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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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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What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?

A child born next year will have a reasonable chance of living to see the dawn of the 22^nd century should they make it to the age of about 85. While that’s not quite the statistical life expectancy yet in most of the developed world, it’s pretty close especially for women. So while it’s no sure thing, it’s not an unreasonable bet either.

The thing is this though. When we think of the future we tend to see it in a sort of sci-fi world of limitless technological progress when it comes to the general shape of things to come. We may not see the specifics, but we think we know the trend lines. After all, all we have to do is look back on our own past to see how far we’ve come. I was born in 1957. That’s only 58 years ago. Yet the world I live in today little resembles the world I was born into. A glance at the front page of any old newspaper (remember newspapers?) or photograph of any cityscape will quickly confirm that. So imagine being born in 2016 and what the year 2101 might look like, as the 22^nd century dawns on Jan. 1, 2101?

Perhaps there is a bit of Buckminster Fuller, the noted American futurist who died in 1983 at the age of 87, after a lifetime spent designing things like Dymaxion houses, cars and maps ™ for his Dymaxion Corporation in Bridgeport, Connecticut, geodesic domes for his Geodesics, Inc., Forest Hills, New York, as well as being the architect between 1965 and 1967 of the United States Pavilion for Expo ’67, the Montreal World’s Fair, in most of my generation.

I still have my cherished copy of The Globe and Mail from Monday, July 21, 1969. I’ve been lugging that paper around – Oshawa, Peterborough, Boston, Durham, North Carolina, Kingston, Ottawa, Yellowknife, Halifax, Sackville, New Brunswick, Thompson, and no doubt a few places I’ve overlooked, for some 46 years now.

The 72-point “going to war” main headline that day – in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.’”

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkly spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

Ah, 1969.

To put in perspective just how remarkable the achievement was, the world of 1969 was largely a world without ATMs (they wouldn’t become commonplace until the early 1980s, although the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969, just 4½ months after the Apollo 11 moon mission.

The quartz watch was introduced in 1969 and was considered a revolutionary improvement in watch technology because instead of a balance wheel, which oscillated at five beats per second, it used a quartz crystal resonator which vibrated at 8,192 Hz, driven by a battery powered oscillator circuit.

And, of course, the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian Internet, was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline from an SDS Sigma 7– a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment – to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California on Oct. 29, 1969.

The website FutureTimeline.net, found at http://www.futuretimeline.net predicts that by 2100 “human intelligence is being vastly amplified by AI (Artificial Intelligence), “while Nomadic floating cities are roaming the oceans” and “Emperor penguins face extinction.”

Says FutureTimeline.net: “Ubiquitous, large-scale automation has led to vast swathes of human employees being replaced by virtual or robotic counterparts. Strong AI now occupies almost every level of business, government, the military, manufacturing and service sectors.

“Rather than being separate entities, these AI programs are often merged with human minds, greatly extending the latter’s capability. For instance, knowledge and skills on any subject can now be downloaded and stored directly within the brain. As well as basic information and data, this includes physical abilities. A person can learn self-defence, for example, become an expert in any sport, or be taught to operate a new vehicle, all within a matter of seconds.

“At the dawn of the 22nd century, many of the world’s cities lie partially submerged due to rising sea levels. Despite some attempts to build flood defences, even famous locations – such as New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Sydney – have been effected. With over 10 per cent of the world’s population living on coastlines, hundreds of millions have been forced to migrate.

“While many citizens have abandoned their homelands, a growing number have adopted a new means of living which does away with national boundaries altogether. This comes in the form of floating, artificial islands – entirely self-sufficient and able to cruise around the world indefinitely.

“These ships provide comfort, safety and security, in stark contrast to the upheaval and chaos experienced by many land dwellers. In addition to a continuous supply of food and freshwater, various facilities are available including virtual reality suites, state-of-the-art android servants/companions, swimming pools, landing pads for anti-grav vehicles and much more. Carefully maintained arboretums with real trees can also be found on board (flora which is becoming increasingly rare these days).

“The world has been transformed by this fusion of people and machines. The vastly greater power of AI means that it has become, at the same time, both master and servant to the human race.

“The benefits of this human-AI merger require the extensive use of implants, however – something which a significant minority of the population still refuses to accept. Compared to transhumans, these non-upgraded humans are becoming like cavemen – thousands of years behind in intellectual development. Unable to comprehend the latest technology, the world around them appears “fast” and “strange” from their increasingly limited perspective. This is creating a major division in society.”

This is a technological but also in some ways disturbingly dystopian view of the not-so-distant future.

But what about if the trip to 2101 and the 22nd century turns out to be not so much like the 20th century and those magnificent men in their flying machines but more like the Dark Ages in Western Europe with the eclipse of civilization that began with the sacking of Rome on Aug. 24, 410 by Alaric and the Visigoths and ending on Nov. 27, 1095 with Pope Urban II’s call of Deus vult!, or “God wills it!”, summoning Christians in Europe to a war against Islamic Saracens in order to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land, as he launched the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont at the Church of Notre-Dame du Port in Auvergne, France?

At the moment, I am in the midst of reading (well actually listening in one case) to two books, one fictional, the other speculative, that point to just how quickly we could be making such a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5^th to 11^th centuries.

New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, her fourth novel, published last year, is 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.”

While mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti suffered his own self-inflicted plague of plagiarism problems elsewhere more than a decade ago, his 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything, which looks at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, is nonetheless a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages.

Casti’s book looks at how the global food supply system could collapse, the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the Internet, what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000 (although not immediately apparent perhaps with West Texas Intermediate crude oil at the benchmark price of about US$35 per barrel, a seven-year low) 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.

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