‘Tis the Christmas season when we dare to mingle publicly for the first time since the novel coronavirus – COVID-19 – arrived New Year’s Eve 2019

Four very long years, indeed.

Now, make mine, a “sinful servant” of the Church Militant on Earth, a Smoking Bishop, a mulled wine wassail, this festive season at university and church potlucks. Even an eggnog will do.  O come, O come, O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us).

We now work and socialize for the most part without masks. But the sensible among us (apparently not a particularly large cohort, with only about 15.4 per cent of Manitobans, as a cumulative percentage of the population, vaccinated as recommended by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), an external advisory body that provides the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) with independent, ongoing and timely medical, scientific, and public health advice in response to questions from PHAC relating to immunization) still get our latest COVID-19 updated vaccinations. I had my seventh shot on Oct. 25. A couple of days later, I learned of the new COVID-19 subvariant HV.1. Hard to know these days exactly how many new COVID-19 infections the new subvariant is responsible for, but a reasonable guess is at least somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent – and soon, if not already, probably the majority of new COVID-19 infections in Canada.

Take heart though. The Justinian Plague erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of 541 AD and went through 18 waves until 750 AD.

 Pandemics kind of fade away, they don’t really end. And even the fade-away is far from a straight-line exit back from a pandemic world to a pandemic-free world. COVID-19 is here to stay for the foreseeable future, manufacturing new subvariants along the way. We have been fortunate so far that while many of the subvariants that have emerged over the last four years have been more contagious than their predecessors, they have not been more deadly. There is no guarantee that pattern will continue.

“The world has emerged from the COVID pandemic, but it’s still under its tremendous impacts.  The global economy is recovering, but its momentum remains sluggish.  Industrial and supply chains are still under the threat of interruption,” U.S. President Joe Biden told President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China Nov. 15 before their bilateral meeting in Woodside, California.

Biden has it about right.

While COVID-19 is still a global pandemic, it is no longer a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an extraordinary event, which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a co-ordinated international response After a five hour meeting in Geneva – its 15th regarding COVID-19 – the WHO’s International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) Emergency Committee recommended on May 4 “that it is time to transition to long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic” and advised “the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic … is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, who has the final say, concurred with the committee.

“While we’re not in the crisis mode, we can’t let our guard down,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead and head of its program on emerging diseases. She added that the disease and the coronavirus that causes it are “here to stay.”

The COVID-19 worldwide death toll as of Dec. 6 stood at 6,985,964 deaths, the WHO reports. The United States had seen 1,144,877 COVID-19 deaths by Dec. 6, and in Canada the number is around 53,000 deaths.

On May 11, the United States ended its own federal public health emergency declaration, which dated back to Jan. 31, 2020.

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.

The the most chilling thing that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter March 21, 2020. 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.

It was ProMED (Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases)-mail, a program operated by the Boston-based International Society for Infectious Diseases, which served as the early warning disease surveillance network that alerted the world to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in an alert issued one minute before midnight China Standard Time (CST) on Dec. 30, 2019. 

What does living in a world where the COVID-19 pandemic continues but is no longer considered by the WHO as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern look like?

Different than the world up to 2020, but also closer to that not-so-long-ago world than we were for most of 2020, 2021 and 2022. I’ve been to two in-person meetings so far this week; that would have been questionable and unlikely last year, and unthinkable and probably illegal in many places in 2020 and 2021.

Last Saturday, we were out at “A Community Christmas Evening,” sponsored by the Thompson Seniors Resource Council, and formerly known as the Old Fashioned Christmas Concert.  It was my first visit inside the Letkemann Theatre at R.D. Parker Collegiate since before the pandemic in 2019. Two weeks earlier, we were out at the Thompson Kin Club Fall Harvest Party dinner.

So far more socializing, mask-free and fully vaccinated (epidemiologists really must shake their heads at human behaviour, I know), than at any point since the fall of 2019. All, of course, with an eye turned to my Facebook page, where I can read friends daily posts about getting COVID-19 recently for either the first or umpteenth time, depending, on what their … what … luck has been? 

That’s the kind of fall and festive season it has been here in Thompson, Manitoba in 2023. Lots of public socializing, vaxxed but unmasked, with one eye on the ever-spinning COVID-19 roulette wheel never too far in the background. 

