Showing posts tagged as: Coronavirus
Angela’s Germany: A Science-Guided Response to the Present Pandemic
As Europe moves through Autumn, a number of countries are reporting new records for coronavirus infections. This month Italy recorded a 24-hour total of over 10,000 new cases for three consecutive days, while France recorded its highest ever total of new cases for a single day, 32,427. Similarly, the Czech Republic broke the 10,000 barrier for the first time (1,105 cases). Even in Germany, virus cases for a single day reached a pandemic high of 7,830 [‘Italy steps up coronavirus restrictions as Europe fights second wave’, Euronews, 18-Oct-2020, www.euronews.com].
October 4 2020 (Image: WELT)
Not withstanding this current setback in the fight against the pandemic, Germany has easily been the stand-out performer among the larger countries trying to combat Covid-19 in Europe. A raft of factors have been advanced to explain Germany’s success. Obviously, it hinges ultimately on a collective effort by the government, medical authorities and experts, and compliance by the nation. A lot of the credit for steering the ship into relatively safe waters (fingers crossed) goes to the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Almost from day one she did a number of things right. Projecting a visage of calm and composure, she was upfront with the German people. Honestly and transparently, she was prepared to admit when the government didn’t always have the answer at a given time. Building trust requires candour and elicits consent and compliance. From when the pandemic hit, she was proactive and decisive. There was no “coronavirus denying” by the leadership (unlike the errant course charted initially by the US and UK governments), but an immediate marshalling of efforts to tackle the problem facing it※ [‘The secret of Germany’s COVID-19 success: Angela Merkel Is a Scientist’, (Saskia Miller), The Atlantic, 20-Apr-2020, www.theatlantic.com].
There were other factors relating to demographics and the public health response that were vital—average age of coronavirus patients was lower than elsewhere; better delivery of testing than many countries; careful and comprehensive tracking of cases (>90%); modern, maintained public health system;local responses—but in a sense everything flowed from the chancellor who has been at the helm of the German state since 2005. With a science background (PhD in quantum chemistry), Merkel knew to listen to the scientists, the public health experts, like the celebrated virologist Christian Drosten. As a scientist herself she respected their views, knew that this was essential to finding out what was needed⚡. Drawing on the well-funded scientific-research organisations and university medical departments that she had maintained, she was able to coordinate these into a single, effective coronavirus task force (Miller).
(Photo: Getty Images)
One observer has attributed Germany’s (and Merkel’s) success to the “Four L’s” which may in the event of a new wave of Covid be integral to “bending the curve quickly once again – luck, learning, local responses and listening. The ‘luck’ amounted in part to being in the right place at the right time…having acquired and readied the coronavirus PCR tests in advance so they were “available in Munich when the first tests showed up there”, but this could arguably be equally attributable to due diligence and preparedness, and an instinctual willingness to follow hunches. Learning from the experiences of other countries who had prior exposure to coronavirus also played a key part – in this Germany was fortunate to have had a delayed arrival of the disease. The German authorities were able to look at the strategies of countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, see what was working well there, and cherry-pick. Germany’s political structure, emphasising localised divisions of authority (government by lander), permitted a decentralised approach to the pandemic which allowed the bureaucratic response to the crisis to be speeded up. The fourth ‘L’, listening to the scientific experts, was not just what Merkel, but what politicians at the local level in Germany◔ did assiduously [‘The four simple reasons Germany is managing Covid-19 better than its neighbors’, (Julia Belluz), Vox, 15-Oct-2020, www.vox.com].
(Source: www.dw.de/)
Of course Chancellor Merkel’s policies in the crisis have had their detractors—business lockdowns and restrictions that go on for lengthy periods are sure to draw displeasure—her measured approach however has been demonstrably unifying and has resulted in overwhelming support from the electorate rallying behind her (approval ratings for the chancellor during the pandemic have been as high as 86%).
PostScript: Denialists and Bunglers Inc
Last month British PM Boris Johnson, in an all-too characteristically ham-fisted way, tried to deflect criticism of his government’s abysmal handling of the pandemic vis-vís (especially) Germany by putting the UK’s worse handling of the crisis down to the ‘fact’ that the UK is “a freedom loving” country [‘Why is Germany doing better than the UK at fighting a resurgence of Covid-19?’, The Local – De, 26-Sep-2020, www.thelocal.de/].
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※ “communicating with scientific rigour, (and) with calm…(Merkel) disarms hysteria” (Ricardo Roa)
⚡ compare and contrast with you know who!
◔ such as the leader of the Free State of Bavaria, Markus Söder, one of the country’s politicians on the short list to succeed Ms Merkel
The Moral Guardians’ War on ‘Pernicious’ Comic Books
As all of us are only too aware, COVID-19 has cut a swathe through public gatherings, large aggregations of people are a “no-no” in 2020. Across the globe all manner of events have been on the receiving end of a different sort of cancel culture treatment. The superhero-studded world of comic book conventions has not been immune to this contagion. Comic-cons everywhere, including the San Diego Comic-Con International, America’s oldest comic book convention, have been red pencilled in this year of the plague. But if we turn the clock back some 70 years we might observe a time when the existential threat was directed at the product itself, the actual comic books.
There were no organised comic-cons in the more cautious and conformist 1940s and 50s, but this in no way equated with a lack of popularity of comic books. In fact the Forties had been a Golden Age, especially for American comic books, Comic strip creators were riding high with a slew of superhero characters—including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Captain America, the Avengers and Captain Marvel—proving lucrative for companies like Detective Comics (DC Comics), Entertaining Comics (EC Comics) and Timely Comics (Marvel Comics). By mid-decade comic books were the most popular form of entertainment in the US (with 80 to 100 million copies being sold per weekBy the late 1940s comic books were well and truly being marketed towards adults as well…”fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, titles (began to tell) lurid stories of crime, vice, lust and horror” [David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, (2008)].
♦️ Wonder Woman (Sensation Comics, 1942)
‘Seduction of the Innocent’
Dark clouds appeared over the comics industry’s blue skies in 1954 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by a Bavarian-born neurobiologist Fredric Wertham. The book was “a full-throttled attack on the lurid contents of various crime, horror, and even super-hero titles, (with an emphasis on) graphic illustrations of wife-beatings, sado-masochism, and gruesome murders”⁕ Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, (2012)]. Wertham’s inditement of the American comics of the day was that they corrupted impressionable youth, inveigling them into fanaticising about evil, leading them on a ruinous path to criminal behaviour, etc.[‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 1’, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Crime SuspenStories, 1950
1940s, North and bonfires
Wertham was not the first critic to take aim at the US comic book industry. In the view of CBLDF✥, since the 1930s “the comics medium has been stigmatized as low-value speech”. In 1940 conservative commentator Sterling North urged parents and educators to guard against the influx of “mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim” in contemporary comic strips. North also decried the incidence of “voluptuous females in scanty attire, machine gun (-wielding hoodlums) and “cheap political propaganda” in the comics. The effect on children, he went on to say, of these “badly drawn, badly written and badly printed” strips was “a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems” as well as constituting “a violent stimulant” to them [North, Sterling. “A National Disgrace”. Childhood Education. 17.1, 1940: 56. Print.]. During WWII religious and patriotic organisations conducted public burnings of ‘disapproved’ comic books in American neighbourhoods – in ironic juxtaposition of the war being fought overseas concurrently against Nazi Germany (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
♦️ Dr Wertham, researching
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“Pop culture McCarthyite”
But it was Seduction of the Innocent that struck the strongest chord in a 1950s America “looking over its shoulder” for real or imagined enemies of society in the grip of a hysteria heightened by McCarthyism. It triggered a public outcry, prompting an investigation into the industry by a Senate sub-committee. Publicity from the hearing was damning and the fallout was devastating. Comic books were denounced by Wertham and other moral crusaders as contributing to juvenile delinquency⚉. At the height of the moral panic, comic book publishers were sometimes treated as though they were mobsters, and the cartoonists, as if they were pornographers [‘The Caped Crusader’ (Jeet Heer), Slate, 04-Apr-2008, www.slate.com; ’Comic Censorship, Part 1’].
The emasculated comic book
Threatened with both public and government censure, the comics industry choose to self-regulate, introducing the Comic Code Authority, “a censorship code that thoroughly sanitized the content of comics for years to come”. The new code (something analogous to the film world’s draconian Hays Code) was taken to ridiculous lengths, it forbade comics from showing zombies, vampires, ghouls and werewolves; words like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ couldn’t be mentioned in the story lines; nor could criminals be portrayed sympathetically and the institution of marriage could not be seen to be disrespected (Howe).
♦️ The imprimatur of the self-censor
Comic book publishers were forced to produce ‘purified’ comics suitable for a younger market—more infantile and tamer stories, squeaky-clean but ‘dopey’ heroes replacing the previous super-overachievers—in short, “safe fantasies” for the youngest readers (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
The economic and human toll
The new reality of the world of comic books decimated the industry’s hitherto prosperity…between 1954 and 1956 the number of titles produced was cut by more than half – from 650 in 250 over that two-year period!✧. By summer 1954 15 comics publishers in the US went belly-up. EC Comics, up to then one of the market leaders, discontinued all its comics lines…its much-vilified publisher William Gaines switching production solely to the satirical Mad magazine. Over 800 jobs in the industry vanished more or less immediately (Howe; Hajdu). Many talented inkers and pencillers left the industry for good, many for economic reasons but others due at least in part to the stifling of their creative artistic output.
Endnote: Demise of adult comics
Both Wertham and North in their hatchet jobs on the comics genre made the error of completely disregarding the significant adult readership of comic books. The recovery of the industry, the winning back of that readership, took many years…it didn’t really happen until the emergence of ‘Underground’ comics in the 1960s with publications like Zap Comics and comic artists like R Crumb§ [‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 2, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Detective Comics, 1945
PostScript: The Wertham thesis unpacked
After it became accessible in 2010 Wertham’s research on comics books was investigated and his conclusions found largely baseless…Wertham was said to have manipulated data, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence. A further weakness of his work was that he used non-representative samples as the basis for his conclusions. Scorn was also poured on Wertham’s contentions that the comic character Superman harboured Nazi SS tendencies, that the Batman/Robin relationship had homoerotic overtones, and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian role model (Wertham saw this as wholly undesirable)[‘Fredric Wertham’,Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Heer].
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⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
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dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts (Hajdu; Heer)
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§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥ Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
⚉ a sense of elitism also coloured Wertham et al’s dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts
✧ in excess of 100 pieces of anti-comic book legislation came into effect in the Fifties (Hajdu)
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Peru and Ecuador; and a Southern Cone Contrarian
As Europe starts to pull itself out of the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the Americas for the most part are still firmly mired in the devastating crisis of the pandemic…more worryingly, COVID-19 cases continue to rise and even accelerate in some countries as Latin America seems to be turning into “pandemic central”, the ‘new’ Europe❅. This is occurring despite the continent comprising only eight percent of the world’s population and having had the advantage of time to prepare for the virus which reached its shores some six weeks after ravaging Europe.
