Cold & Flu Season.” Please keep that thought in mind should you choose to read on. Especially since President Dipshit has already raised the concept of this all being over once warm weather gets here. His surrogates will amplify any crowing he does should, as is likely the number of infections/deaths from covid-19 drop significantly by summer. Keep in mind when & Flu Season” takes place in a typical year. Having established that, what follows is my take on what might well happen.
I realize the title is a weird mix of reassurance and grim warning. Most people know an influenza pandemic swept the world one hundred years ago infecting a third of the world’s population and actually killing an appalling number of them. t’s impossible to know how many died, but most estimates start at fifty million people and some credible estimates put it closer to a hundred million. Even today with so many more billions of people in the world that would be a staggering number of deaths from such an illness, much less in so short a time.
There are some troubling, even scary parallels between covoid-19 and the strain of influenza that became known as (the “Spanish Flu.” That label is incredibly unfair – they were the only country that honestly addressed and reported numbers of cases/deaths from the outset but Spain wasn’t the epicenter/responsible for the 1918-1919 pandemic. Time, perspective and advances in medicine have provided lessons for those willing to look at that particular bit of history. The lessons have been learned, but sadly and even tragically sometimes those lessons have been ignored. In fact, I think it’s easy to make a case there are countries including (and especially) our own that seem determined to refuse to apply the lessons of history.
Much has been written in the last century about the pandemic, and I have an often too strong tendency to dive into the weeds on topics so if I leave out some key information in an attempt to only hit what I think are the main points I ask for your forgiveness. And anyone wanting to fill in more details in comments are encouraged to do so. With that in mind I want to emphasize some key points.
The pandemic took place over not one but two “flu seasons.” That’s right. It showed up and infected a lot of people in the first part of 2018, and seemingly was petering out by summer. It was serious in that first go-round and a significant number of people were infected and died, but the numbers that everyone talks about as in one-third of people in the world being infected and anywhere from fifty to a hundred million people dying wasn’t a result of the initial outbreak in the winter and spring of 1918. No, it came back in the fall and in more virulent form, and the bulk of the infections and deaths happened starting in the fall of 1918 and continuing well into 1919.
Think about that for a minute. Viruses can and do mutate, and while they often get milder or at least vaccines & treatments are developed to deal with them sometimes they mutate into a more virulent/dangerous form which happened back then. However that wasn’t the only thing that made that particular strain of flu so deadly. There was also a sense of denial that caused a lack of action on the part of many countries – a refusal starting during the first outbreak to recognize the potential severity of the problem both in terms of lethality and the rate at which this strain of flu could (and did) spread. It’s worth remembering something else was taking place during the pandemic.
World War I
Europe was filled with troops from around the word, crammed into trenches, camps and yes, hospitals. Also, despite lyric in a classic song (Over There!) meant to rally the American public people were in fact coming back (not just to the U.S. but other countries too) before it was “Over – over there!” Not just wounded people, but those with serious illnesses that made them unfit for combat, but medical folks (both administrative & direct care folks) went back and forth, as well as officers and civilians tasked with evaluating firsthand what was happening on the front and then reporting back home. And in those packed camps and “rear areas” there were the folks who drove the supply trucks back and forth to the ships, and the people who crewed those ships and so on. When you consider there was little effort made to separate those suffering from flu/flu like illnesses in so many cramped places it’s no wonder that the virus spread. Then you have to factor in the fact that the powers-that-be in Britain, France and also the United States, and even Germany didn’t want to admit a particularly infectious outbreak was taking place. At two percent mortality (sound familiar?) it was much more deadly than regular flu, and the countries I’ve cited didn’t want “bad news” causing a drop in support for their respective efforts to prevail in the war.