It it is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

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Did either CBS Sports’ Grant Wahl or photojournalist Khalid al-Misslam die of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) at the FIFA World Cup tournament in Doha, Qatar?

Two journalists, CBS Sports‘ Grant Wahl, 48, who collapsed and died while working the Netherlands-Argentina match at the Lusail Iconic Stadium Friday, and Khalid al-Misslam, a photojournalist for local sports outlet Al Kass TV, who collapsed and died hours later on Saturday, the Doha-based Gulf Times reported, have died so far on the job covering the FIFA World Cup tournament in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Khalid al-Misslam’s actual date of birth is not known. However, it’s believed he was in his 30s.

How they both died is still unclear but questions are being asked about Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), a 10-year-old coronavirus far more deadly than COVID-19. There are also various conspiracy theories afoot.

Eric Wahl announced his brother’s death on Instagram and made an emotional plea for help. 

“I am gay. I am the reason he wore the rainbow shirt to the World Cup,” Eric Wahl said. “My brother was healthy. He told me he received death threats. I do not believe my brother just died. I believe he was killed, and I’m just begging for any help.” 

As for me, in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary, I counsel that “Occam’s razor,” or the law of parsimony should apply. Namely, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms and the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected when there’s two or more competing theories and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known.

Which means, while I approach conspiracy theories with an abundance of caution, I don’t automatically rule them in or out. Same for coronaviruses.

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.

In total, 27 countries have reported cases since 2012, leading to 858 known deaths due to the infection and related complications, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

The origins of the virus are not fully understood but according to the analysis of different virus genomes it is believed that it may have originated in bats and later transmitted to camels at some point in the distant past, the WHO says.

Human-to-human transmission is possible, but only a few such transmissions have been found among family members living in the same household. In health care settings, however, human-to-human transmission appears to be more frequent.

Human coronaviruses were first isolated in the mid-1960s from volunteers at the Medical Research Council Common Cold Unit, a former military hospital at Harnham Down, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, England. The family Coronaviridae is a group of RNA-containing viruses that are associated with respiratory infections in humans and animals, including pigs, cats, dogs, mice and chickens. The group was so named because of the crown-like projections on its surfaces. Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense RNA genome and with a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry.

The first description of human coronavirus – a family of viruses that now includes SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the current COVID-19 pandemic – was published in The BMJ in 1965.

The research, led by virologist David Tyrrell at the Common Cold Unit, involved studying nasal washings from volunteers. The researchers found that they could grow several viruses associated with the common cold, but not all of them. One such sample, referred to as B814, turned out to be what we now know as a coronavirus.

Using the original B814 nasal swab from a “boy with a typical common cold in 1960,” the team obtained more secretions from volunteers who “developed colds after intranasal inoculation of the original specimen.”

The researchers wrote, “In over 20 experiments washings were tested by inoculation into a variety of test systems for known viruses. These should have revealed the presence of influenza A, B, or C, pars-influenza 1, 2, 3, or 4, respiratory syncytial viruses, herpes simplex virus, and adenoviruses, cytopathic enteroviruses and rhinoviruses, or mycoplasma, Mycoplasmapneumoniae. None was found.”

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Bus to the Stars: Reading sci-fi in the 1970s down the highway

While I don’t read as much science fiction today as I once did, recalling what I did read more than 40 years ago reminded me today how much of it at the time was read on intercity buses.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction, I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi).

Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then. I have become a fan in more recent years of perhaps more post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, such as New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and 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.”

There are limits, however, to my fandom for post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction in popular culture, whether it is in a visual or written context. When Black Mirror was first aired on Netflix, I found it dark but cleverly well written. Now, I find virtually everything on Netflix dystopian, and not all of it well written. For that matter, I find much of CNN and even The Guardian real-life dystopian. Thanks for that Donald John Trump and the global COVID-19 pandemic rapidly closing in on the three-year mark.

I read Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven in a paperback edition much like the one shown here is shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on an old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back to Peterborough weekend trip. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

“When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed “The Hammer” by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.

‘The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet’s nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.

‘Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the United States that it is not the target.”

So, a 1977 plot, not so far from today’s real-life headlines.