(Source: www.maps-of-the-world.net)
Smallness helps
The picture of Central and South America is not uniformly bleak. Some of the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, have managed to restrict their nation’s outbreaks to low levels of infection and casualties. This last mentioned country was surveyed in an earlier blog entitled Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador – June 2020). Among the Southern Cone countries, Argentina and Uruguay stand in contrast to their neighbours Chile and Brazil. Argentina (population of >45 million)—its commendable performance vs the virus slightly tarnished by a recent upsurge following an easing of the lockdown—has a total of 39,557 COVID-19 cases and only 979 deaths, compared with Brazil (whose leader Jai Bolsonaro has taken a recklessly dismissive attitude towards the pandemic). Even on a per capita basis Argentina‘s figures are still a fraction of the human disaster befalling Brazil which has racked up 1,038,568 cases and 49,090 deaths (population: 212 million). The Argentine Republic’s results are also way better than Chile’s record of 231,393 cases and 4,093 deaths (from just 19 million) [‘Argentina’s president enters voluntary isolation amid coronavirus surge’, (Uni Goñi) The Guardian, 18-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].
Brazil: COVID-19 mural message (Source: Getty Images)
Uruguay: Stellar success of an outlier
Uruguay has fared as well as anyone in Central/South America in avoiding a pandemic catastrophe on the scale of some of its neighbours. A tiny population (3.5 million) helps immeasurably but the sheer lowness of its corona numbers stands by themselves – just 1,040 confirmed cases and 24 deaths. This has been achieved despite a demographic profile that should have made it highly vulnerable to the disease: the largest regional proportion of elderly citizens and a population which is 96% urban. And an outcome secured not by lockdowns and quarantines (allowing Uruguay to preserve its national economic health cf. the stricken economies of its large neighbours Brazil and Argentina), but by eliciting the voluntary compliance of its citizenry – and through the luxury of having a near-universal, viable health care system✺ [‘Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?’, (Mac Margolis), Bloomberg, 30-May-2020, www.bloomberg.com].
Uruguay (Photo: Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)
Peru:
Aside from Brazil the country in the region most in strife due to the pandemic at the moment is probably Peru. Peru’s statistics are stark – over 247,925 confirmed cases and 7,660 deaths in a population of 32 million. What is particularly troubling about Peru is that, unlike Brazil, at onset it seemed to be pulling all the right reins, implementing one of Latin America’s earliest and strictest lockdowns. Months of enforced lockdown have however failed to flatten the curve of infections. Peru finds itself in a demoralising “double whammy”, the public health catastrophe continues unabated❈ while the recourse to a tough national lockdown has further crippled the economy [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times (UK), 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?’, (Dan Collyns), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com]✪.
⇑ Andean pabluchas patrol Cuzco streets to enforce social distancing and mandatory mask measures (Photo: Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images)
Indicators of the poverty trap
The economic predicament Peru finds itself stems from the country’s high reliance on an informal economy (reaching some 70%). What Peru has in common with Brazil—and has been exacerbated by the pandemic—is very high social inequality. The poorest Peruvians cannot afford to stay home, to isolate as they should. Many are without bank accounts and under the informal economy have to travel to collect their wages, those without home refrigerators also need to shop frequently – all of which makes them more vulnerable to be exposed to the virus [‘Latin America reels as coronavirus gains pace’, (Natalia Alcoba), Aljazeera, 15-Jun-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. Disease and impoverishment have converged in Peru to make the predicament more acute for those of the poor who need life-saving oxygen of which there is now a scandalous critical shortage – the situation being exploited by profiteering hit men (the sicarios) controlling the black market oxygen supplies [‘In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort to black market and its 1,000 percent markups’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 18-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
Ecuador and Guayaquil ⇓
Ecuador:
In Ecuador the pandemic epicentre is the western city of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city. This is thought to be due to a couple of factors, the city’s sprawling slums where “many residents live hand-to-mouth and routinely violate the government lockdown…in order to work”, and because many Guayaquil exchange students and migrant workers came back to the city from Spain and Italy in March [‘COVID-19 Numbers Are Bad In Ecuador. The President Says The Real Story Is Even Worse’, (John Otis), NPR, 20-Apr-2020, www.npr.org]. The unpreparedness and inability of the authorities to cope with the crisis has affected the woeful degree of testing done, the lack of hospital facilities for patients and even the capacity to bury the dead as the bodies of coronavirus victims were left piling up on the city’s streets. In the wake of the disaster the Guayaquil Council entered into a slinging match with Quito (the national government), asserting that the government has under-represented the city’s death toll by as much as four-fifths, that it failed to provide it with the health care backup demanded of the disaster, as well as calling out the corruption of public utilities which has accentuated the crisis (Alcoba). Ecuador currently has 49,731 confirmed cases and 4,156 fatalities in a population of 17 million.
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End-note: The hypothesis of virus protection at high altitude
Among the multitude of worldwide research projects triggered by the pandemic, a multi-country study looking at Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet has advanced the theory that populations that live at a height of above 3,000 metres have significantly lower levels of susceptibility to coronavirus than their lowland counterparts. The study attributes the capacity of high altitude to nullify the disease down to the fact that living at high altitude allows people to cope with hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood), and that the altitude provides a favourable natural environment—dry mountain air, high UV radiation and a resulting lowering of barometric pressure—reduces the virus’ ability to linger in the air. The COVID-19 experience of Cuzco in Peru seems to corroborate this hypothesis, being lightly affected compared to the rampage elsewhere in the country – the high Andean city has had only 899 confirmed cases and three deaths. Similarly, La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest legislative capital, has recorded only 38 coronavirus-related deaths to date⊠ [‘From the Andes to Tibet, the coronavirus seems to be sparing populations at high altitudes’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 01-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
<Þ> all country coronavirus counts quoted above are as at 20-June-2020
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❅ for week ending 20th June 2020, confirmed cases for Latin America represented half of all new coronavirus cases (Source: WHO)
✺ a like-for-like comparison to Uruguay might be Paraguay – also a small population (6.9 million), only 1,336 cases and 13 deaths but at the cost of a draconian lockdown with an economy-crippling end-game.
❈ even prior to COVID-19 striking, the Peruvian public health system was struggling due to “decades of chronic underinvestment” (eg, spending <$700 a day on health care) (Tegel, ‘In Peru’)
✪ the strict lockdown has been less rigorous when removed from the urban centres…in outlying areas, in the northern coast and the Amazonas region (particularly bad in the Amazonian city of Iquitos) it was less “honoured in the breach than the observance” leading to the formation of new virus clusters (Collyns)
⊠ other experts discount the study’s findings noting that most coronavirus infections occur indoors, negating the relevance of UV levels (Tegel, ‘From the Andes’)
Coronavirus Responses and Patterns in Africa: Southern and West Africa
Three months ago when the COVID-19 outbreak started to move around the globe, the World Health Organisation issued a warning to the continent of Africa whose nations were just starting to feel its impact [‘Coronavirus: WHO tells African countries to ‘prepare for the worst’, Eye on Africa, 18-Mar-2020, www.france24.com]. The pandemic was late in reaching Africa and initially slow to make inroads, taking 98 days to register its first 100,000 confirmed cases but is now accelerating – only taking 18 more days to hit the 200,000 mark of cases [‘COVID-19: WHO warns of virus acceleration in Africa’, Vanguard, 14-Jun-2020, www.vanguardngr.com]. Overall African fatalities sit at 6,793 (16-Jun-2020) with just five countries (Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Nigeria) accounting for 70% of the deaths✹.
Southern Africa: To date South Africa has been the nation most heavily affected by the public health emergency – over 73,000 confirmed cases and 1,568 deaths (16-Apr-2020). The Western Cape province has become the epicentre of the RSA pandemic, recording so far around 75% of the country’s fatalities. The province’s high incidence of cases has been attributed to the presence of poor, densely populated townships like Khayelitsha, a shantytown of 500,000 people. Cape Town’s thriving tourism (before the closedown) has also been advanced as contributing to the outbreak’s toll. South Africa, with a more developed economy and better health care system, has conducted more a million virus tests, while many other African countries have racked up only a few thousands. The clear implication of this is that ”the disease is spreading undetected elsewhere on the continent” [‘Cape Town becomes South Africa’s coronavirus hotspot’, (Jevans Nyabiage), South China Morning Post, 12-Jun-2020, www.amp.scmp.com].
⍐ Bulawayo, Zim. (Photo: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)
South Africa’s smaller, northern neighbour Zimbabwe has done surprisingly well on paper in the crisis (four deaths recorded only), but with the rider that testing for the disease—hampered by a critical shortage of health equipment and infrastructure—has been very limited…by 10th April it had tested a mere 392 people [‘In Zimbabwe, lack of tests sparks fear COVID-19 goes undetected’, (Chris Muronzi), Aljazeera, 10-Apr-2020, www.aljazeera.com].
(Image: SABC News)
West Africa: Results of the fight against the pandemic in West Africa have been mixed. Senegal began its counter-measures early in January, closing the borders, implementing contact-tracing, etc. The country was able to produce a test kit for COVID-19 costing only $1 per patient and has managed to accommodate every coronavirus patient either in hospital or in a community health facility. African countries who experienced the 2013/14 Ebola virus outbreak like Senegal put that experience to good use, prohibiting large gatherings, strict night-time curfews, banning intercity travel, etc. Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) followed Senegal’s approach, declaring a state of emergency and trying to impose curfews in it’s main city Abidjan, but the country’s buoyant economy has taken quite a hit from the coronavirus crisis. Ghana has utilised an extensive system of contact-tracing and a “pool-testing” mechanism which follows up only on positive results [‘Why are Africa’s coronavirus successes being overlooked?’, (Afua Hirsch), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Women unite against COVID-19 in Senegal’, Relief web, 10-Jun-2020, www.reliefweb.int].
The speeding up of coronavirus cases in a small African country like Guinea-Bissau has occurred notwithstanding it’s small population and limited testing, reflecting a reality stretching across the whole continent, the sheer incapacity of weak and under-resourced national health infrastructures to cope with the pandemic [‘West Africa facing food crisis as coronavirus spreads’, (Emmanuel Akinwotu), The Guardian, 16-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
⍐ Kano (Photo: Reuters/Luc Gnago)
In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, the most worrying hotspot has been the north in Kano state and metropolis. The pandemic has gotten out of hand here because of a confluence of factors, including the state government’s early failure to admit the presence of coronavirus (which it initially tried to pass off as an upsurge in other illnesses), costing it vital lost time in the fight against the disease; the closure of Kano’s only testing centre for a week in April; acute shortages of PPE; and the pre-existing displacement of 1.8m people in the region [‘Covid-19 Outbreak in Nigeria Is Just One of Africa’s Alarming Hot Spots’, (Ruth Maclean), New York Times, 17-May-2020, www.nytimes.com].
Dakar, Senegal (Photo: John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images)
PostScript: A young and rural population Africa’s avoidance of the worse excesses of COVID-19 thus far has prompted the theory that the continent’s demographics is working in it’s favour. A study in the journal BMJ Global Health attributes this to Africa’s young, rural-based population▣ …60% of the population is under 25, cf. Europe (95% of its deaths from the virus have been people over 60). BMJ hypothesises that Africa will likely suffer “more infections but most will be asymptomatic or mild, and probably (go) undetected” [‘Africa’s young and rural population may limit spread and severity of coronavirus, study says’, (Jevans Nyabiage), South China Morning Post, 28-May-2020, www.amp.scmp.com].
