‘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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Betting on the science: Goodbye to the long public health emergency that was COVID-19, but not the pandemic

Journalists generally frown on question mark headlines. Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist based in Canterbury, and director of content and audience development at the German Bauer Media Group, in 2009 – although the principle is much older – stated what has come to be known as “Betteridge’s law of headlines,” an adage that says, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Not all writers agree. Holly J. Morris, National Public Radio’s (NPR) training team’s digital journalism trainer, says, “Not so!” Whatever the case, COVID-19 has caused me to write at least one and think about more question mark headlines over the last three years than ever before.

I started off on Jan. 23, 2020, writing, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/the-fire-this-time-pandemic-prose-and-waiting-and-watching-for-the-big-one/). I penned those words on a cold winter January night. At that time, COVID-19 hadn’t been invented by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the official moniker for what was then simply known provisionally as Novel Coronavirus 2019-n, or CoV2019-nCoV, designating it as a novel coronavirus. When I first wrote about it, the WHO was still a week away from designating the newly-discovered coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The WHO then waited another six weeks almost until March 11 to decide a global pandemic was under way.

Eight months after my first novel coronavirus post, I wrote: “… the question mark, of course, can be dropped. It is indeed the fire this time. Except when it is not. That is the paradox of COVID-19. The vast majority of people infected with COVID-19 will recover. The elderly and those of any age group with comorbidities are at greatest risk. Except there will be apparently otherwise healthy young people who die of COVID-19, too. Many, in fact, although nothing like their elders (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/covid-19-the-fire-that-darkened-the-world/).

“People infected with the flu almost always get sick. They are rarely asymptomatic. Many people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or only mildly symptomatic, but contagious in any of those three states, making them walking viral bombs.”

After more than three long years of the COVID-19 global pandemic, hope is on the breeze early this May. Two years ago today on May 9, 2021, Manitoba was going into its third lockdown and third coronavirus wave, reporting the third highest number of COVID-19 cases per capita in all of Canada and the United States. Tomorrow, most of the last remaining masking requirements for health-care facilities in Manitoba are set to be lifted, although the public health order changes will not apply in settings where care is being provided to particularly vulnerable populations, including cancer patients and transplant recipients. Masking requirements in these locations will be clearly indicated with signage and the requirement will apply to health-care workers, visitors and all patients “who are able to tolerate wearing a mask.”

While COVID-19 is still a global pandemic, it is no longer a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. 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.”

On Thursday, the United States is set to end its own federal public health emergency declaration, which dates back to Jan. 31, 2020.

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 332 million and more than 1.1 million Americans have died of COVID-19. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 8 billion people today, and at least 50 million people died of the Spanish Flu. Almost 7 million have died of COVID-19.

Kent Sepkowitz, a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said yesterday “the slow and steady, data-based rollback of these previously necessary interventions surely is the right thing to do … as is assuring that masks and vaccines and test kits (though these soon will no longer be free to all) and the entire apparatus of pandemic control remain available for those who feel uneasy still.”

Sepkowitz says “the specifics of the next bad thing” is not “what keeps us infectious disease specialists up at night. Rather, it is the deepening uncertainty as to whether the U.S. will be able to respond to the next crisis. The loose collection of anti-vaxxers, anti-pharma, anti-science, pro-conspiracists has hardened into a movement.”

What that means, says Sepkowitz , is that “at the next public health crisis we will need to deal not only with a pathogen but also with a well-organized, non-reality-based community that seems tireless in its pursuit of alternative facts. Though the majority of people in the U.S. are vaccinated, seem to believe in science and simply want to go about their business, the noisy minority will likely make the Trump-organized Operation Warp Speed response to the Covid-19 pandemic seem like a once-in-a-lifetime moment of amity, a peaceful agreement across all ideologies and political stripes.”

Dr. Brent Roussin, Manitoba’s chief public health officer, on May 5 called on people to move forward following the World Health Organization’s declaration that the global COVID-19 emergency is over.