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target less than a month ago on Sept. 26, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.

“As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered,” the agency said.

Pournelle, who died in 2017, was born in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He was a polymath: a scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. While Pournelle was great at writing or co-writing page-turners like Lucifer’s Hammer, he is also known as the first writer to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. Jerry was an early adopter.

Sometimes science and science fiction mingle easily enough in my mind.

Looking at images from the James Webb Space Telescope capturing highly detailed snapshots of the iconic Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth, which show a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars, is remarkable, but the name Pillars of Creation immediately took me back in my mind to a another intercity bus ride; this one a Greyhound bus ride out of Blaine, Washington in the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the Summer of 1979, where I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant 1953 science fiction novel Childhood’s End where Rashaverak, an Overlord, refers to “Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn.”

Aside from reading Childhood’s End on that bus trip, I remember having to changes buses in Spokane, Washington and being awoke in the middle of the night, with my body draped rather uncomfortably across several very hard plastic seats on the second floor of the bus terminal, as Washington State troopers made a gunpoint arrest of a man opening a rental locker on the mezzanine below.

While I’m not sure how much of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven was read on a bus (perhaps some of it was on the old Trent Express run from downtown Peterborough to Trent’s Nassau Campus), the book left a big impression on me in the late 1970s.

I still remember reading, “Dr. William Haber’s office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower in Portland, Oregon and didn’t have a view of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.

“That doesn’t last long. Mount Hood is the very first thing that we see transformed by George’s power: it gets changed into a horse. And that’s just the first of its transformations.

“Later, when he’s become more powerful and famous, Haber gets a beautiful view of Mount Hood through a fancy window instead of just a picture. When the alien invasion begins, Mt. Hood wakes up and spouts fire that burns the surrounding forest. It’s not until George stops Dr. Haber’s dream that the mountain goes to sleep again.”

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Celebrating our Maple Leaf flag on its 57th anniversary and in the third COVID-19 pandemic winter of our discontent

Canada’s flag, the Maple Leaf, was raised for the first time on Parliament Hill on February 15, 1965 – and that was 57 years ago today. Xavier Gélinas, curator of political history at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, notes.

The Canadian Flag or the Maple Leaf Flag, was decided by a vote. A joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons voted for the present flag back in 1964. The final design was taken up by Parliament and approved by a royal proclamation after months of debate.

“It was an epic battle, and entire chapters and books have been written about the process. Not so much about the actual flag itself or the design of the flag, but about the very torturous process in which the design was finally reached,” said Gélinas. “The final act of the drama takes place between the Spring of 1964 and the last days of December 1964. The idea that Canada’s truly distinct national flag had been brewing and simmering with various intensities of heat since the early 20th century,” he added.

“Canada was flying the Red Ensign in 1870,” Canadian Military Family Magazine (https://www.cmfmag.ca/history/february-15th-marks-56th-anniversary-of-our-maple-leaf/) noted last year. “In 1892, merchant vessels registered in Canada flew the Red Ensign with only the four original provinces represented.” Canadian Military Family Magazine, based in Petawawa, Ont., is not officially affiliated with the Canadian Armed Forces or Department of National Defence. “In 1925, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King proposed the idea of a new national flag. He backed off after his proposal was met with protest against any attack on the Union Jack. He tried and failed again in 1945 with a joint committee of the Senate and House of Commons.”

The 1960’s-era Canada that gave birth to the Maple Leaf flag – a flag of our very own for the first time – is often nostalgically remembered as a time of incredible optimism and possibility, as it was in much of the world. And surely it was. We had our Centennial in 1967 and the International and Universal Exposition, or Expo 67, as it was commonly known, a Category One World’s Fair general exhibition, held in Montréal from April 27 to Oct. 29, 1967. It is considered to be the most successful World’s Fair of the 20th century with the most attendees to that date and 62 nations participating. It also set the single-day attendance record for a world’s fair, with 569,500 visitors on its third day.

Lest we forget, we also had in that same decade and into 1970 the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). Writing in 2013 in the Canadian Encyclopedia, now known as Historica Canada, Marc Laurendeau and Andrew McIntosh noted  FLQ members – or felquistes – were responsible for more than 200 bombings and dozens of robberies between 1963 and 1970 that left six people dead (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/front-de-liberation-du-quebec).