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✹ Egypt and South Africa alone account for nearly 48% of the entire continent’s corona-related deaths
▣ the study focused on Kenya, Senegal and Ghana
Russia’s Coronavirus Anomaly, a Question of What You Count
From the start of this month Russia began a gradual re-opening of services after a ten-week pandemic lockdown. This is happening despite new cases of COVID-19 continuing to materialise – the tally of confirmed case of the virus has now ticked over the 500,000 mark (as at 12-Jun-2020). There are several reasons contributing to the decision to re-open, some political and some economic.
Concern for the damage sustained by the Russian economy by the pandemic was foremost to the Kremlin but President Putin also wanted things functioning as close to normal in time for two upcoming events important to him. The 75th end of WWII anniversary military parade in Red Square—a PR showcase of Russian power—postponed from May is rescheduled for 24th of June. Even more personally important for the Russian leader is the July 1 vote✱, Putin has put up far-reaching constitutional amendments for approval, the main outcome of which could see Putin’s iron-grip on the federation extend till 2036.
(Photo: Reuthers / SPUTNIK)
Discontent with Russia’s approach to the crisis
An underlying reason for the hasty end to the national lockdown might be that it hasn’t been as successful as hoped. The tracing app utilised in Moscow (the epicentre of the country’s COVID-19 outbreak) has had issues with its effectiveness. Putin’s personal popularity was at risk with public resentment voiced at the prolonged restrictions (murmurings of Orwellian and Soviet-like echoes). The medical response by the Kremlin has been called out by many front-line responders for its shortcomings⊘. One doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva (leader of a Russian doctors’ union), frustrated at the president’s insistence that the public health crisis was under control, has been at great risk to herself distributing PPE to medical workers on the front-line, provoking retribution from the Kremlin [‘The doctor who defied a President’, ABC News, (Foreign Correspondent, Eric Campbell), 06-Jun-2020, www.abcnews.com.au]. This is symptomatic of Moscow’s neglect of the regions who are expected to handle both the outbreaks without the medical infrastructure to deal with a large volume of cases✩ and the economic fallout from the crisis without adequate financial assistance [‘Russia’s coronavirus cases top 300,000 but deaths suspiciously low: ‘We conceal nothing’ Kremlin says’, (Holly Ellyatt), CNBC, Upd 21-May-2020, www.cnbc.com].
Counting the virus’ toll: a small exercise in data massaging? Some Russia watchers have cast doubts about the reported COVID-19 figures released by Moscow. This includes WHO has questioned Russia’s low death toll, describing it as ‘unusual’ [‘WHO asks Russia to review its Covid-19 death toll in rare rebuke’, (Natalia Vasilyeva), The Telegraph, 11-Jun-2020, www.telegraph.co.uk]. While the number of Russian virus cases is comparatively high, the official record of fatalities is disproportionately low compared to the rest of Europe…Russia’s fatality rate is 0.9% cf. UK’s, 14.4% (roughly 10% of the mean figure for Western Europe) [‘How Russia’s Coronavirus Outbreak Became One of the World’s Worst’, (Madeline Roache), Time, 15-May-2020, www.time.com]. The Kremlin has rejected the criticism that it is withholding the full impact of the pandemic, but outside observers pinpoint an anomaly in the methodology it uses to count cases. Unlike say Belgium (which is strictly inclusive), Russia has not counted deaths as caused by the coronavirus where other co-morbidities are present, ie, if a patient tested positive for the virus and then had a subsequent critical episode, the cause of death is not recorded as COVID-19 [‘Russia Is Boasting About Low Coronavirus Deaths. The Numbers Are Deceiving’, (Piotr Sauer & Evan Gershkovich), The Moscow Times, 14-May-2020, www.themoscowtimes.com].
A deserted, locked-down Red Square (Source: www.citizen.co.za)
Compartmentalising the fatalities This persuasively accounts for the recent discordant mortality statistics reported by Russian sources, eg, if you separate fatalities directly attributable to coronavirus from other fatalities for May, the unexplained “excess deaths” recorded for Moscow is up about 5,800 on that occurring during the previous three Mays [‘New data suggests Russia may have a lot more COVID-19 deaths than it says it has’, (Alexandra Odynova), CBS News, 11-Jun-2020, www.cbsnews.com]. A look at Dagestan, a region with one of the largest clusters outside of the capital, is also instructive. As of mid-May it had experienced 35 deaths listed as caused by coronavirus, but in the same timeframe it recorded 650 deaths attributed to “community-acquired pneumonia”. One explanation from Russia watchers is that “local officials want to present Moscow with ‘good’ figures” (Ellyatt). If the Kremlin were to publish both sets of figures in its official data, such transparency would deflect much of the doubt and questioning by outsiders (Sauer & Gershkovich).
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✱ that Putin is prepared to push through the referendum at this time and risk aggregating the public health and safety of Russians, confirms for many the president’s prioritising of his own political motives [‘Russian officials, citing COVID-19, balk at working July 1 constitutional referendum’, CBC News, 11–Jun-2020, www.cbc.ca]
⊘ many medical practitioners in Russia have been disaffected by both a critical shortage of equipment to fight the virus and by unpaid wages [‘Exclusive: Did Russia pass the coronavirus test? Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov Responds’, (M Chance, Z Ullah & N Hodge), CNN, 09-Jun-2020, www.amp.cnn.com]
✩ the COVID-19 emergency has exposed the deteriorating state of the Russian health service in the Putin era – the Semashko system infrastructure allowed to run down while the private medical sector has flourished [‘Can the Russian Health Care System Cope with the Coronavirus?’, (Estelle Levresse), The Nation, 09-Jun-2020, www.thenation.com]
The Pandemic’s “Holy Grail”, the Elusive Vaccine: For the “Global Public Good” or an Inward-looking Assertion of Vaccine Nationalism?
At this point in the war on COVID-19 there are over 120 separate vaccination projects—involving Big Pharma, the public sector, academe, smaller biotech firms and NGOs—all working flat out worldwide trying to invent the ‘magical’ vaccine that many people believe will be necessary to bring the current pandemic to an end. While nothing is guaranteed (there’s still no cure for the HIV/AIDS virus around since the Eighties), the sheer weight of numbers dedicated to the single task, even if say 94% of the efforts fail, there’s still a reasonable chance of success for achieving a vaccine for coronavirus✱ [“Former WHO board member warns world against coronavirus ‘vaccine nationalism’”, (Paul Karp), The Guardian, 18-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
(Source: CEPI)
If and when the vaccine arrives, will it get to those in greatest need? The way the coronavirus crisis has been handled between nations so far doesn’t exactly give grounds for optimism. Collective cooperation on fighting the pandemic has been sadly absent from the dialogue. We’ve seen the US attack China over coronavirus’ origins with President Trump labelling it the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus”, and China retaliating with far-fetched accusations of America importing the virus to Wuhan via a visiting military sporting team, and the whole thing becoming entwined in a looming trade war between the two economic powers❂.
(source: www.socioecomonics.net)
The advent of COVID-19 has introduced us to terms such as “contact tracing”, “social distancing”, “covidiot” and the like, but recently we‘ve been hearing a new term thrown about, one with more ominous implications – “vaccine nationalism”. As the scattered islands of scientific teams continue the hunt for the “silver bullet” that presumably will fix the disease, there is a growing sense that the country or countries who first achieve the breakthrough will adopt a “my nation first” approach to the distribution of the vaccine. There are multiple signs that this may be the reality…the US government has launched the curiously named “Operation Warp Speed”, aimed at securing the first 300 million doses of the vaccine available by January 2021 for Americans [‘Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ Aims to Rush Coronavirus Vaccine’, (Jennifer Jacobs & Drew Armstrong), Bloomberg, 30-Apr-2020, www.bloomberg.com]. In the UK Oxford University is working with biopharma company AstraZeneca to invent a vaccine that will be prioritised towards British needs.
(Source: IndiaMart)
A “vac race” Not to be outdone, China, operating through Sinovac Biotech, is at the forefront of testing potential cures for COVID-19. The pressing need for a vaccine to safeguard its own population aside, Beijing’s rationale includes a heavy investment in national pride and the demonstration of Chinese scientific superiority (cf. Trump’s motivation). The Sino-US rivalry over finding a cure for the pandemic has been compared to the Cold War era ”Space Race” between the US and the USSR (Milne & Crow). A political war of superpower v superpower on a new battlefield…noted as bring part of a longer trend of the “securitisation of global health “ where the health objective increasingly has to share the stage with issues of national security and international diplomacy (E/Prof Stuart Blume, quoted in ibid.).
An environment of competition in lieu of collaboration Even prior to the start of serious talk about the vaccine, the coronavirus crisis was provoking an “everyone for themselves”, non-cooperative approach. With the onset of equipment shortages needed to combat the virus outbreak, an international bunfight developed over access to PPE (personal protection equipment). 3M masks destined for Germany were intercepted by the White House and re-routed to US recipients; French president, Emmanuel Macron, seized millions of masks that were on route to Sweden; Trump purportedly tried to buy CureVac, a German biopharma company working on the vaccine [‘Why vaccine ‘nationalism’ could slow the coronavirus fight’, (Richard Milne & David Crow), Financial Times, 14-May-20320, www.ft.com/]. India (under Hindu nationalist Modi), the world’s largest supplier of hydroxychloroquine (touted as a cure for the virus), withheld it from being exported. As part of this neo-protectionism of the corona medical trove, more than 69 countries banned the export of PPE, medical devices and medicines [‘A New Front for Nationalism: The Global Battle Against a Virus’, (Peter S Goodman, Katie Thomas, Sui-Lee Wee & Jeffrey Gettleman), New York Times, 10-Apr-2020, www.nytimes.com].
Politics and economics over science and global health? Will narrow self-interest and economic advantage prevail? Will Big Pharma sell the virus panacea to the highest bidders? A zero-sum game in which those who can’t afford the cost fall by the wayside? There are precedents…the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine for the 2009 Swine Flu was predicated on the purchasing power of the higher-income countries, not on the risk of international transmission [‘The Danger of Vaccine Nationalism’, (Rebecca Weintraub, Asaf Britton & Mark L Rosenberg), Harvard Business Review, 22-May-2020, www.hbr.org/]. The availability of the vaccine is seen as integral to restarting the global economy (Milne & Crow).
The eclipse of multinationalism? With WHO in the eyes of some international players seemingly tarnished by its relationship with China, and by Trump’s undermining of its effectiveness by threatening to withdraw American support, multilateralism is on the back foot. There have been some attempts to stem the tide, CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’)▣, with a mission of promoting a collective response to emerging infectious diseases, is trying to advance both the development of coronavirus vaccines and equitable access to them (http://cepi.net/).