“That doesn’t mean that the pandemic is over … but I do think that we need to find ways to heal,” Roussin said. He told CBC that Manitoba used extraordinary measures to stem the tide of COVID-19 in the province, but they are not a normal way to deal with health issues.

“If you think about the pre-pandemic years, there’s always been people who have been vulnerable, susceptible, and more at risk than others. But we don’t deal with that in a restrictive manner,” he said.

Roussin said he’s optimistic that people will start to heal from societal divisions that arose during the pandemic. 

“I’m quite hopeful, especially in Manitoba. We know what Manitobans are made of,” he said.

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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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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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COVID-19: The fire that darkened the world in 2020

Eight months ago today, I wrote my first post on the current coronavirus pandemic, and in a headline asked, ‘The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/the-fire-this-time-pandemic-prose-and-waiting-and-watching-for-the-big-one/).

I penned those words on a cold winter January night. At that time, COVID-19 hadn’t been invented by the World Health Organization (WHO), as the official moniker for what was then simply known provisionally as Novel Coronavirus 2019-n, or CoV2019-nCoV, designating it as a novel coronavirus discovered last year. 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. On Jan. 23, when I first wrote about it, the WHO was still a week away from designating the newly-discovered coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The WHO then waited another six weeks almost until March 11 to decide a global pandemic was under way.

As summer has given way to September’s still unseasonably warm autumn here in Northern Manitoba, the question mark, of course, can be dropped. It is indeed the fire this time. Except when it is not. That is the paradox of COVID-19. The vast majority of people infected with COVID-19 will recover. The elderly and those of any age group with comorbidities are at greatest risk. Except there will be apparently otherwise healthy young people who die of COVID-19, too. Many, in fact, although nothing like their elders.

People infected with the flu almost always get sick. They are rarely asymptomatic. Many people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, presymptomatic, or only mildly symptomatic, but contagious in any of those three states, making them walking viral bombs. The estimate of a virus’s contagiousness is captured in a variable called R-naught (R0), or basic reproduction number, and is a key number used in infectious disease modelling for estimating pandemic growth rate. Seasonal flu has an R0 of 1.3, while measles is highly contagious with an R0 between 12 and 18. By way of historical comparison, the the R0 of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is estimated to have been between 1.4 and 2.8, which is within the range COVID-19 falls currently in many parts of the world.

COVID-19 has officially killed more than 200,000 people in the United States alone over the last eight months.

It is indeed the fire this time.

The 1918 influenza pandemic, widely known as the “Spanish Flu,” killed about 675,000 people in the United States, and perhaps 50 million worldwide, in a much less populated smaller world, As of mid-afternoon Sept. 22, the WHO reported there have been 31,174,627 confirmed cases worldwide of COVID-19, including 962,613 deaths.

COVID-19 in just eight months has killed almost 30 per cent of the number of Americans who died over three years between 1918 and 1920 of Spanish Flu, the worst global pandemic of modern times.

How does COVID-19 stack up against a more “normal” modern American five-to-six month flu season? The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports preliminary estimates from the 2018-19 flu season, the most recent data available, shows 34,157 deaths. Estimates from the 2018-2019 season are still considered preliminary and may change as data is finalized, the CDC notes. Looking back over the last decade to 2010, estimated influenza deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 to a high of 61,000.

The case fatality rate for COVID-19 in the United States is currently 2.9 per cent. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC) in Baltimore says Canada has reported 9,279 COVID-19 deaths with a case fatality rate of 6.3 per cent.

For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1 per cent, the WHO says. Countries throughout the world have reported very different case fatality ratios – the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. Differences in mortality numbers can be caused by:

• differences in the number of people tested: With more testing, more people with milder cases are identified. This lowers the case-fatality ratio;.
• demographics: For example, mortality tends to be higher in older populations;.
• characteristics of the healthcare system: For example, mortality may rise as hospitals become overwhelmed and have fewer resources.