The FLQ was founded in March 1963 by two Québecers, Raymond Villeneuve and Gabriel Hudon, and a Belgian, Georges Schoeters, who had fought with the resistance during the Second World War. “Québec was undergoing a period of profound political, social and cultural change at that time,” wrote Laurendeau and McIntosh, as well as rising unemployment. Members of the FLQ or felquistes – were influenced by anti-colonial and Communist movements in other parts of the world, particularly Algeria and Cuba. They shared a conviction that must liberate itself from anglophone domination and capitalism through armed struggle. Their objective was to destroy the influence of English colonialism by attacking its symbols. They hoped that Québecers would follow their example and overthrow their colonial oppressors.”

Their actions culminated in the 1970 kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Québec cabinet Labour Minister Pierre Laporte, in what became known as the October Crisis.

The escalation of FLQ activities prompted Québec Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa to ask Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to intervene. Trudeau, in turn, deployed the Armed Forces in Québec and Ottawa and invoked the 1914 War Measures Act – the first and only time it was ever used in a domestic crisis in Canada. Nearly 500 people were arrested without charge, including 150 suspected FLQ members.

Canada survived what appeared to many observers in 1970 to be an existential crisis. Whether the federal government was justified in invoking the now-repealed War Measures Act was controversial at the time and historians to this day still debate whether Pierre Trudeau did the right thing. Justin Trudeau invoking yesterday for the first time ever the 1988 Emergencies Act to deal with the trucker blockade and occupation of Ottawa, during this the third COVID-19 pandemic winter of our discontent, is also, of course, controversial. The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act 34 years ago, was passed by in 1988 under the Progressive Conservative government led by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada, the land of back bacon, pickerel, the Maple Leaf, beaver, moose and the loon, was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream, and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

My land. My country. My Canada. My flag.

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Spanish Flu on the cusp of no longer being the reference point for modern pandemic plague

Some 18 months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, the world stands on the cusp of it replacing the Spanish Flu influenza pandemic of January 1918 to December 1920 as the reference point – the benchmark, as it were – for measuring modern pandemic plague. That will occur very shortly as the United States crosses the threshold of 675,000 COVID-19 deaths in what is now the novel coronavirus’ fourth wave there; a toll that will then exceed that of the Spanish Flu of a century ago in America.

All pretty remarkable, since the name COVID-19 didn’t exist prior to Feb. 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization named what had been provisionally known as Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV and first reported from Wuhan, China on Dec. 31, 2019. COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

It is important to note the “in America” qualification. As Laura Spinney writes in her very timely 2017 book, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, our picture of the Spanish Flu pandemic, beginning in the waning last months of the First World War, just over a 100 years ago, is very much a reflection of the North American and European influenza pandemic perspective and experience, rather than that of say, India, South Africa or Iran, although the Spanish Flu, named not for its country of origin but rather because wartime press censorship was more relaxed in neutral Spain than either the Central Powers or Allied Powers in 1918, allowing for more early news coverage of the illness, which within months swept the world, much like COVID-19.

While some 675,000 Americans died over three years between January 1918 and December 1920 during the three waves of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the country’s population was 103.2 million. Today, the population of the United States is more than 331 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today.

Also, while global death toll estimates for the Spanish Flu pandemic are speculative to some extent, it is generally accepted it killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. COVID-19’s global death toll stands at about 4.7 million.


There are, of course, all kinds of similarities – and differences – between COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu pandemic: They are not the same type of virus; the former is a coronavirus, the latter an influenza virus. But compulsory masking as a public health-driven non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) has been similarly divisive in societies in both pandemics.

The rolling real time daily death count on the online COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore functions as our equivalent of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” circa 1947, and the clock itself, set at 100 seconds before midnight last Jan. 27, is being profoundly influenced by COVID-19.

“Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet,” writes John Mecklin, the editor-in-chief. “The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.”

The Center for Systems Science and Engineering, in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University’s Latrobe Hall in Baltimore, launched its a tracking map website with an online dashboard for tracking the worldwide spread of what was then known as the Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as it appeared to be spreading around the globe in real-time in January 2020.