Getting to an “equitable distribution” of the vaccine As CEPI recognises, and is committed to redressing, there is no formal mechanism in existence for fairly distributing vaccines for epidemics…one step being taken is to try to get an equitable distribution strategy accepted by the G20 nations. The only way forward to ensure that allocation is fair and prioritised according to needs is through a coordinated global effort (Milne & Crow; Weintraub eg al).
The fear is thus well founded that if and when a vaccine is discovered and developed, the richer nations will secure a monopoly over it and prevent it getting to poorer nations where it would be urgently needed by the elderly, the immunocompromised and the “first responder” health workers. There are many who hope fervently that a different scenario will be played out, that a more enlightened type of self-interest will prevail. This would require the wealthier countries seeing the bigger picture – the danger that if they don’t redistribute the cures, the outcome will be an adverse effect on the global supply chain and on the world‘s economies. As Gayle Smith (CEO of “One Campaign“, a Washington-based NGO fighting extreme poverty) put it: it is in the richer countries‘ own interests ”to ensure that the virus isn’t running rampant in other countries” (Milne and Crow). “If an international deal can be reached“, CEPI CEO Dr Richard Hatchett said, ”Everyone will win, if not, the race may turn into a free-for-all” with the losers in plain sight [‘Why the race for a Covid-19 vaccine is as much about politics as it is about science’, (Paul Nuki), The Telegraph (UK), 10-Apr-2020, www.telegraph.co.uk].
(Source: www.euroweeklynews.com)
PostScript: Its no done deal! – reining in the wave of vaccine optimism Even some of the scientists working on developing a vaccine are less than sanguine about the prospects. As immunologist Professor Ian Frazer (UQld) explains: there is no model of how to attack the virus. Trying to come up with a vaccine for upper respiratory tract diseases is complicated due to “the virus landing on the outside of you”, as we have seen with the common cold. What’s needed is “an immunise response which migrates out to where (the coronavirus) lands” [‘No vaccine for coronavirus a possibility’, (Candace Sutton), News, 19-Apr-2020, www.news.com.au].
──── ୨୧ ────
✱ a matter of getting “the maximum shots on goal” as Jane Halton, a former member of the WHO board, put it
❂ with Trump aided and abetted in this mission by Peter Navarro (who Bloomberg calls “Trump’s Trade Warrior”) enthusiastically leading the charge in the undeclared trade war with China
▣ with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Flying’s Future Shock: Anticipating the Great Reset
All the travel and aviation pundits say commercial flying—when it does finally get airborne again—will never be the same again. There are so many imponderables and unknowns about the enigmatic future of airline travel, the cup of endless speculation nonetheless runneth over.
No one, inside the industry or out, knows when international flights will resume normal services. Like everything else it hinges on containing, and ultimately on subduing the pandemic (the “holy grail” of the vaccine?). When it does happen and things return to ‘normal’, we know it will be a ‘new’ normal…so let’s concern ourselves now with what it might look like?
What’s on the cards at airports in the future? Airports will need to design or augment existing health and safety measures to stack up to the new requirements. Airlines will be trying to minimise the risk of human-to-human contagion, which’ll probably mean touchless check-ins and more utilisation of self-service E-ticketing machines, thermal scanning of body temperature, increasing use of biometrics. The imperative of social distancing will still be with us, airports will have to adhere to the safety edicts of keeping everyone 1.5m apart from everyone else. But will this be feasible, or even partly attainable? Airports are people magnets, people come en masse – to fly, to work, to farewell other people and to welcome others on return.
A pessimistic prognosis with very little “blue sky” Will we end up seeing airports despairingly throwing their hands up in the air and saying it’s all too much? If the prescribed public health measures include things like wiping down the handles of every piece of baggage and all the trays as they go through the scanner, that will add intolerable delays to an already tortuously long process for people at peak-travel times (‘Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad, for a Very Long Time’, (James Fallows), The Atlantic, 11-May-2020, www.theatlantic.com). The CEO of one of the world’s busiest airports, London’s Heathrow, is on record as stating that social distancing will be impossible to maintain✱ (‘COVID-19 and travel: Heathrow boss says social distancing “impossible” in airports’, (Neil Callanan), Traveller, 04-May-2020, www.traveller.com.au).
Will passengers turn up at the luggage check-in fully decked out in hazmat suits, smelling like they’ve been dipped by their heels in a vat of disinfectant? Will face masks, already in common use, gloves and even face shields, be mandatory for everyone in airports? Attaining standardised practice in these and other aspects of the changing landscape of flying, is a long way off happening.
(Source: www.theweek.in)
A Covid-19 health pass? Strict health screening for incoming passengers at international borders in the coronavirus age is a given, but future travellers may need to present new documents along with their international passport. Flyers may need some kind of “proof of good health” to travel internationally – much like the certificate you need now to show you’ve had the required inoculations to enter certain regions prone to yellow fever, malaria, etc. Alternately, these “immunity passports” may be used to record negative coronavirus test results❅ (‘Face masks, blood tests and onboard janitors. Flying’s about to feel very different’, (Karen Gilchrist), CNBC Traveler, 17-May-2020, www.cnbc.com; ‘The era of peak travel is over’, (Sarah Khan), Vox, 22-Apr-2020, www.vox.com).
Social distancing on planes, an oxymoron? If we turn to the aircraft flights themselves, how will they work? Some of the world’s international carriers are considering removing the middle seat in jets (as a temporary move only) to enhance space between passengers⊞. Ryanair is the first carrier to outlaw toilet queues, passengers are now required to raise their hand to request a toilet visit.
Transforming seats into anti-virus shelters Airplane designers are exploring the possibilities of converting the present flying “sardine tins” into spaces that observe social distancing. ‘Janus’ seats are one option advocated by the Italian company Aviointeriors…a double-S shaped configuration which juxtaposes passenger seats in an opposing direction to each other. Passengers are also separated by a high transparent thermoplastic shield or screen. The company had an alternate design which retains the standard seating configuration but attaches a separating perspex screen to each seat (‘Aviointeriors proposes post-COVID-19 Janus seats’, (John Walton), Runway Girl Network, April 2020, www.runwaygirlnetwork.com). The designs are still in testing stage but one drawback is that glass dividers adds another hard surface to passenger space which may be infected by contaminated droplets. the view of Peter Harbison, CAPA Centre for Aviation chairman emeritus, is that the removal of middle seats won’t be sufficient to ensure the social distancing requirement on airplanes, that the outcome is not realistically attainable.
(Image: Aviointeriors S.p.A.)
Hermetically-sealed flying? Clearly, the level of on-board hygiene will need to ramped up post-corona. There’s talk about having cleaners on-board during flights, to target the plane’s tactile zones such as toilet doors. One objective airlines will definitely aim for is minimalism, they’ll want to radically pare back the on-board fringe items. Touchscreen entertainment might disappear, pre-packaged meals left on seats prior to boarding to avoid contact, the end of free drinks, etc (Gilchrist).
The financial side With all the uncertainty of what’s in store for future travel, one thing that will definitely change is the economics of travel. From the consumer side, if airlines resort to removing seats, therefore capping the passenger load of a jet, it’s hard to imagine how that will not result in a ticket price hike. IATA has estimated that with aircrafts only two-thirds full, average fares would jump up to between 43 and 54 per cent✪. Airlines have reckoned that they need to fill 77 per cent capacity of the aircraft just to break even (Gilchrist). Travel industry pundits have indicated that most leisure travellers won’t be willing to pay more if the option of affordable travel is taken away (‘Social distancing on planes during coronavirus: Middle seat won’t stay empty for long’, (Dawn Gilbertson), Traveller, 04-May-2020, www.traveller.com.au).
Some industry insiders have predicted the end of over-tourism, reasoning that for financial reasons or because of the new layers of bureaucracy required, travellers will be less inclined to travel as frequently as before the crisis, and with it will we see the demise of the jet-setting lifestyle and the addictive travel pilgrim. It may be too premature to make such a dramatic call, the 9/11 terrorist attacks put many people off international flying, but not permanently, the industry bounced back its pre-2001 level eventually, and this is an industry that employs over 10 per cent of the global workforce (Khan).
Certainly though, for the foreseeable future, tourists will probably think twice about venturing to the world’s most heavily populated destinations (Venice, Rome, Paris, New York, London, Dubrovnik, the Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis, the Great Wall, etc.). A whole new generation of ‘agoraphobes’ may decide to avoid travelling during the peak season and seek out the less-travelled, remoter locations to holiday.
A respite from the ecological ‘footprint’ for Venezia and Plaza San Marco (Source: www.sites.middlebury.edu)
Business travel to recede? Another matter to ponder is whether business travel will be reduced when the Covid-19 dust settles, will professionals and business folk still travel O/S to exotic locations for conferences? The lockdowns and restrictions of the last few months meant that the overwhelming majority of conferences went virtual. Administrators are no doubt discovering that they can just as meaningfully conduct business meetings by Skype or by video-conferencing, without the need for everyone to be in the same room together. If so, this may well have a negative knock-on affect for economy class tickets (which are subsidised by business and first class) (‘How Much of Airlines’ Revenue Comes From Business Travelers?’, www.investopedia.com).
╳ ╳
✱ we have recently witnessed that once beaches have been reopened to the public, it is virtually impossible to police distance restrictions on packed beachfronts
❅ Emirates have taken a different tact, trialling a rapid “10-minute” blood test at the departures gate (insiders have questioned whether this would be feasible to implement at high-volume times (Gilchrist)
⊞ operators already indicating they will move to vacant middle seats include Southwestern, Delta, American and Qantas – the Australian carrier later reneged on this claiming the risk of Covid infection on an aircraft was minimal (‘Qantas passengers angered after airline reintroduces the middle seat’, 20-May-2020, www.news.com.au/)
✪ that said, some airlines may, for the immediate period, offer travellers discounted fares and deals to reignite interest in overseas travel …“struggling operators (will) incentivize flyers to return to the skies” (Gilchrist)
What Happens to the World’s Airplanes After they are Grounded During the Pandemic?
I think most people, outside the industry, think the answer to this question would be “not a lot”. Unfortunately for the airlines, being grounded, being not able to utilise their assets to realise revenue, is only the start of the problems. In April it was estimate by the industry researcher Cirium that there were over 16,000 commercial passenger aircraft no longer flying – around 62% (the numbers would not have decreased since then) [‘Here’s What You Do With Two-Thirds of the World’s Jets When They Can’t Fly’, (Anurag Kotoky, David Stringer & Ragini Saxena), Bloomberg, 17-Apr-2020, www.bloomberg.com]. The severity of the blow to the airline industry internationally can hardly be understated, coming soon after IATA (International Air Transport Association) predicted (in December 2019) a US$29.3bn net profit for 2020 [http://airlines.iata.org].
The norm under coronavirus: flights with a handful of passengers (Photo: Jennifer Flowers / AFAR
Put simply, while the primary income from the airlines’ raison d’être, the loss of paying passengers, dries up, the fixed costs, the invariables, don’t go away for both the airports and the airlines. Let’s take the airports first, they make look deserted when you glimpse images of them on the internet or television, but they haven’t closed down altogether, they haven’t morphed into ghost towns. Airports still have infrastructure and most still run at least a limited service of domestic flights, and on the international scene, though closed for tourism, emergency flights still happen. So, with people and the coronavirus still around, the airports need upkeep. Surface cleaning with virus and bacteria killing disinfectants, hand-sanitising stations, etc.