With apologies for a bit of detail I should note the strain of flu that caused the pandemic got named “Spanish Flu” because Spain which sat out the war was actually honest from the beginning about the size and scope of the devastating it was causing. other countries hiding or outright lying about the severity of the situation it looked to the masses around the world like Spain was the epicenter of the outbreak and responsible for the spread of the disease and ultimately all those deaths. As I said earlier it was incredibly unfair to Spain who tried to tackle the problem head on and do so openly & honestly but even as a kid in school when learning about the pandemic I heard it being called the Spanish Flu. Unfair and inaccurate as the name is, in the interest of making the rest of this more readable & avoiding repeated clarifications I’ll stick with that name and ask for forgiveness to anyone of Spanish heritage.
In the United States, President Wilson was so worried about bad news r.e. the severity of Spanish Flu he got Congress to pass a couple of laws criminalizing criticism of the government. His administration’s actions browbeat the press pretty much into submission. Even health workers who knew things were really bad didn’t know just how bad things actually were. Meanwhile, bodies sat in homes for days and weeks sometimes, and since people didn’t know how serious the situation was they had no idea of the then limited things they might do to protect themselves. An estimated 675,000 Americans would die before the pandemic was over, a number that would likely have been much smaller had there been open and honest information provided to the public and health care providers (as well as funeral service providers – a subject I can speak to with authority) but the truth was hidden from the public. Then, as now cities which of course have so many people concentrated so closely together represented both a special challenge but also in retrospect some important lessons. Some had picked up enough info. despite efforts to suppress knowledge of the scope/lethality of the disease to take steps like cancelling major gatherings. St. Patrick’s Day parades for example. Philadelphia famously (or perhaps infamously) did not and their death toll was particularly appalling. That’s the kind of lesson I think Governors and Mayors have been taking a hard look at & deciding to take the actions that are being taken. Professional sports leagues, and the NCAA is following suit. I don’t know WTF the PGA was thinking going ahead with the Player’s Championship this week but at least as of tomorrow no fans will be allowed onto the course. It will be interesting to see what happens or doesn’t happen in Augusta, GA regarding The Master’s in a few weeks. The important part, and part of what prompted me to start writing about this is there are stark lessons from a hundred years ago – if we have both the will and the wisdom to learn them.
Oh, one last dive into that particular patch of weeds. Remember Turd Trump saying he didn’t know people died from flu? Granted, his brain has rotted to a point where he might actually have forgotten it but I’m pretty sure somewhere in his miserable childhood he got taught about his ancestors including ole “Grandpa Trump.” Guess what that old draft dodging (in his home country) bastard Friedrich Trump died of? Not just flu, but the freaking “Spanish Flu.” Call me mean but maybe some journalist should remind him of that. Anyway, moving on.
Now let’s talk about the world’s response once the pandemic resumed in the fall of 2018 and the lion’s share of infections and deaths occurred. To be sure, medicine while not what it would become had at least progressed to the point where hospitals were common at least in developed countries, and doctors had actual diagnostic capabilities to identify not just viruses like flue but even distinguish different strains. There was even some understanding about treating cases and preventing spread of diseases by that point. What didn’t exist back then were international organizations and networks to share information including cooperation in slowing spread of particularly infectious diseases. Still, it’s safe I believe to say that had medical professionals and the public in this and other countries been properly informed of the new, more lethal strain of flu the infection rate & therefore death toll while still massive would have been far less than what it became.
Fast forward a hundred years, and medicine has advanced in ways doctors and other medical professionals couldn’t even dream of back then. In addition, experience learned via confronting a variety of deadly diseases and in a world where travel allows spread of them in way and at rates that would have terrified those same medical professionals during the pandemic countries have developed protocols for identification and treatment. Just as important nations with the ability to invest in such develop international structures to cooperate to prevent, or at least limit the spread of a variety of diseases. The more deadly diseases that have crossed borders, the more the world has learned and the United States has been a key part of developing the international networks needed to confront the spread of diseases that can be disruptive and even deadly.