Lauren Gardner, a civil engineering professor and CSSE’s co-director, spearheaded the effort to launch the mapping website. The site displays statistics about deaths and confirmed cases of COVID-19 across a worldwide map.

“We built this dashboard because we think it is important for the public to have an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds with transparent data sources,” Gardner said when Hopkins launches it last year. “For the research community, this data will become more valuable as we continue to collect it over time.”

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Humbled by nature: 600,000 dead in U.S from COVID-19

“Fully vaccinated.”

Today’s the day. Wednesday, June 16, 2021. Two weeks have passed since my second dose of Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was administered.

Our parents generation had V-E Day or Victory in Europe Day, the public holiday celebrated on May 8, 1945 to mark the end of the Second World War in Europe, while V-J Day or Victory over Japan Day was celebrated Sept. 2, 1945 in the United States, Aug. 14-15, elsewhere by our Allies. But as he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad Gita ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Our generation now has its own individual V-Day: Vaccinated against COVID-19 Day.

Some 675,000 Americans died over three years between January 1918 and December 1920 during the three waves of the Spanish Flu pandemic when the country’s population was 103.2 million. Today, the population of the United States is more than 331 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today.

COVID-19 is the second-deadliest plague in modern history, having killed as of June 15 more than 600,000 people in the United States in slightly more than 16 months. The COVID-19 death toll stands at about 3.8 million case fatalities worldwide. It’s unusual clinical course of unpredictability in patients, ranging from an asymptomatic infection the person isn’t even aware of to death in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU), often with no good explanation available even after age and comorbidities are accounted for, makes it all the more terrifying. Some diseases are so deadly death is almost certain. COVID-19 is not like that. Rather it is like playing a macabre viral version of Russian Roulette. Maybe. Maybe not.

At the same time, effective messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) and viral vector vaccines offering full protection against COVID-19, some of which were relegated to the scientific research backburner since their initial discoveries and on-again, off-again preliminary work in the mid-1980s, were brought to fruition in warp speed in 10 months rather than the normal 10 years it takes to bring a new vaccine to market. Despite the COVID-19 vaccines impressive efficacy and good safety record to date, I’m under no illusion that we the vaccinated are not all part of a population level experiment. We surely are. Not something I would have said in advance I’d be anxious to sign up for, but as the Scottish philosopher James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quotes in 1777 the latter to say: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

And, of course, as the last 18 months have unfolded, all of this has been accompanied by an “infodemic” of social media and real life (if there is still that separation for some) sometimes accidental misinformation but more often deliberate disinformation from modern-day armchair Barbarian Visigoths, who revel in the propagation of their anti-mask and/or anti-vax propaganda. Until they die of COVID-19. It’s not like we didn’t have a heads-up of what to expect on this front in the battle against COVID-19. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioural regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.

All pretty remarkable, since the name COVID-19 didn’t exist prior to Feb. 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) named what had been provisionally known as Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV and first reported from Wuhan, China on Dec. 31, 2019. In terms akin to chaos theory, think of it perhaps as the as the Wuhan butterfly effect, regardless of whether the origins of COVID-19 should someday prove to be natural or the result of a gain-function experiment gone awry resulting in an accidental lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 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 what would become known as 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.

Human beings live in the realm of nature, they are constantly surrounded by it and interact with it. Man is part of nature, a humbling reminder for all of us to what we so quickly forget 15 minutes after the last pandemic ends. Until the next one begins.

The first time I wrote on what would soon be characterized as the current pandemic was on Jan. 23, 2020. A week later on Jan. 30, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian biologist, following the recommendations of the WHO Emergency Committee, declared that the Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). On March 11, the WHO elevated the viral outbreak to the status of full-blown pandemic.

The headline to my Jan. 23, 2020 post wondered, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ (The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ | soundingsjohnbarker (wordpress.com) In a matter of weeks, there was no question the question mark could be dropped and the sentence turned into a categorical statement; it was indeed the fire this time, and the “big one” had arrived as an unwanted New Year’s Eve 2019 guest.