A Californian “desert dormitory” for grounded jets (Photo: Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images)
The immediate problem for airlines in the Covid-19 crisis is where to put the multitude of grounded jets. The optimal place, leaving other considerations aside for a minute, is determined by climate. Aircrafts on the ground, exposed to the elements for any significant length of time, will do best in a dry climate with low humidity. This places the major airlines of Eastern Asia with their wetter, steamier climes at a disadvantage. Conversely, Australia’s great interior continental deserts are a favourable location. QANTAS and some other international airlines have accordingly parked their jets in Alice Springs (Central Australia)✫. In America [‘Parking in a pandemic: Grounded planes scramble for storage space’, (Paul Sillers), CNN, 22-Mar-2020, www.cnn.com]. Similarly, in America, US airlines have sought out long-term storage facilities in the hospitable desert environments of western USA [‘What It Takes for an Airline to Ground Its Fleet Amid Coronavirus’, (Jessica Puckett), Conte Nast Traveler, 31-Mar-2020, www.cntraveler.com].
Delta jet, Pinal Airpark (reliever airport), Arizona (Photo: Rebecca Sasnett, Arizona Daily Star)
A lot of European airlines are not so lucky, forced to use the local airports in Europe where some of the runways have been decommissioned to make way for the grounded planes. Aircraft parking in some of the European hubs can also be exorbitantly expensive, charging up to US$285 an hour (although the cost varies greatly from location to location). Sometimes the remotely located (long-term) storage facilities are referred to as aircraft ‘boneyards’❈ [‘Aircraft Boneyards, MRO & Storage Facilities in Europe’, Airplane Boneyards, www.airplaneboneyards.com].
Thwarting the nesting birds (Photo: Reuters / Elijah Nouvelage)
When happens with the planes taken out of service and parked? Although not in current use, they still have to be maintained so that they are ready when the airways open up again. Planes are subjected to regular, heavy mechanical maintenance checks, the hydraulics and the flight control system needs to be finely monitored. When the aircrafts are being stored long-term, the process followed has been described as a kind of ”aeronautical embalming” (Sillers) – fluids require to be drained (to prevent rusting of the landing gear), as the jets are housed al fresco everything needs to be covered and/or protected – the engine intakes and exhaust areas, external instruments, the tyres, the windows, the entire airframe (to prevent corrosion). Maintenance staff also have to check the planes for bird-nests and incursion from insects (grilles are sometimes affixed to keep birds outs). Every two weeks the wheels need to be rotated and the batteries reconnected (Sillers; Kotoky et al). Yes, it’s true to say that aircraft maintenance and storage firms are busy at the present time.
To try to offset, at least partly, the crippling hit from of the coronavirus crisis, the loss of multi-billion dollars by the industry, some airline companies have switched their (unused) passenger jets to become freight-carriers (in addition to using their usual freighters). Scoot, for instance, in February commenced bi-weekly hauls from Singapore to Nanjing and Guangzhou transporting air cargo only. Cathay Pacific carries freight on passenger-less flights from Hong Kong to three Chinese cities∅ [‘Airplanes Without Passengers Start Coronavirus Recovery’, (Will Horton), Forbes, 10-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com].
EndNote: In March, even after extensive international flight restrictions had come into effect, a number of airlines were still undertaking their scheduled flights with zero passengers on board. One of the reasons for such a seemingly nonsensical practice was to abide with EU regulations which require the airlines to fulfil their allotments or risk losing the flight slots [‘Why Airlines Are Flying Empty Ghost Planes’, ((Caroline Delbert), Popular Mechanics 11-Mar-2020, www.popularmechanics.com].
____________________________________________________________________
✫ north of five billion dollars’ worth of aircraft enjoy the arid air of Alice Springs Airport (from SilkAir 737s to Singapore 380s) [‘How expensive will air travel be after the Covid-19 crisis?’, (Cynthia Drescher), CNN, (14-May-2020), www.cnn.com]
❈ quite apt for housing a lot of the older, less-efficient planes, which will be retired and either be sold-off or used for parts and then scrapyarded
∅ there’s precious little upside for the airline industry at the moment, but one positive for the jets still in the air is the record low world oil prices at the present
Manchuria 1910-1911: North-East China’s End of Empire Frontier Plague
In 1910 the 265 year-old Qing Dynasty in China was fasting approaching its denouement. The following year it would be deposed and replaced with a republic. Over the years leading up to this point, Imperial China had been in long drawn-out decline, suffering a series of reversals – a disastrous defeat in the (1st) Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and ensuing loss of territorial sovereignty in Manchuria; the crushing of the Peking Boxer Rebellion in 1900. In 1907 China had been beset by the latest (and one of the worst) of a series of famines (“Third Plague Pandemic”), losing an estimated 25 million of it’s population. And in late 1910, Manchuria in the midst of a tense political situation—China having to share the region with competing Russian and Japanese aspirations—a plague broke out.
The plague was first noticed in the Inner Mongolian town of Manzhouli on the Chinese-Russian border, where Russian doctors began treating patients with fever and haemoptysis symptoms. Thus began the Great Manchurian Plague which eventually took up to 60,000 lives in less than six months – with a mortality rate very close to 100 per cent [William C Summers, The Great Manchurian Plague: The Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease, (2012)].
Vector from the rodent family Because of a past pattern of bubonic plague in China, rats and fleas were initially suspected to be the source of human infection. 50,000 rats were examined but the results proved negative [CHERNIN, ELI. “Richard Pearson Strong and the Manchurian Epidemic of Pneumonic Plague, 1910–1911.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 44, no. 3, 1989, pp. 296–319. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24633015. Accessed 5 May 2020]. The disease was eventually traced to the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica) or tarbagan, found in Inner Mongolia, eastern Siberia and Heilongjiang. Later research by Dr Wu (see below) and others established that the plague, like the present coronavirus, was pneumonic, transmitted animal to human by respiratory droplets, and not bubonic.
A roaring trade in fake mink The European fashion for mink and ermine furs can be ‘fingered’ for being at the bottom of the preconditions leading to the 1910 plague. Mink’s popularity as one of the most prized materials for clothing accessories made it’s cost prohibitive to all but the richest Europeans. Things changed when it was discovered that the fur of the marmot when dyed passed very convincingly for mink fur. After the pelt price for marmot fur soared from 12 cents to 72 cents a hide, hordes of Chinese hunters from the central provinces swarmed into the region to join the lucrative hunt for the now in-demand creature. Mongol and Buryat hunters, long experienced in marmot-hunting knew how to select only tarbagan marmots which were not diseased for culling. The inexperienced Chinese trappers however didn’t practice safe hunting methods, failing to discern the difference, they hunted marmots indiscriminately. Thus, the infection was passed on to humans from the pelts of the disease-ridden rodents (Chernin; ‘Manchurian Plague 1910-11’, (Summers; Iain Meiklejohn), Disasterhistory.org, (April 2020), www.disasterhistory.org].
Spreading the plague by rail
Manchuria at the time was equipped with an extensive network of railroads, thanks to the vested interests of the Russians and the Japanese which the Qing Dynasty had, reluctantly, conceded. Russia controlled the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR) and the China Eastern Railway (CER), Japan controlled the Southern Manchurian Railway (SMR)⌖. The time of the year was an important factor. From November/December, as the weather turned arctic-like, the Chinese hunters and agricultural migrant workers started to return to their home regions. The foremost consideration was to get back before the Chinese New Year. The hunters and the labourers, huddled together infecting each other in the bitter cold of the train carriages, carried the plague along the railway lines. In a short time the plague travelled from its origin point to large cities on the Dongbei line, Harbin, including the central district of Fuchiatien (Fujiandian), Changchun and Mukden (today Shenyang). Compare this to what happened with the coronavirus outbreak which spread from Wuhan to other Chinese cities by airplane.
In the disease’s wake mortality proceeded at an alarming rate, Harbin in the far north was the initial epicentre. In November 5,272 died in the city. It then spread along the tracks to cities further south, Mukden recorded a death toll of 2,571 by January 1911, and Changchun was losing over 200 a day to the plague (Meiklejohn). The plague was sustained and promoted by the prevailing conditions it encountered – dense population, high human mobility and poor hygiene environments (Cornelia Knab, cited in Meiklejohn). Eventually the plague reached Peking and as far as central China〲.
Enter Dr Wu The authorities, in desperation, turned to a migrant, Penang-born doctor working at the time in Tianjin, Wu Lien-Teh. Cambridge-educated Wu took immediate charge of the medical emergency in Harbin. Enforcing a strict quarantine in the city, Wu put in place a series of comprehensive measures to contain the disease, including:
● converting railway freight cars to makeshift quarantine centres and turning a bathing establishment into a plague hospital
● establishing “sanitary zones” in the city
● closing down the railways in Manchuria, impose blockades, border controls and so stop infected people from travelling (Wu needed to secure the co-operation of the Russian and Japanese rail companies to achieve this)
● burning the lodgings of those infected
● monitoring the population by checking households for new cases
● advocating the wearing of face masks (Wu had more effective masks with extra gauze padding made)
● carrying out mass cremations of the infected dead (considered a sacrilege in Chinese society, Wu had to petition the emperor for permission)✪
● undertaking post-mortem examinations of the victims (again, a Chinese taboo that Wu had to overcome objections to)✲
Temperature check, Fuchiatien ⟱ (www.Flickr.com)
With no vaccine for pneumatic plague available, Wu’s quarantine measures involved isolating people for a five to ten day period, if no symptoms present, they are released with a wire band attached to their wrist signifying they have been cleared of the disease [‘In 1911, another epidemic swept through China. That time, the world came together’, (Paul French), CNN, 19-Apr-2020, www.cnn.com; ‘The Chinese Doctor Who Beat the Plague’, (Jeremiah Jenne), China Channel, 20-Dec-2018, www.chinachannel.org].
⟱ Old plague hospital, Harbin. When the epidemic was suppressed, the hospital was burnt down to eliminate any residual risk of contamination
(Photo: www.avezink.livejournal.com)
Keeping the ports plague-free The concerted efforts of Japanese, Russian and Chinese managed to prevent the epidemic from reaching the eastern seaboard. Several towns close to the major port city Dalian reported cases, but Dalian itself (by this time under Japanese control, known as Dairen), initially undertook mass inspections of train and ship passengers, before closing the South Manchurian line altogether. With such strictures in place Dalian was wholly spared from the plague (French). The Russians were able to similarly stem the outbreak’s movement along the CER rail line and stop it from reaching Russia’s vital Pacific port, Vladivostok.
Racing against catastrophe What added even more pressure to Wu’s task in trying to control the plague was that he was working against a tight deadline. The plague needed to be contained before 30th January which was Chinese New Year’s Eve. Thousands of migrant workers would be returning home to their families for this most important annual celebrations in China via the Manchurian railway network, which Wu knew would make it almost impossible to rein in the outbreak. The conscientious and thorough measures implemented in northern China made it possible for Wu to be able to declare the epidemic virtually suppressed by the end of January. Decisive action in N.E. China also prevented the plague from spreading to near-by (Outer) Mongolia and Russian Siberia. By March all the region’s shops, factories and schools were reopened and the only lingering infection was confined within the specially established plague hospitals (Meiklejohn).