Under this administration the United States has, as it has done in so many other ways abdicated its role a leader in the world. Valuable, life-saving expertise was summarily dismissed from our government institutions that could have helped with containment, as well as treatment both abroad and here at home. This strain of flu spreads too easily and is much too lethal to think there wouldn’t have been a tragic number of infections and deaths. However, there are going to be countless more than had to be the case, and China’s initial secretiveness isn’t going to be the only major contributing factor to that being the case. Not that a sociopath like Turd Trump will care about those deaths, but there IS a consequence of his appalling combination of action & inaction he DOES care about and care deeply because of how it affects him:
The economy, as in economic disruption.
If it weren’t tragic one might smile at the irony of the situation – a weak, vain & soulless man so obsessed with his image and re-election that his tunnel vision (asking himself how to get only positive news coverage during each day’s news cycle) leads to his defeat. The recent jobs report notwithstanding our economy is going to take a bit hit and long before the election, or even the nominating conventions. His attempts to lie his way out of the severity of both the severity of the disease and the economic impact because is so obsessed with the economy are a ticking time bomb for him. That same expertise he so casually dismissed from our government could have been at work as soon as word started coming out of China about a troubling new strain of flu been at work slowing the spread of the virus & containing it when found (again, both here and abroad) and bought precious time to mitigate the economic impact!
Then there’s the fact that as people’s lives are disrupted as layoffs start happening, and entire businesses shutting down people will, despite what the President is telling them on the news and in his twitter feed getting sick. And dying. That includes out there in all that great big swath of red states and the rural/red parts of blue states. When people die in such small communities it gets noticed. And if multiple people die, while at the same time their false fake-golden idol is telling them nothing is wrong & it’s all a hoax? I’m not bat-shit crazy enough to think very many of those people will vote for Democrats, but I’ll settle for them staying home. Trump could wind up suppressing as many GOP votes as his Party does Democratic ones.
But all that’s politics and I want to go back to what got me to writing this which is history and the chances of a particularly gruesome bit of it repeating itself. Again, with the flu pandemic a hundred years ago there was an outbreak of a particularly virulent strain in the first part of 2018. Things seemed to get better, just as Trump has claimed will be the case this time. And there’s a possibility that once spring sets it the outbreak might actually subside due to a combination of warmer weather and more comprehensive testing/identification of pockets of infection and steps being taken to contain the outbreak finally being implemented on a large enough scale to be somewhat effective.
There is another fact to be considered, and it’s probably one that registered in what Turd Trump calls his “very fine brain.” Influenza (flu) is a year-round thing, but there’s a reason the term “flu season” exists. Flu is more common during the cold months and regardless of the prevalent strain in a given year the number of cases tends to peak in the middle of winter – February to be more precise. While “flu season” varies by country (and by northern/southern hemispheres as winter and summer are reversed) in the U.S. it runs from October to as late as May, although most cases are in the months of December through March. The reasons aren’t fully understood why flu is more common during colder months but there is a long history of tracking the disease and there’s ample reason to expect that the number of cases will peak (as more testing is done the number of REPORTED cases will seemingly spike, but I’m talking about the actual number both reported and unidentified/reported) and appear under control by summer. I think the administration and perhaps the GOP overall is counting on that. They are also counting on that being the end of this particular outbreak & that at least a couple of years go by before it reappears. IOW they are counting on an effective, widely available vaccine before this particular strain of flu shows up again.
However, as the saying goes “Hope ain’t a strategy.”
The fact is, covid-19 is particularly easily transmitted. However, most strains of flue have a much, much lower mortality rate. former estimate of 2% fatalities appears to have risen to over 3% and some estimates have it as high as 4% which is truly terrifying. If there’s any good news in those numbers it’s that in several countries including our own systematic efforts have been made and/or incompetence in testing & providing good information to medical providers and the public it’s likely the number of cases is much higher than have been documented/reported. That would mean the mortality rate won’t be over three percent, and might not even be 2% although at this point there’s enough data from enough clusters to indicate the 2% figure is, if not the low end of the mortality rate than at least in the ballpark. That would still make this strain of flu at least fifteen more times deadly than the common varieties we deal with year to year.