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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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A Year of COVID-19: Missing friends, missing the Hub and Strand Theatre in Thompson, Manitoba

Last night, I was wistful for a very long moment for the pre-pandemic, pre-COVID-19 world, as I spotted the Hub restaurant and the Strand Theatre straight ahead of me downtown on Churchill Drive here in Thompson, Manitoba. After almost a year of takeout cuisine, which I am indeed grateful for, the Hub’s dining room, and perhaps a very rare steak sandwich to enjoy in the company of friends, and/or a movie next-door at the Strand Theatre, reminded me of life before Code Red.

For the last year, I have like many, many other people around the world, focused primarily on the present and putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, one day at a time. It can be exhausting. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end.

One of the most chilling things, 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.

On 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).

I’ve read, thought and written a fair bit about pandemics and the like over the last 30 years. More than a decade ago on Dec. 4, 2010, when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I penned a story headlined, “Potential influenza pandemic on Garden Hill First Nation, MKO says: Surrounding Island Lake First Nations may also be under the flu gun.”

I wrote: “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 the North American 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.

“Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes on the basis of two surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

“Three subtypes of hemagglutinin (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. It is not yet known if this pattern will be altered by the emergence of the 2009 pandemic virus [A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)]. Immunity to the H and N antigens reduces the likelihood of infection and lessens the severity of disease if infection occurs.”

“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.

“The antigenic characteristics of current and emerging influenza virus strains include A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like, A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like and B/Brisbane/60/2008 (Victoria lineage)-like antigens.”

On Nov. 1, 2019, just before a likely, but not yet conclusively proven, viral species jump to humans, in or around Wuhan, China, that likely sparked  the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as COVID-19, I posted on Facebook on 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 2018’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus that circulated in Canada.

While influenza isn’t a coronavirus, some of the arguments I made on Oct. 16, 2013 in a editorial for the Thompson Citizen, might sound somewhat  familiar today, “Even if the influenza vaccine only prevents infection 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the time, in the best of cases – meaning that of every 10 people who would have gotten the flu without the shot, three or four still will – flu shots have proven to be effective in slowing the virus down and helping to limit the spread of pandemics,” I wrote. “On the balance of probabilities, you hopefully are helping yourself in getting a flu shot, but you’re almost certainly in any event being altruistic in helping the rest of us in the general population by slowing the spread the virus down.”

I’ve also blogged in soundingsjohnbarker on such esoteric topics as blog posts on “Black Death: Not so bad?” in 2014, “What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?” in 2015, “A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis” in 2018 and, more recently, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” in 2020

Thirty years ago, I wrote a third-year history essay at Trent way back in 1991 about ergot poisoning, from a fungus that commonly forms in wheat, rye, and other grains, and is now known to cause such symptoms as convulsions, vomiting, and hallucinations, possibly triggering the events leading to the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. In 2006. I read Laurie Garrett’s landmark 1994 book, “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.”

In 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan to the Thompson Public Library for me 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.

Four years later, I borrowed an audio book version from University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus of “Station Eleven”, New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel published in 2014, and centred around the fictional “Georgia Flu” pandemic, which is so lethal, and named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed and “all countries and borders have vanished.”

In 2017, also from the UCN library here, I borrowed “The Plague”, a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story from the point of view of an unknown narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran.

I spent Mondays between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a comfortable orange chair on the third floor of UCN during the fall of 2019 reading John M. Barry’s book “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. Barry is an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

So, yes, I had some idea of what a pandemic might look like when it arrived a year ago and it did turn out indeed to be the fire this time.

Knowing might be good preparation. But you can only know so much. Nowhere had I read in advance to get ready for a pandemic where perhaps one out of every three carriers might be showing no symptoms and feeling just fine while shedding the virus and transmitting a disease, with multiple variants now, and that varies so much in its effects from person to person. The Chimera, according to Greek mythology, was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature. COVID-19 is its progeny.

And no matter how much you know, it’s not the same as the lived experience of a pandemic where “mask up” is the imperative public health-ordered emergency non-pharmaceutical intervention that taken to brain and heart, along with six-foot physical so-called “social distancing” and restricted travel, might just some day mean dinner at the Hub and a movie at the Strand Theatre again.

