Posted on 03/17/2020 4:42:47 AM PDT by Entrepreneur
Surrounded by amulets of the coronavirus crisis, I stare out my window at a city that may or may not be on the verge of disaster. To my right is a case of canned pasta. To my left are cartons of corned-beef hash from New Jersey and bottled water from Maine. I’m ready for whatever comes.
Except, I’m not ready. In fact, even at my advanced 80-something age, I find the whole COVID-19 panic to be strange and troubling. I’ve lived through epidemics before, but they didn’t crash the stock market, wreck a booming economy, and shut down international travel. They didn’t stop the St. Patrick’s Day parade or the NCAA basketball tournament, and they didn’t drop the curtain on Broadway shows. Will these extreme measures have any real effect on the spread of COVID-19 in New York, or America? We’re about to find out.
My first encounter with a global pandemic came in October 1957, when I spent a week in my college infirmary with a case of the H2N2 virus, known at the time by the politically incorrect name of “Asian flu.” My fever spiked to 105, and I was sicker than I’d ever been. The infirmary quickly filled with other cases, though some ailing students toughed it out in their dorm rooms with aspirin and orange juice. The college itself did not close, and the surrounding town did not impose restrictions on public gatherings. The day that I was discharged from the infirmary, I played in an intercollegiate soccer game, which drew a big crowd.
It’s not that Asian flu—the second influenza pandemic of the twentieth century—wasn’t a serious disease. Worldwide, this flu strain killed somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. More than 100,000 died in the U.S. alone. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, governors did not call out the National Guard, and political panic-mongers did not blame it all on President Eisenhower. College sports events were not cancelled, planes and trains continued to run, and Americans did not regard one another with fear and suspicion, touching elbows instead of hands. We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.
Today, I look back and wonder if an oblivious America faced the 1957 plague with a kind of clueless folly. Why weren’t we more active in fighting this contagion? Could stricter quarantine procedures have reduced the rate of infection and lowered the death toll? In short, why weren’t we more afraid?
It’s hard to answer that question without explaining what it was like to grow up in an age of infectious illness. My mother once showed me a list of the contagious diseases she survived before the age of 20. On the list were the usual childhood illnesses, along with deadly afflictions like typhoid fever, pneumonia, diphtheria (it killed her older brother), scarlet fever, and the lethal 1918–19 Spanish flu, which took more than 50 million lives around the world.
For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four. Polio took a heavy annual toll, leaving thousands of people (mostly children) paralyzed or dead. There were no vaccines. Growing up meant running an unavoidable gauntlet of infectious disease. For college students in 1957, the Asian flu was a familiar hurdle on the road to adulthood. For everyone older, the flu was a familiar foe. There was no possibility of working at home. You had to go out and face the danger.
Today, thanks to vaccines, fewer and fewer people remember what it was like to survive a succession of childhood diseases. Is the unfamiliar threat of serious sickness making us more afraid of COVID-19 than we need to be? Does a society that relies more on politics than faith now find itself in an uncomfortable bind, unable to lecture, browbeat, intimidate, or evade the incorrect behavior of a dangerous microbe?
When the coronavirus finally runs its course, one of the most important tasks for health-care officials will be to determine whether the preventive measures we’re taking today were effective. Did deploying the National Guard save lives, or did it simply expose the soldiers to an infection that, in the end, could not be stopped? Did we pay too high a price for tanking our economy and disrupting our society?
Or did we get it right, acting quickly and decisively to slow the virus, shutting down possible pathways of infection? By comparing the 2020 data with information from 1957, we’ll also be able to find out if the strange people who lived in that distant year—and I remember them well—could have done more to reduce the death toll of the Asian flu. The more answers we get, and the sooner we get them, the better it will be for everyone. When the curtain goes up on Broadway again, somewhere in a faraway continent to be named later, we can be sure that new viruses will be waiting in the wings.
Clark Whelton, a New York–based writer, was a speechwriter for New York City mayors Edward Koch and Rudolph Giuliani.
The ridiculous panic caused additional human suffering.
The difference-maker is a global Elites have their incomes drastically curtailed due to President Trump and therefore they have to get rid of him at all costs even at the cost of this. That’s the Difference Maker.