So, when you put those two things together you have a strain of flu that spreads particularly easily AND is far more lethal than common strains of flu. That’s a bad combination any way you look at it. If that’s not bad enough, there now seems to be reliable information from China where all this started and which has had by far the most cases that there are two variants of covoid-19. IOW, it has mutated already. I noted earlier that mutations can make this or any virus/bacterium less virulent, but that can also make these organisms more so. Given the large number of cases already, a number which it’s virtually certain doesn’t reflect just how many people have been infected and died even if this epidemic subsides in the northern hemisphere by summer the virus will still be circulating. Both in the northern hemisphere’s warm months, but in the winter months in the southern hemisphere. That means it’s more than a small possibility this could come roaring back in the fall, and in more lethal form.
Just like happened with the Spanish Flu a hundred years ago. Under the best of circumstances this was going to be tough to deal with. However, in his zeal to undo anything that the Obama administration did (which added to stuff prior administrations did) Turd Trump has gutted the ability to respond to this disease in the U.S. He has also, by gutting our entities that worked with other countries to confront this type of thing hurt the rest of the world’s ability to respond since as with so many other things the U.S. was the leader, and the country whose lead others followed. Medicine has made stunning advances since the 1918-19 pandemic, but travel around the world takes place on a wider and faster scale than it did in those days. And now we have a President and administration that only cares about the stock market and corporate profits looking good in newscasts so they can run for re-election based on a “great economy.”
But a virus doesn’t respond to tweets, or to what helps or hurts a specific candidate or political Party. It simply does what it does which is find a way to survive and one way it does so is to grow in numbers of individual organisms that it’s impossible to kill them all off. Scientists have actually been warning us about what we might be about to experience for years and years. Why is yet another subject, that would take a lot more explaining and this has already gotten longer than I’d hoped it would be.
Mypoint is that we might think the worst is over by summer and if as is likely the numbers seem to indicate that things are under some measure of control you-know-who will be crowing about having single-handedly save the country and the world. But I look at the parallels between a hundred years ago and now, and as early as October (and October 2019 was when it was clear that outbreak was back with a vengeance) we might be seeing history repeat itself. As I said, we’re not all gonna die, but forty or fifty million minimum and possibly upwards of a hundred million deaths (and upwards of a half million deaths in our own country) is a terrible thing to contemplate. Given how interconnected our economy is, and especially in a country like our own that has a “service economy” the impacts could well trigger a collapse like we saw in 2008 or even worse.
We aren’t prepared. Not even close. The reason for that is because a weak, vain man with an ego thinner than an eggshell has gone about pointedly destroying the very government institutions and our ability to respond to both the medical and economic crises we face. He was wanted, and even demanded everything be all about HIM. ll, he should be careful what he wishes for because if what happened a hundred years ago repeats itself the goobers out there in MAGA land will suffer and die just like the rest of us, and in numbers that are far too large for them to ignore. Sure, they will try to rationalize with “Deep State” CT bullshit but not all of them will be able to do so.
I take no pleasure in pointing out that they will get sick, die and lose jobs and homes just like everyone else. But will not grieve their losses, at least those who have reached adulthood. They will have brought it upon themselves. Sadly, they will have brought it upon far more than their closed-minded, selfish and hateful ranks.
I’ll conclude pretty much how I started. No, we’re not all gonna die. But a lot, and perhaps tens of millions will and many of those won’t have had to die. Just like a hundred years ago. Even more will suffer due to the societal and economic disruption, up to an including a possible Great (as in world wide) Depression 2.0. If the virus (as is a very real possibility) quiets down & explodes this fall many of the deaths and disruption would still happen in the best of circumstances. But due to politics as in certain “leaders” including our own being more concerned about their own status far more people will die and far more people will suffer than had to be the case.
( Originally posted on Politizoom.com )