That might seem like a distant hope at the moment, and I suppose it is, but I am mindful that individual actions can collectively matter, and instead of the “twindemic” of influenza and COVID-19 public health epidemiologists feared last spring for this winter, the start of the annual flu season in the Northern Hemisphere has been very quiet to date, much like it was in the Southern Hemisphere during their winter season last year during our summer. Since September, the CDC “FluView” – its weekly report on influenza surveillance – has shown all 50 states in shades of green and chartreuse, indicating “minimal” or “low” flu activity. Normally by December, at least some states are painted in oranges and reds for “moderate” and “high.”

In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June through August, widespread mask-wearing, rigorous lockdowns and other precautions against Covid-19 transmission drove the flu down to record-low levels. Southern Hemisphere countries help “reseed” influenza viruses in the Northern Hemisphere each year, so a good flu season here year “Down Under” often, not always, means we can reasonably hope for one in the Northern Hemisphere.

And some of it is just seasonal variability. Some flu seasons are worse than others. Flu viruses mutate far more than coronaviruses through antigenic drift, hence the need for a different combination flu vaccine every year.

Since last February, COVID-19 has killed more than 430,000 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.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

United States: Behind the scenes and Continuity of Government (COG)

When U.S. President Donald Trump boarded Marine One yesterday for the short helicopter airlift from the White House to be admitted as a COVID-19 patient at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, he was accompanied by not only his smartphone to stay au courant on Twitter,  but something almost as important: the so-called “nuclear football.” The president is always followed by the briefcase and a military aide wherever he goes. It has joined every president when they are away from the White House since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The football is carried to allow the president to be able to launch a nuclear strike at short notice if needed.

It originally got its name from an Eisenhower-era nuclear war plan, code-named ‘Dropkick’, and was created to make sure a nuclear war option was always near the president. There are three of the bags in total, one is with the president, one with the vice president and the other kept safe in the White House.

In a story in today’s Daily Mail from London (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8801071/President-Trump-airlifted-hospital-COVID-treatment-nuclear-football.html), Tom Pyman, a U.K. online news reporter, writes, “The ‘ball carriers’ who look after the cases also carry Beretta pistols and have to shoot anyone who tries to take it.

“Little is made public about what is inside the cases and it regularly changes.

“But a small antenna that pokes out the top of the case means it likely contains a satellite phone.

“There is also a 75-page book that informs the president of his options for a nuclear strike, with another highlighting places he could hide during a nuclear war.

“A ten-page folder on contact details for military leaders and broadcasters sits next to a sealed laminated card known as the Biscuit. 

“This looks like a large credit card and shows letters and numbers, with the president having to memorize where on it sits the Gold Code.

“In the event of a nuclear strike, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces will say the code down the phone to the National Military Command Centre in Washington D.C.

“Despite the bags being kept at the White House when the president is in residence, it is widely thought he carries a card with the launch code on him all the time.”

While there is no indication the nuclear football came into play yesterday, one might reasonably expect Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) were perhaps sailing somewhere off Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego, with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) personnel at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Strategic Command, (USSTRATCOM), the global warfighting command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, on high alert. 

 In the event of a national emergency, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) says, a series of seven different alert conditions (LERTCONs) can be called. The seven LERTCONs are broken down into five defence conditions (DEFCONs) and two emergency conditions (EMERGCONs). Defence readiness conditions (DEFCONs) describe progressive alert postures primarily for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCONs are graduated to match situations of varying military severity, and are numbered 5,4,3,2, and 1 as appropriate. DEFCONs are phased increases in combat readiness. In general terms, these are descriptions of DEFCONs:

EMERGCONs are national level reactions in response to ICBM (missiles in the air) attack. By definition, other forces go to DEFCON 1 during an EMERGCON.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was placed on DEFCON 2 for the first time in history, while the rest of U.S. military commands (with the exception of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe) went on DEFCON 3. On Oct. 22, 1962 SAC responded by establishing Defense Condition Three (DEFCON III), and ordered Boeing B-52 Stratofortress long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bombers on airborne alert. Tension grew and the next day SAC declared DEFCON II, a heightened state of alert, ready to strike targets within the Soviet Union.

Alert conditions and the nuclear football are but two component in what is known as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, which establishes defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in the case of a catastrophic event.