As for either a vaccine or herd immunity being the magic bullet to defeat COVID-19, consider the so-called common cold. The U.S. National Library of Medicine, an institute with the National Institutes of Health, notes there are now seven human coronaviruses (HCoVs) associated with upper respiratory tract infections that sometime spread to the lungs and other organs. Epidemiological studies suggest that HCoVs account for 15 to 30 per cent of common colds.

Are you aware of a vaccine for the common cold? Are you immune to catching colds?

Coronaviruses are enveloped positive-strand RNA viruses from the Coronaviridae family. Making a safe and effective vaccine is far more complex than making batches of an annual flu vaccine. And while herd immunity has been a factor in mitigating some disease pandemics, including influenza, the evidence that could happen with a coronavirus such as COVID-19 is preliminary and inconclusive at best.

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

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Holy hyperbole, a.k.a. ‘HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! … It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad’

Eric Feigl-Ding’s Jan. 20 tweet on Twitter was one of the first to set off COVID-19 pandemic alarm bells. He is a Washington, D.C.  epidemiologist and health economist, and is currently a visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” Feigl-Ding’s tweet read. “How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating.” The estimate of the virus’s contagiousness is captured in a variable called R0, or basic reproduction number for COVID-19, and is a key number used in infectious disease modelling for estimating pandemic growth rate. An R0 of 3.8 meant that every person who caught COVID-19 would transmit it in turn to almost four other people.

Feigl-Ding, 37, had tweeted after reading a paper called “Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions,” published on Jan. 23, and providing an early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions using case information from Chinese cities and other countries from Jan. 1-22 to fit a mathematical model to estimate outbreak parameters.

Still, there were problems with Feigl-Ding’s tweet, as Alexis C. Madrigal, a staff writer at The Atlantic, noted just eight days later in a piece headlined, “How to Misinform Yourself About the Coronavirus: Even if you avoid the conspiracy theories, tweeting through a global emergency is messy, context-free, and disorienting” (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/china-coronavirus-twitter/605644/), which appeared online Jan. 28.

Feigl-Ding is in no way an unintelligent man or incompetent epidemiologist; by all accounts he is quite the contrary in both disposition and abilities. Nor is this in any way to suggest the COVID-19 pandemic, which hadn’t even been designated a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Jan, 20 [that would come Jan. 30], much less a global pandemic [that would come March 11] was not worthy of a five-alarm fire bells general wake-up call or tweet even back then: it was.

His work focuses on the intersection of public health and public policy. Feigl-Ding has published in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and Health Policy. In 2018, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to run for the party in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, located in the south-central region of the state, and encompassing all of Dauphin County, as well as parts of Cumberland County and York County, including the cities of Harrisburg and York. But in his enthusiasm to tweet, he omitted some context, which he now regrets, he says. What he inadvertently omitted primarily were facts such as other infectious diseases, say measles for instance, also have very high R0 numbers (R0s for measles range from 12 to 18), and by the time he tweeted about the paper, the researchers had already lowered their R0 estimate from 3.8 to 2.5. “And R0, for that matter, is not the be-all and end-all of the danger of a virus,” Madrigal points out “Some highly transmissible diseases are not actually that dangerous.”

Madrigal also rightly observed that “one of the realities of the current information ecosystem” is that while “out-and-out conspiracies and hoaxes will draw some attention, it’s really the stuff that’s close to the boundaries of discourse that grabs the most eyeballs. That is, the information that’s plausible, and that fits into a narrative mounting outside the mainstream, gets the most clicks, likes, and retweets. Bonus points if it’s sensational or something that someone might want to censor.” When Twitter launched in March 2006, its timeline structure was simple: Tweets were displayed in reverse chronological order. In other words, each user’s feed contained tweets from their followers, from the most recent tweets onward. For “top tweets” now, Twitter uses an algorithm-powered feed organized by ranking signals. In addition to ranked content from followers, the feed will sometimes feature “who to follow” suggestions and, and content from other accounts. Users can also provide feedback on content shown in the feed by selecting “show less often.”