Endnote: Dr Wu Many Chinese medical personnel including epidemiologists and other physicians contributed to preventing the plague spreading throughout China, and to suppressing it all together within a short period. But if anyone should be called a hero of the Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-11, certainly that mantle should land on Dr Wu Lien-Teh, whose decisive leadership, organisation and enterprise saved China’s North-East provinces from a much higher casualty toll and from the regional plague developing into a nationwide epidemic.
꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙
⌖ China for it’s part controlled the Imperial Railways of North China, which linked Peking with Mukden
〲 one case was recorded in Shanghai, 2,000 miles away
✪ thousands of bodies were still above ground in coffins because the relatives were waiting for the spring thaw to bury the dead…ideal incubators for the plague bacillus to magnify the contamination [‘Dr Wu Lien-Teh, plague fighter and father of the Chinese public health system’, (Zhongliang Ma & Yanli Li), www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov; Jenne)
✲ Wu performed the first autopsy in Harbin, identifying the disease as the bacterium Yersinia pestis of the pneumonic variant [‘Wu Lieh-Teh: Malaysia’s little-known plague virus fighter’, Star Online, 11-Feb-2020, www.msn.com]
Not Missing the Human Touch: Robots Stepping Up in the Time of COVID-19
Intelligent design, AI, artificial humanoids, bionic life, androids, cyborgs, have all moved outside of the cloistered environment of the lab and the science fiction genre and are all embracing the day-to-day functions of human existence. Well, perhaps not all of these products of imagination and creativity – but with the restrictions placed on human communication in the all–enveloping cloud of the coronavirus crisis, automatons are the new “white knights” coming to the rescue (or relief) of humans.
The sudden emergence of the pandemic has propelled Medtech companies into the war on COVID-19. Drones as well as robots are being enlisted in the fight, taking the load off medical professionals and health care systems. Delivery robots are used as a way of circumventing the danger of human-to-human contagion. UVD robots are employed to kill viruses and bacteria in rooms to avoid the need for human involvement [‘Robots And Drones Are Now Used To Fight COVID-19’, (Bernard Marr), Forbes, 18-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com].
‘Xenex’ Germ-zapping robots (CBS News)
As healthcare experts and governments search for the optimum strategy to contain and suppress the coronavirus outbreak, other intelligent humans are finding new applications and roles for intelligent non-humans in the health emergency crisis. It starts, appropriately enough for a public health disaster, at the medical coal face, in the ICU wards where doctors and nurses have been overwhelmed, physically and emotionally, with the skyrocketing workload of coronavirus-affected patients. In Lombardy in northern Italy, one of the first hotspots of the pandemic outside of China, six robot nurses have been fast-tracked into hospital service in Varese where they help lighten the human nurses’ face-to-face load and reduce their risk of personal infection. The robots man the wards, monitor the medical equipment and communicate remotely with doctors. Similarly in India, at a hospital in Chennai, ‘Zafi’ the robot does the rounds, transporting food and medicine to virus patients to lessen the risk to hospital medical staff [‘Tommy the robot nurse helps keep Italian doctors safe from coronavirus’, (Flavio LoScalzo), Reuters, 02-Apr-2020, www.reuters.com].
Pepper the robot (Photo: Reuters)
Japan is using humanoid robots as reception staff at hotels to greet patients with mild coronavirus symptoms. Robots like ‘Pepper’ at Kyogoku in Tokyo greet arriving patients and instruct them how to check-in while reassuring them with warm and positive messages [‘Pepper the robot set to greet COVID-19 patients checking in Tokyo hotels’, Hindustan Times, 01-May-2020, www.hidustantimes.com].
With the need for pristine clean surfaces in public spaces to prevent the spread of the virus outbreak, a number of countries now employ robots as cleaners. At Hong Kong International Airport autonomous cleaning robots known as “Intelligent Sterilisation Robots” use UV light and air sterilisers to routinely clean and disinfect key operational areas of the airport [‘Clean me up, Scotty: Hong Kong airport debuts cleaning robots, disinfection booth in fight against COVID-19’, Coconuts, 30-Apr-2020, www.msn.com].
Such medical uses of robots have been replicated across a range of countries hit by the pandemic. With people confined to their homes under quarantine orders and required to maintain a distance of at least 150 cm from other humans, robots on wheels are being increasingly used to deliver products to them, or to deliver food to overworked NHS workers (Britain).
(Photo: www.uk.news.yahoo.com)
Singapore has brought into service a robot with the decidedly unsexy name of “O-R3”, whose job it is to patrol the city’s parks and monitor the behaviour of joggers. This ever vigilant robot spots transgressors and warns them about the need to practice social distancing in public [‘Robot in Singapore tells joggers to stay home’, SBS, 28-Apr-2020, www.sbs.com.au]. Joggers and walkers in Singapore need to ultra-alert around the parks as the city has a second social distancing-monitor robot, Boston-built Spot the robotic dog (Robocop?)…if O-R3 doesn’t nap the violators, Spot (below) might.
(Photo: CNA)
Tunisia’s ‘Robocop’ looks more like a military style armoured vehicle (Photo: AFP)
Tunisian authorities have had a similar idea to curtail the incidence of virus infection in the capital Tunis. The police have been using a robot (a ‘Robocop’) who ‘walks’ the city beats, stopping and questioning people who it suspects should not be on the streets during lockdown. The Robocop asks people to produce their IDs which can be scanned by the robot’s in-built computer [‘Coronavirus: Tunisia deploys police robot on lockdown patrol’, (Rana Jawad), BBC News, (03-Apr-2020), www.bbcnews.com].
Robot Cop (Source: The Hindu)
Chennai Police (southern India) are on the same wavelength as Tunis’, deploying it’s new “Robot Cop LD v5.0” equipped with a two-way intercom to surveil citizens in coronavirus hotspots in the city during containment. The Robot Cop is un-humanoid in appearance and has been described as “an oversized box on wheels” [‘Chennai Police Deploys “Robot Cop” in COVID-19 Hotspot’, (Kishalaya Kundu), Beebom, 01-May-2020, www.beebom.com].
(Photo: BBT University)
Robotic engineers in Japan have produced avatar robots who can stand in for university graduands in virtual graduation ceremonies. BBT University in Tokyo uses ‘newme’ robots dressed in black graduation gowns and caps with mobile screens showing the student’s face attached to a motherboard. The robot proxies line up to be officially presented with a testamur by the university president while the actual graduate watches via Zoom from a safe distance at home [‘BBT University in Japan has graduates attend ceremonies via robots in light of Covid-19’, (Guan Zhen Tan), Mothership, 02-Apr-2020, www.mothership.sg].
The National Health Emergency ‘Tyranny’: The Lockdown Through Libertarian Eyes
The majority of countries where coronavirus infection rates have experienced an upward curve have resorted to locking down the community to varying degrees. In the USA, more than elsewhere, this has tested the faith of those of a libertarian disposition. In recent weeks we have seen the mega-massive jolt to the economy and enforced closures of businesses resulting in millions of workers finding themselves in the dole queues. Many libertarians, albeit with reluctance, accept the inevitability of the present state intervention as the only means available of providing the fiscal stimulus to keep people and businesses afloat.
Its when it comes to the matter of mandatory quarantine as a counter-virus measure, then the issue becomes more thorny for libertarians. The classic libertarian position would see voluntary self-isolation as the ideal solution in an ideal (ie, libertarian) world… compulsory quarantine is the last resort to them. Some of a libertarian mind would reject it outright – on ideological grounds, while also claiming it to be an ineffective measure as a social curative. Others accept it as a legitimate move given the uniqueness of the Covid-19 crisis situation, but with a very clear rider that the measures taken need to be temporary only. As shown below, this aspect of libertarianism is a “hot-button” issue currently for many in the US with skin in the game [‘What libertarians would do in response to coronavirus’, (Bonnie Kristian), The Week, 13-Mar-2020, www.theweek.com].
Gadsden flag: associated with libertarianism & the American Tea Party
Social distancing as an imposed, mandated practice during the pandemic, fails the libertarian test. The pure libertarian much prefers to see voluntary compliance by the individual, in the expectation (or hope) that most people will ultimately do the right thing [‘Libertarianism and the Coronavirus Pandemic’, (Andy Craig), Cato Institute, 25-Mar-2020, www.cato.com]. Accordingly, a small minority of US states (five?) have not enforced the distancing and stay-at-home edicts, their leaders pledging to hold fast to the “sacred liberties” of their citizenries. But most everywhere else the pandemic has hit, certainly in urban areas, the civil authorities have gone for some form of lockdown.
Escape from Lockdown 13 For the average “Joe and Joanna Citizen” in Main Street, Anywheresville, being locked down inside four walls indefinitely is one of the hardest things to cop. For most people “cabin fever” will inevitably set in…confined at home, unable to congregate and socialise in cafes, eateries and bars with friends and colleagues or do road trips. In First World societies such as the US, Western Europe or the Commonwealth of Nations, freedom of movement is such an inherently natural expectation, once deprived, resistance to these rigid controls can reach a tipping point which easily spills over into increasingly bold attempts to subvert or defy the government’s edicts. Recently we have witnessed this perhaps at its apogee in the Midwest and Southern states of the US. Protest groups, the new scofflaws of Trumpian America, have mushroomed in particular in “rust-belt” states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia✷.
Pro–Trump demonstrators trying to intimidate Democrat Gov. Whitmer (photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
As the lockdowns extend from weeks into months bunches of pro-Republican conservatives∎ have more and more blatantly violated the stay-at-home orders of mostly Democratic governors (in contrast serving GOP governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, continue to play the libertarian card, steadfastly refusing to implement a stay-at-home order regardless of virus outbreaks within the state). For the protesters, egged on by the schizophrenic tweets❂ of President Trump, a call to “Liberate Michigan” (Virginia, etc) and amplified by the Fox press, one prime target of their vitriol has been Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who has mandated a strict ”stay home, stay safe” executive order to counteract the virus. This month organised gatherings of protesters have assembled outside the Capitol building and the governor’s home, flaunting the restrictions and demonstrating their displeasure at Whitmer’s policies. Some of the dissenters have been armed with AR-15s and AK-47s, very few wearing face masks but brandishing Confederate and Gadsden flags and even Nazi emblems (loosely equating the state “governor/tyrant” with Nazis). Some protesters have held up signs such as “The cure is worse than the virus” (which, if you have watched the president’s coronavirus press briefings ‘sideshow’, has a faintly familiar ring to it).