You’re right of course. What a horror to watch.
...I’ve lived through epidemics before, but they didn’t crash the stock market, wreck a booming economy, and shut down international travel...
The old man tells it like it is/was.
What a complete and utter disgrace.
The global panic-dendum.
It is going to cause far more human suffering, too. Don’t think this disruption of the West is going unnoticed.
This is going to become commonplace, and one of these days, it isn’t going to be people dying of the flu at flu-like rates.
Not to mention the hundreds of millions of people losing their jobs, economies being destroyed over this.
The media is responsible for the panic. Shame on them for not giving a crap about others.
You speak of when America was still America. Ironically, I was a college freshman in fall 1957 when Asian flu hit. I got the vaccine and next day got the Asian flu. I can still remember how shitty I felt.
1957 was a time filled with fear. Nuclear war was a real threat after WW2. With Sputnik added in death from space was added to the mix. The ordinary routine death by germ was trivial by comparison.
Just doing shirt sleeve numbers here but my estimate is if we act we can perhaps keep the new, additional deaths down to maybe 10,000 or 20,000 by year’s end. If we act and aren’t real successful it goes over the high end. If we do nothing we are looking at 10 million or more very ill people over the next couple months here in the US and around 100,000 deaths. The real damage is the drain on the economy of the hundreds of thousands of recovered sick people. Mitigation efforts will hurt but not nearly as much as failure to mitigate.
I don’t believe ANY of that.
But we agree on most every other subject so let’s agree to disagree on this one :)
The real funny part of all this is Mexico is closing their border with the US. As our economy tanks a lot of illegals, I suspect, will try to go home. The irony is they may have to sneak into Mexico.
The social disruption and economic crash are going to cause far more deaths than the virus could ever do. Far, far more.
Most people recover from it with no problems, so if you’re looking for an excuse for euthanasia, that’s not it. But euthanasia will be next, since our economy will be so bad it will be considered a waste of to maintain “useless eaters.”
Notice pandemic is a panic with a DEM in the middle of it.
We will know in a couple weeks. The deaths are the thing to watch. Death is irrefutable. The number of cases is unknown, the number of seriously ill is better known but contaminated with alpha and beta errors, the deaths are firmer. Use the deaths like a rudder on a boat and steer management decisions from there. In two weeks if US deaths are below a couple thousand what we are doing has worked and folks can start emerging from hiding. Watch the deaths. We have how many now? 40? 70? I forget, but it’s less than 100. So if we have 200 deaths in 4 days and 800 in 8 days, 1600 in 12 days what we are doing isn’t working. If we only have 400 deaths in 12 days what we are doing is working. The question then is if it’s working can we afford to stop?
If you are correct in 12 days we should still have only a few score of deaths.
I think that the bigger difference maker is 60 years of public education (including universities) in producing ill educated, subservient snowflakes.
If, as I suspect, urban retards are going to be hardest hit places like Baltimore will have TOTAL meltdown not just healthcare meltdown and the death rate from violence will dwarf the deaths from virus.
think that the bigger difference maker is 60 years of public education (including universities) in producing ill educated, subservient snowflakes.
...
Super good poit
Its effects are going to be much longer-lasting and more devastating than any number of flu deaths.
And it was a panic: like any stampede, it started suddenly, on the basis of rumors and distorted reality, the way a stampede in a crowd begins when someone thinks the sound of a car backfiring is a gunshot and screams “gunshot” to the people next to him.
I remember just a couple of weeks ago I was visiting family in another state, visiting a beautiful public garden, chatting with strangers, eating in a harborside restaurant, planning a trip to another part of the country in a month or so...it’s hard to imagine that all of this has been destroyed in the space of a few days by hysteria and manipulation. And I don’t think it’s going to come back.
Now we have 1.1 million children out of school, roaming the streets of New York, prisoners being dumped back into our communities, restriction on the movements of the law abiding, fear and suspicion everywhere, and the breakdown of the entire economic system. How can it come back?
Even with several thousand flu deaths, in the worst case, if we had maintained a normal life and perhaps added mitigation practices, it would have come back, but I don’t see how it can do so now.
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