In an April-June 2017article in ASA footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association, R. Tyson Smith, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, who conducts research in the areas of health, gender, social psychology, criminal justice, and the military, suggested, “Twitter is arguably the best way to reach the greatest number of people, in the quickest fashion, and in the least mediated way.”

Probably still true, but not necessarily always a good thing for academics perhaps, as Eric Feigl-Ding quickly discovered to his chagrin.

In all fairness, who among us hasn’t hit the send button on a tweet, email, Facebook post, or other social media platform expression, a tad too soon in retrospect? Not I, I admit.

Think? Yes. Send? Maybe – but only after a very long pause, which on most social media platforms, and perhaps especially on Twitter, is about as likely as successfully asking a multi-line slot machine player to ease up to dampen some of the audiovisual feedback.

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Misplaced patriotism and public health propaganda are no disinfectants for a pandemic

John M. Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, chronicles the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. It is a compelling read, and placenames such as Haskell, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, remain etched in my mind.

Barry also serves as an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

But what really struck me was 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. Can any of us really know what we would have done faced with similar circumstances? I think not.

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.

But how did things get so bad in Philadelphia in the fall of 1918?

On Sept. 28, 1918, despite sound advice and warnings to the contrary, Philadelphia public health director Wilmer Krusen insisted on allowing a Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, “cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles.” It was after all the patriotic thing to do in the final Allied push to defeat the Central Powers and win the First World War.

“Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled,” Kenneth C. Davis wrote in Smithsonian magazine in September 2018. “In the week ending October 5, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia had died from the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. Allison C. Meier in an article for Quartz last November noted that historian James Higgins, writing in Pennsylvania Legacies, observed that by the first week of October 2018, roughly five weeks into the outbreak, “Philadelphia’s mortality rate accelerated in a climb unmatched by any city in the nation –perhaps by any major city in the world.”

We really are not very particularly good at learning the lessons of history. Or when we think we have, we often draw the wrong lessons. Misplaced patriotism. Public health propaganda. These are no disinfectants for a pandemic.

The original name of the new coronavirus was provisionally known as Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV, before the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the name COVID-19.  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.

The revised World Health Organization’s case fatality rate earlier this week of 3.4 per cent from 2 per cent for COVID-19 on March 3 is a 70 per cent fatality increase.

“I think the 3.4 per cent is really a false number,” U.S. President Donald Trump told Sean Hannity, one of his favourite conservative Fox News hosts, in a phone interview broadcast live March 4.

In the early 1980s, I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name.”

Who will be the next C. Everett Koop, with the courage to speak truth to power, afflicting the comfortable, while comforting the afflicted? Someone Ike the late Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm after contracting the virus while working at Wuhan Central Hospital.

There have been some exemplary public health responses to the COVID-19 public health emergency of international concern, such as those of Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s, provincial health officer, whom André Picard, the health columnist at The Globe and Mail, earlier today described as setting “the standard for public health communication. Too often, public officials are dispassionate and robotic. Using clear language and showing genuine emotion makes your message more relatable and impactful.”

And then there have been the less than exemplary public health responses – or perhaps more accurately – lack of response.

When is a pandemic not a pandemic? When the World Health Organization (WHO) has Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as its director-general apparently.

“I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a pandemic and I don’t know why WHO is resisting that,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh who co-chaired a review of WHO’s response to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said a pandemic declaration is long overdue.

While none of this is easy when we don’t yet have a clear idea of the transmissibility and virulence of COVID-19, it is equally true the absence of true, timely public health information and honest decision-making, we risk further fostering a not insignificant climate of international government and institutional distrust, leading to social media platforms being lit up with stories such as the ones suggesting that the novel coronavirus is a genetically engineered biological weapon with a protein sequence included elements of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS – either a Chinese one that had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan or an American one inflicted on Wuhan, or that COVID-19 is perhaps some kind of so-called “false flag” operation to distract us from someone or something else.

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