(Photo: REUTERS/Alyson McClaran)
This orchestrated “Operation Gridlock”, in Michigan and elsewhere, is organised by a conservative patriot/militia group with connexions to Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos. One of its objectives (successful) was to grind city centre traffic down to a standstill, including the blocking of ambulances conveying patients. Protesters in various states have also tried to intimidate health workers engaged in the frontline of the fight against the pandemic. So far Whitmer has remained resolute in maintaining a strict state lockdown, pointing to the gravity of the state’s health predicament (Michigan has had 37,778 confirmed cases and 3,315 deaths due to coronavirus, as at 27-April-2020) [‘Conservative group linked to DeVos family organises protest of coronavirus restrictions in Michigan’, (Igor Derbyshire), Salon, 16-Apr-2020, www.salon.com; ‘Trump Supporters Are Staging Armed Protests to Stick it to Coronavirus’, (Caleb Ecarma), Vanity Fair, 16-Apr-2020, www.vanityfair.com].
🔻 Gov. Whitmer (Photo: U.S. News & World)
What’s motivating the scofflaw behaviour? Researchers at the University of Maryland have concluded that “quarantine fatigue” has set in. Increasing numbers of fed-up or plain bored Americans are venturing outside of “the box” in defiance of state stay-at-home orders. Many of these are exercising, or as the weather gets warmer, going to the beach (most of the escapees are doing these things without bothering to practice safe distancing)⌖ [‘Quarantine fatigue is setting in: Smartphone data shows thousands are fed up after weeks under lockdown’, (Ralph R Ortega), Daily Mail, 27-Apr-2020, www.dailymail.com].
The inalienable right to be ‘selective’ The gatherings of those discontented with the status quo in America have exercised their right to protest against their state’s political leaders. Interestingly, their decision to protest on this occasion, as has been noted, does not signify their endorsement of the right to protest per se – a perfectly admirable and consistent libertarian trait. Previously when sectors of the Left in America took to protesting issues such as climate change and police brutality, these Right-wing elements were vigorously supporting the conservative politicians’ endeavours to bring in legislation to outlaw protests [’The hypocrisy of the anti-lockdown protests’, (Anthony L Fisher), Business Insider Australia, 22-Apr-2020, www.businessinsider.com.au].
🔺The ‘tyranny’ avengers (Photo: Nikolaus Kama/AFP via Getty Images)
These insurrectionists and those who facilitate and encourage them, argue that they are motivated, nay compelled, by the (temporary) loss of their basic liberties… evoking the First Amendment and the Founding Fathers, they portray Whitmer and other governors as tyrants, preventing their right to come and go as they wish, to work and leisure untrammelled. Thus, it comes back to that same nub at the core of libertarian values, the right to do as one pleases — (with the rider)…so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. This added qualifier is fundamental to the credo of libertarian theory.
“Inviolable freedom”…so long as it doesn’t harm harm anyone else The casualty toll of the Covid-19 health crisis in the US—the worse in the world by far—is rapidly overtaking that of the total of American lives lost in the ten-years of the Vietnam War. Disproportionally, the pandemic everywhere is killing the older and the most vulnerable, people with co-morbidities. Coronavirus, the epidemiologists have shown us, is transmitted from a human host to a human recipient, the more people interacting with each other, the more likelihood of transmission, the greater the incidence of morbidity and mortality from the virus, simple as that!
An unavoidable trade-off The temporary suspension of liberties is the price to pay to preserve lives. Yes, the measures are inconveniences and hardships on individuals, but they’ve been imposed on the population for a health safety reason – the greater good of the community and the health of all. Yes, the libertarians have some grounds to quibble, a few of the measures taken have been over-the-top and seem disproportionate. Even Gov. Whitmer, a rising Democrat star on the national political scene, has at times pulled the wrong rein (eg, barring people from purchasing garden equipment and baby restrainers for cars seems to be over-zealous) [‘Quarantine Protesters Are No Heroes of Civil Disobedience’, (Jonah Goldberg), National Review, 22-Apr-2020, www.nationalreview.com].
🔺 Colorado protesters visualising a totalitarian pivot by their governor? (Photo: AP)
FN: Heat in the kitchen Democrat governors in “swing states” like Gov. Whitmer—caught in a pincer of intimidatory Scofflaw defiance, demands from business to re-open and constant sniping from a divisive chief executive at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave—are not the only ones feeling the mounting pressure of the moment. Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, has copped plenty of flak himself. He was very late in issuing stay-at-home orders, having rejected calls to close Florida’s crowded beaches, citing the libertarian manta of free choice. When the lockdown finally came, church services got a “go free” card from the restrictions. Consequently, the state’s coronavirus ‘scorecard’ is now 32,138 confirmed cases and 1,088 deaths (27-April-2020). The current virus “hot spots” in Florida don’t augur well for a lifting of it’s restrictions any time soon. On top of this gloomy prognosis, Florida, being a ‘bellwether’ state, Trump will be expecting DeSantis to deliver it to the Republicans in the November elections [‘Anti-quarantine protests, Trump pressure on governors on political tightrope over coronavirus’, (Deidre Shesgreen & Maureen Groppe), USA Today, 23-Apr-2020, www.amp.usatoday.com].
⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿⥿
✷ the protests have by no means been confined to these states – such happenings have been increasingly the done thing from Pennsylvania to Nebraska to California. Nor have lockdown protests been confined to America, ‘Berlin police anti-lockdown protestors accusing Angela Merkel of “banning life”’, SBS News, 25-Apr-2020, www.sbsnews.com.au ∎ the same kind of pro-Trump people that Hillary Clinton (unwisely) labelled a “basket of deplorables” in the 2016 presidential campaign ❂ ”schizophrenic” because at the same time the president at his daily podium is officially asking Americans to adhere to the prescribed Covid-19 safety measures ⌖ there’s obviously other underlying factors in the tendency towards civil disobedience in Midwestern states and perhaps more so in the South – greater religiosity (and associated with that) scepticism towards scientific evidence and government experts, and even the “Siamese twins” attachment of many Americans to car culture (especially in suburbia and rural regions), ‘The American South has resisted social distancing measures — and we’re all going to pay the price’, Raw Story, 03-Apr-2020, www.rawstory.com
Behind the 24–Hour Cycle Coronavirus Counts, How well do the Numbers Stack up?
Every day we are reminded of the global reach of the novel coronavirus crisis. We know it’s a pandemic because WHO and other health agencies publish data showing that 211 countries and territories have been affected by the disease. The international media coverage tends to focus largely on the unenviable “big five” chart-toppers who have been most affected – the US, Italy, Spain, France and the UK. A number of sites publish constantly updated lists of the growing toll of Covid-19 casualties, a sort of sombre “score card” listing all the countries who have recorded instances of the disease.
Confirmed Coronavirus Cases: Globally tracked, country-by-country – as @ 23-Apr-2020
Sources: WHO http://covid19.who.int/;
Country Total cases Total deaths Region
USA 850,000 47,700 Americas
Italy 188,000 25,500 Western Europe
Spain 208,500 21,750 Western Europe
France 160,000 21,500 Western Europe
UK 134,000 18,300 Western Europe
http://worldometers.info/
When we scroll through the world tables of where the pandemic has landed, it’s instructive to look at the comparative totals by continent – Europe has a bit over 1.28 million confirmed cases recorded, and the Americas, 995,510 (predominantly from the US), compare these to South-East Asia, a bit more than 38,572 and Africa, a mere 18,234 cases✺✺.
From a statistical standpoint we might wonder if the published data gives a true impression of the extent of of the pandemic? It needs to be kept in mind that the numbers we have are those that have been reported to the World Health Organisation. Population differences aside, it is clear that the low numbers in South-East Asia and Africa (examples: Cambodia 122 cases, zero fatalities✺✺, Myanmar 139 cases, five fatalities✺✺, Ghana 1,279 cases, 10 fatalities✺✺, Ethiopia 117 cases, three fatalities✺✺) mask the full impact of the catastrophe. They are a product of limited testing by countries in these regions … widespread poverty, surplus populations, lack of resources and infrastructure mitigate against the capacity to take corrective, safety monitoring measures.
Limited testing capacity and weak surveillance The small numbers of recorded cases and handful of reported deaths in Africa and S.E. Asia (the Caribbean is another such case in point) can engender a false security and justify a lack of action by such already economically and health-challenged countries, thus the risk of infections spreading is magnified. In the early phases of the outbreak some S.E. Asian states were slow to acknowledge the risks…even as late as mid-March, Myanmar’s government was still attributing it’s low number of cases to the superior “lifestyle and diet” of the locals. The fight against Covid-19 by Third World countries is further retarded by a failure to test widely and in the numbers necessitated by the crisis. It shouldn’t be overlooked that some of these countries have quite repressive regimes that don’t rank the goal of a universal healthcare system as their highest priority [‘Experts Doubt Low Coronavirus Counts of Some Southeast Asian Countries’, (Zsombor Peter), VOA, 29-Mar-2020, www.voanews.com].
For the bulk of African countries the story is similar. A by-product of their lack of development is that their health systems are fragile before the onset of coronavirus hits them. Awareness of the inability to cope with a full-blown health crisis, had led some leaders to advocate so-called “miracle cures” for the virus (eg, Madagascar’s president’s championing of untested traditional plant remedies). Nigeria (Africa’s largest nation by population) shows only 981 confirmed cases and 31 deaths✺✺ to date but is looking as vulnerable as anyone in Africa. Oil exports are the hub of Nigeria’s economy and the fall of the world’s crude oil price to a record low will hamstrung the country’s efforts to contain any future eruptions of the disease [‘Coronavirus: How drop in oil price affects Nigeria’s economy’, (Michael Eboh), Vanguard, 17-Mar-2020, www.vanguardngr.com]. The outbreak of pandemic hotspots in Nigeria could be devastating, especially in the north, given the country’s population of nearly 200 million people and it’s inadequate healthcare capacity⋉.
Too good to be …
Some countries have reported being lightly or relatively lightly touched by the onslaught of the coronavirus, these results have surprised outside observers. One such country that raises eyebrows in this respect is Russia. The republic has 146 million people and shares long borders with China⤱, yet it fesses up to having had only 68,622 cases✺✺ (well under half of that of the UK) and suffered only a comparatively low 615 deaths✺✺ from the epidemic (most of those since the start of April). If you cast aside the anomalies, on paper it’s an excellent result! But whether Soviet or post-Soviet, there’s always an air of suspicious doubt about Russian information. The Russian Bear has had form in the past with cover-ups…a prime example—the Soviet Union throwing a tarpaulin over the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 1980s —indicative of a less than honest response to major disasters [‘The Very Low Number of Russia’s Reported COVID-19 Cases Raises Questions of a Cover-Up’, (Rick Moran), PJ Media, 22-Mar-2020, www.pjmedia.com].
Russia, if it so erred, is not “Robinson Crusoe” in deliberately underreporting the pandemic’s effect. China for nearly three months from the initial outbreak didn’t include asymptomatic patients in the official stats, and only rectified this oversight on April Fools Day [‘China acknowledges underreporting coronavirus cases in official count’, (Mark Moore), New York Post, 01-Apr-2001, www.nypost.com]. For six weeks after WHO declared a global health emergency Indonesia did not report a single Covid-19 case (unlike most of it’s S.E. Asian neighbours). Considering the republic’s population size (more than 270 million) and it’s close links with China, this aroused widespread suspicion of underreporting and criticism in a Harvard University study which seemed to belatedly jolt Indonesia into disclosure. The first notification by Djakarta of coronavirus cases occurred on 2nd March, and from then on Indonesia’s curve has been on an upward trajectory – currently 8,211 cases, 689 deaths✺✺ [‘Why are there no reported cases of coronavirus in Indonesia?’, (Randy Mulyanto & Febriana Firdaus), Aljazeera, 18-Feb-2020, www.aljazeera.com].