As anyone who watched the fictional series Designated Survivor on ABC or Netflix between 2016 and 2019 probably knows, the real line of presidential succession is, in fact, the vice president, speaker of the House of Representatives, speaker of the Senate, and members of the cabinet in order of precedence, who are all killed when a bomb blows up the Capitol during the president’s state of the union address. All but one that is. Thomas Kirkman (played by Kiefer Sutherland), the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is 11th in line of succession and off-site for the evening as the “designated survivor” for just such contingencies.

Kirkman is rushed by the Secret Service to the White House where they’re met by a D.C. federal appellate judge who swears him in as president in the lobby, and actually gets the oath of office to be repeated by Kirkman correct, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, saying, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States (https://www.imdb.com/video/vi24950809?fbclid=IwAR0Pk-GtUPK0dRe41x4GEMiHjOlJ5e_O8IngEcU5dLT9dKF6KaHujhYFEYk).

On Nov. 23, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

President Kennedy died a short time later.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, and who was riding in a car behind President Kennedy, was sworn in a short time later as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas using a Roman Catholic missal mistakenly taken by Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, as O’Brien supposedly thought the missal was a Bible. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a  Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

As the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, became the only woman in U.S. history to date to have sworn in a United States president (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/on-nov-22-1963-lbj-was-sworn-in-by-judge-sarah-tilghman-hughes-a-federal-judge-and-the-only-woman-in-u-s-history-to-have-sworn-in-a-united-states-president-while-mistakenly-using-a-roman-catholic/), a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States. Wrong book, wrong oath, however. Hughes explained five years later in 1968 that she got the oath wrong, as she mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

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Philadelphia: The greatest social distancing debacle in modern pandemic history occurred 102 years ago today in the City of Brotherly Love on Sept. 28, 1918

Philadelphia.

The greatest social distancing debacle in modern pandemic history occurred 102 years ago today in the City of Brotherly Love on Sept, 28, 1918. That was the day Philadelphia public health director Wilmer Krusen allowed the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, “cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles,” to proceed, as the second and far more deadly wave than the first of the Spanish Flu pandemic rolled out across the American landscape. Within a week of the rally an estimated 45,000 Philadelphians were afflicted with influenza.

Some 675,000 Americans would die in the pandemic, while the worldwide death toll was probably somewhere around 50 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today. How bad were things in September and October 1918, during the waning weeks of the First World War, in the United States? Some frontline public health scientists by October and November thought the United States on the verge of an extinction-level event. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth within a matter of a few more weeks,” wrote Victor Vaughan,  a former president of the American Medical Association (AMA), and head of the U.S. Army’s division of communicable diseases, as he sat in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army in October 1918.

John M. Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, to my mind anyway, remains the definitive historical work to date in the field. Barry also serves as an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

Wilmer Krusen’s actions – and inaction – as the case may be, in allowing the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, to proceed has been looked at again in recent years.

Both the Smithsonian magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/philadelphia-threw-wwi-parade-gave-thousands-onlookers-flu-180970372/) and Quartz (https://qz.com/1754657/the-1918-parade-that-spread-death-in-philadelphia/) have published interesting pieces over the last couple of years on what happened in Philly in September and October 1918.

But what really struck me is the very, very rapid breakdown in public order, Barry chronicles, despite official protestations to the contrary.

Nurses, who were right on the front lines, and truly, truly heroic in the earliest stages of the pandemic, in many cases soon just stopped coming to work. Many, of course, were too sick to, gravely ill or dying themselves, but many who were still well stopped coming to work out of fear of becoming infected themselves, and perhaps also infecting their loved ones. The same happened across many different public offices.

Government in many cases, and particularly at the municipal level, pretty much ceased to function – and that happened very, very quickly. State and provincial governments weren’t much better in many cases, and federal governments were, to be very charitable, slow off the mark. The international institutions we have now, for the most didn’t exist in 1918.

Philadelphia is one of Barry’s chilling examples that has stayed with me. Things were so bad there in the fall of 1918, when the Spanish Flu pandemic arrived in the city, that a group of volunteer women, holding no official titles or offices, who lived on Philadelphia’s “Main Line,” home of the city’s old money and prestige, essentially took over the key functions of the city government and co-ordinated Philadelphia’s response to the pandemic.

In essence, the Ladies Auxiliary, albeit a very well off, and a very well connected one, saved the day in Philadelphia in 1918, but it was a very close thing indeed.

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