribute the origin of all three to special creation often hold that they arose at about the same time, perhaps 6,000- to-10,000 years ago. Those who attribute all three to non-theistic evolution have a much longer time scale. They generally hold the universe to be 10 billion to 20 billion years old, life on earth to be about four billion years old, and modern man –homo sapiens – to be about 30,000  years old.

Those who believe in varieties of developmental creation hold dates used by either or both of the other two positions. Around 13.82 billion years is the current best estimate for the age of the universe by those in the non-theistic camp. “Until recently,” says the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the solar system is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: by looking for the oldest stars; and by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.”

While there are definite parameters to the Catholic position on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans, much also concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled.

“Concerning cosmological evolution,” a tract from Catholic Answers, the El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating says, “the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing [ex nihlo]. Vatican I solemnly defined that everyone must ‘confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing’ (Canons on God the Creator of All Things, canon 5).  “The Church does not have an official position on whether the stars, nebulae, and planets we see today were created at that time or whether they developed over time (for example, in the aftermath of the Big Bang that modern cosmologists discuss). However, the Church would maintain that, if the stars and planets did develop over time, this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan, for scripture records: ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host [stars, nebulae, planets] by the breath of his mouth’ (Psalm 33:6).

“Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.

“Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that ‘the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions … take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – [but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God’ (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36), a papal encyclical promulgated on Aug. 12, 1950. “So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

“While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution,” says Catholic Answers, which received the nihil obstat (no objection) imprimatur for setting out the position of the Church “free of doctrinal or moral errors” from Bernadeane Carr, the director of the San Diego Diocesan Institute in Chula Vista, California, and the censor librorum of the Diocese of San Diego, and the imprimatur in accord with the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC) 827, which is where the Church’s norms on the authorization of books and other written materials is primarily found, and where permission to publish the work by now Bishop emeritus Robert Brom of the Diocese of San Diego was given in August 2004.

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared,” notes Catholic Answers. “The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age – that it has not existed from all eternity – but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.

“Catholics should weigh the evidence for the universe’s age by examining biblical and scientific evidence. “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth (Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).

“The contribution made by the physical sciences to examining these questions is stressed by the Catechism, which states, ‘The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers (CCC 283).

“It is outside the scope of this tract to look at the scientific evidence, but a few words need to be said about the interpretation of Genesis and its six days of creation. While there are many interpretations of these six days, they can be grouped into two basic methods of reading the account – a chronological reading and a topical reading.

“According to the chronological reading, the six days of creation should be understood to have followed each other in strict chronological order. This view is often coupled with the claim that the six days were standard 24-hour days.

“Some have denied that they were standard days on the basis that the Hebrew word used in this passage for day (yom) can sometimes mean a longer-than-24-hour period (as it does in Genesis 2:4). However, it seems clear that Genesis 1 presents the days to us as standard days. At the end of each one is a formula like, ‘And there was evening and there was morning, one day’ (Genesis. 1:5). Evening and morning are, of course, the transition points between day and night (this is the meaning of the Hebrew terms here), but periods of time longer than 24 hours are not composed of a day and a night. Genesis is presenting these days to us as 24-hour, solar days. If we are not meant to understand them as 24-hour days, it would most likely be because Genesis 1 is not meant to be understood as a literal chronological account.

“That is a possibility.” Pope Pius XII warned us, ’What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East’ (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35–36).

“This leads us to the possibility that Genesis 1 is to be given a non-chronological, topical reading. Advocates of this view point out that, in ancient literature, it was common to sequence historical material by topic, rather than in strict chronological order.

“The argument for a topical ordering notes that at the time the world was created, it had two problems – it was “formless and empty’ (Genesis 1:2). In the first three days of creation, God solves the formlessness problem by structuring different aspects of the environment.

“On day one he separates day from night; on day two he separates the waters below (oceans) from the waters above (clouds), with the sky in between; and on day three he separates the waters below from each other, creating dry land. Thus the world has been given form.

“But it is still empty, so on the second three days God solves the world’s emptiness problem by giving occupants to each of the three realms he ordered on the previous three days. Thus, having solved the problems of formlessness and emptiness, the task he set for himself, God’s work is complete and he rests on the seventh day.

“The argument is that all of this is real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.

“Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work – things God really did.

“The Catechism explains that “scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337), but “nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun (CCC 338).

“It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use.

“It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Genesis. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).

“In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: ‘When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own’ (Humani Generis 37).

“The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states ‘The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390).

“The Catholic Church has always taught that ‘no real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits … If nevertheless there is a disagreement … it should be remembered that the sacred writers, or more truly ‘the Spirit of God who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men such truths (as the inner structure of visible objects) which do not help anyone to salvation’; and that, for this reason, rather than trying to provide a scientific exposition of nature, they sometimes describe and treat these matters either in a somewhat figurative language or as the common manner of speech those times required, and indeed still requires nowadays in everyday life, even amongst most learned people’ (Providentissimus Deus 18), Pope Leo XIII’s papal encyclical on the study of holy scripture, promulgated on Nov. 18, 1893.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved in June 1992 by now St. Pope John Paul II puts it, “Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are” (CCC 159). The Catholic Church has no fear of science or scientific discovery.”

So while I have no problem with Plait’s criticism of Ham here, I think his promotion of scientific skepticism unfortunately shades into stereotypically characterizing creationists such as Ham as nothing more than no-nothing, redneck Hillbillies. Ham, 64, a former high school science teacher, who lives in Kentucky, was born in Australia, and first rejected what he termed “molecules-to-man evolution” during high school, and became influenced by American young earth creationists John Clement Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry Madison Morris’ 1961 book The Genesis Flood, while studying in college in 1974. Ham holds a Bachelor of Applied Science undergraduate degree from Queensland Institute of Technology, and a diploma in education from the University of Queensland, which allowed him to teach high school science for five years in Australia during the mid-to-late 1970s. He left his position in 1979 and co-founded what was to be later known as the Creation Science Foundation (CSF).

Then there is a guy like Jim Mason, a Lakefield, Ontario area retired nuclear physicist, who lectures on the evangelical church circuit as a young earth creationist with Creation Ministries International (CMI)-Canada. I’ve written a couple of newspaper stories and bog posts about Mason since April 2012, including most recently “Bear witness: The faith journey of electronic warfare experimental nuclear physicist Jim Mason to born-again Christian and young earth creationist” in April 2015 at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/bear-witness-the-faith-journey-of-electronic-warfare-experimental-nuclear-physicist-jim-mason-to-born-again-christian-and-young-earth-creationist/

I’ve heard Mason, who has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and who spent 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems, speak twice in the last several years, and he just doesn’t fit the no-nothing country bumpkin rube stereotype Plait seems so ready to buy into when it comes to young earth creationists. For the first 20 years of his career, Mason developed passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason grew up in a mainline Protestant church but left Christianity behind after taking Geology 101 in the first year of his bachelor of science engineering physics undergraduate program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He resumed his faith journey in mainstream Protestantism in his late 30s, mainly because he and his wife, Rosemary, thought it would be good for their two young girls.

He was almost 40 when he attended an evangelical church in response to the invitation of a friend and neighbour and subsequently became a born-again Christian.

Interestingly, even as an evangelical at first, Mason continued to believe in the theory of evolution, including the evolutionary account of origins and the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution, which posits that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity, the theory’s proponents argue, with modern measurements placing this moment at approximately 13.82 billion years ago, which they thus consider the age of the universe.

It wasn’t until he attended a weekend seminar conducted by young earth creation scientists that Mason came to believe that science and scripture were completely coherent and soon became concerned about how evolution is used as a means to avoid confronting the claims of Jesus, he said.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection. Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence.

Mason’s field of expertise, according to a July 2011 interview he did for Creation Ministries International with Jonathan Sarfati, an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist, who is a fellow CMI scientist and co-editor of the quarterly Creation magazine, which can be found online at http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist, includes radiometric dating techniques, which measure the ratio of the radioactive parent element to the stable daughter element in, say, a sample of rock today, inferring the age through calculations that typically give wildly erroneous ages, Mason argues, saying carbon dating, properly understood, supports young earth creationism.

After completing his PhD studies at McMaster University, Mason spent a year teaching in the faculty of the physics department at the University of Windsor in southwestern Ontario.

He then spent the next 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems. The first 20 years he spent developing passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason argues for a literal interpretation of the 50-chapter Book of Genesis, saying the first 11 chapters are “foundational.” According to Mason, the so-called “long ages” and Big Bang theory, which explains the origin and evolution of the universe using the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological concordance model, estimating the age of the universe as being 12 to 14 billion years old, cannot be reconciled with the Bible as “Adam and Eve disappear, original sin disappears, death through sin disappears, the need for a Saviour disappears and indeed, in the end, salvation and eternal life disappear.”

As I said earlier, as a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight. Much concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled. Catholics are free to believe in creationism and a young earth; they are also equally free to believe in an old earth, keeping in mind, one would hope, the centuries-old cautions of two doctors of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

“One should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous… irrisio infidelium [which translates to the mockery of the infidels], the scorn of the unbelievers,“ said St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century. Likewise, in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in A Commentary on Genesis: Two Books against the Manichees, unfinished works he wrote between 388 and 418 Anno Domini (AD):

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

“The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men … Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

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