Doubting a hermetically-sealed “Hermit Kingdom” North-East Asia’s renegade, secretive state, North Korea, can be added to the list of countries purporting to be Covid-19–free. Pyongyang‘s official line has been met with disbelief from several external sources such as South Korea and Radio Free Europe which asserts that disclosures from within North Korean military circles confirm the occurrence of coronavirus cases in the border areas [‘What Is the Coronavirus Doing to North Korea’, (Nicholas Eberstadt), New York Times, 22-Apr-2020, www.nytimes.com]
Addendum: (Coronavirus as @ 0130 hrs EAT time, 25-April-2020) USA 890,200 cases | 50,403 deaths Italy 189,973 cases | 25,549 deaths Spain 219,764 cases | 22,524 deaths France 158,183 cases | 21,856 deaths UK 143,464 cases | 19,506 deaths
໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱
✺✺ figures as @ 0130 hrs EAT time, 25-Apr-2020
⋉ just over the last week the African continent experienced a sudden surge in infections, ‘Africa’s 43% jump in virus cases in 1 week worries experts’, (Gerard Zim Rae), ABC News, 23-Apr-2020, www.abcnews.go.com
⤱ although Russia did close its eastern border with China after the virus breakout
The Fight against the Coronavirus Pandemic: Reflecting on the Numbers
The war against the coronavirus outbreak is indeed global, infecting to date 199 countries and territories and every continent with the possible exception of (largely and seasonally unpopulated) Antartica. Every day the apps on social media and the news broadcasts inform us of the rising tally of coronavirus cases and of the fatalities, but what we do know is that these totals do not convey a true picture of the populations affected by the virus. They are often an indicator only, a way of charting the trajectory of the elusive curve that every health service and provincial and national government strives to flatten.
Distribution of Covid-19 cases worldwide, 31-Mar-2020 (www.ecdc.europa.eu)
The complexity of the disease partly explains the inexactness. That being infected with coronavirus can be asymptomatic and remains recordable for those never tested, highlights this problem. On a country by country basis the uncertainty over numbers magnifies. Some countries (a lot in Africa for instance) have no or minimal records of testing, which is not the same as saying they have no coronavirus cases! The reason for this might lie in the fact these predominantly impoverished countries have not the wherewithal nor the infrastructure to test even significant numbers of the population, they simply can’t cope. Thus their true numbers are never ascertained. There are other countries in the world who are motivated by reasons other than capacity to report the incidence of infection and mortality, eg, a desire to mask the extent of the calamity for domestic or external purposes.
Geographical distribution of Covid-19 cases worldwide, 31-Mar-2020 (www.ecdc.europa.eu)
The media’s daily servings, the table of virus mortality and morbidity gives us the bare bones of the depth of the human catastrophe — Italy a disaster, Spain a disaster, China a disaster but seemingly over the hump, Iran shockingly bad, France shockingly bad, USA very bad but likely to become even more catastrophic, UK and Netherlands, both worsening, etc. But of equal curiosity is those countries positioned much lower on the ladder of gloom that stand out as demographic anomalies, their numbers almost too good to believe…indeed! Two such are Russia and India. Russia, a vast country with around 145 million people has fessed up to just 17 deaths⋇. On face value a result that would hearten the most pessimistic, but you have to wonder about the level of reportage? India, with 1.3 billion-plus people has so far recorded a mere 32 deaths⋇ (compared to Italy with 60 million people which has lost just shy of 11,600 lives⋇). With India, the lowness of the figure is overshadowed by the inevitability of magnification…the sheer mass of humanity confined within such an acute density of space means that for the substrata of Indians, the poorest classes, no matter how earnestly their prime minister entreats them, they simply cannot physically isolate themselves. The directive from on high to keep a “social distance” from others to ward off the virulent effect of the epidemic remains for the vast masses a pipe dream. That many, many of these unfortunate souls will not escape infection and worse—either recorded or unrecorded—remains inevitable.
At 26-Mar-2020 (Source: Newsweek Statista)
_______________________________________________________________________
⋇ as at 1515 hrs, Greenwich Mean-time, 31st March 2020, ‘Confirmed Cases and Deaths by Country, Territory, or Conveyance’, www.worldometers.info/
The Government’s War on Coronavirus: The Great COVID-19 War from Ground Level
(Source: www.thesummitexpress.com)
A few years ago one of the incumbents of the revolving door that is the Australian prime ministership intoned: “these are the most exciting times to be alive”… well, for “exciting” substitute “worrying and challenging” and you have the status quo, 2020. We are getting bombarded daily, even hourly it seems, with mixed messages from news sources – it was okay to go to the football last Sunday and mingle with crowds of much more than the 500 limit but somehow it’s not okay to do this on Monday, the day after (what changed?!?); the medical experts warn us to keep a distance of one-and-a-half metres from anyone else, yet it’s fully expected that people will still travel on trains and buses which will generally make that an impossibility; the government tells us not to fly overseas but it’s still okay to fly within Australia (a lifeline to the national carrier?).
(Image: www.nature.com)
Every day media outlets offer up a doomsday book of horror stories…”London faces stricter lockdown after coronavirus advice ‘ignored’” |”Italy coronavirus deaths rise by record 475 in a day” |”All of us have to assume we have the virus’: COVID-19 infections rise past 300 in NSW” |”Yes, young people are falling seriously ill from Covid-19” |”Trump spent weeks downplaying the coronavirus. He’s now pretending that never happened” | “Stay home’. Grey nomads unwelcome as Top End coronavirus tensions grows’ | “Coronavirus UK: Boris to impose FOUR-MONTH quarantine for elderly under ‘wartime’ measures” | “China blaming US for coronavirus? It refuses to come clean about origin” | “Privacy fears as India hand stamps suspected coronavirus cases” | “Coronavirus: One dead every 10 minutes in Iran as government faces backlash over late response” | “Spring Breakers Pack Some Florida Beaches, Ignoring Social Distancing Warning Amid Coronavirus“ | “Italy overtakes China in coronavirus toll”. Panicked consumerism born of exaggerated fears of limited resources➀, foolhardy apathy as the young party on regardless in fatalistic Titanic style (‘Millennialmania’), doom and gloom, finger-pointing recriminations, the media has been full of it for two months…sorry, we don’t do calm, rational, measured responses here.
A corona red world, March 2020 (Credit: www.abcnews.go.com)
It’s a climate ready-made for rumour-mongering and this is not confined to the West…China is rife with rumours ‘explaining’ the epidemic’s origin starting with the fiction of it’s supposed transmission from bats in January. The rumours soon became more fanciful and more conspiratorial, ranging from coronavirus being deliberately released to cull excess numbers of pensioners in society to it being a bio-weapon brought to Wuhan by the US Army to it being the consequence of the zodiac signs being out of harmony in the Year of the Rat!
The pandemic has caused divisiveness. Not just between rival countries trying to shift the blame and score political points, but at a grass roots level. We’ve seen the spectacle of shoppers in supermarkets fighting over the providence of a single pack of toilet roll➁.We’ve got incorrigible prepper-minded hoarders boasting online of their Fort Knox-sized storage bunkers of stockpiled household essentials, counter-balanced by the shopper-shaming of overzealous buyers queueing up with 150 rolls of toilet paper in their trolly (human behaviouralists tell us that buying ridiculous quantities of toilet rolls gives us reassurance, a warm and fuzzy feeling in a time of fear). The supermarkets, one of the very few sectors doing spectacularly well out of the crisis, have responded (too late) with partial war rationing to head off the panic buyers. War rationing seems apt as democratic governments across the world channel their inner Churchill and rush to set up “war cabinets” to deal with the extraordinary and unprecedented situation.
Deserted airport departure lounges 🔺
Whole industries grind to a halt, workers laid off with mortgages and bills that won’t disappear, while those of us investing in the stock market have taken an instant massive hit and the Aussie dollar plunges ever lower. Border closures, tourism industry bottoming out, small businesses going to the wall, nightlife, restaurants, bars, cafes, shows, movies, public events, etc…all nix! The hackneyed T-shirt slogan “Keep calm and carry on” is now “Keep calm, stay home and don’t go anywhere”. Lockdowns, compulsory home quarantine for targetted groups of the population, Pacific cruising virus-traps, a safe and effective vaccine for the virus still up to 18 months away. Talk in the UK of prioritising “herd immunity” uncomfortably evokes the spectre of eugenics. Some have called for the euthanasia of family pets, which is drawing a long bow even if you accept the possibility (far from definitively proven at this stage) that the virus was transmitted to humans by pangolins (scaly ant-eaters) in a Wuhan wet market. What next, euthanasia vans going round the suburbs to collect the weak and elderly? Reality at the moment looks increasingly like an unbelievable dystopian novel or movie! Welcome to the scary new world of indefinite uncertainty.
Thanks to COVID-19 we’re learning a slew of new buzzwords, for a start social distancing and elbow bump (sounds and looks dorky but it’ll catch on, trust me), and us non-statisticians in the community are already tired of hearing TV expert commentators rabbiting on about the merits of “flattening the curve”. I am waiting to hear (and am surprised not to have heard it yet) the adjective “Orwellian” uttered in the current crisis.
Bay County beach, Fla. (Ya Photo: WJHG/WECP)
I don’t know anyone who envies the governments or the frontline health care sector at the moment, but the government responses do have their critics? To take the scenario I am most familiar with, Australia…on the credit side the mortality rate is low (so far) though the morbidity rate is climbing fast and winter and the flu season are on the near horizon. However, under the government’s partisan “war cabinet” a coordinated approach to the crisis seems to be missing. We are looking for more systematic and less chaotic here! One example, the distribution of scarce essential goods depleted by panic buying is held up by a failure to get councils involved so they can free up the delivery schedule. Some medical and communications experts have asked where the government’s public awareness campaign is? Unlike some other countries, we are bereft of the myriad of community billboards and the television and social media advertisements which can raise awareness in the public of the disease. Overcoming ignorance is a first step to diminishing fear and apathy.
As with something this truly extraordinary, of such novel complexity and uncertainty, despite (or perhaps because of) the deluge of information, more questions than answers remain…should we lockdown cities or not? What are we not doing here to stem the crisis that appears to be working overseas? Face masks, yes/no?➂ Test for virus or not test? Can I be infected, recover and be infected a second time? What’s the shelf life of an infected surface? What do I do if I’m at high-risk and social distancing is not a viable option? Should we let the grandparents babysit our pre-schoolers any more? And then of course there’s the greatest imponderable of all, when is this whole nightmarish scenario going to end?
🔺 No issues with social distancing here (Photo: AP)
All the punter at ground zero can do is listen to the official medical advice➃, make sure we inform ourselves about Coronavirus 101 and get the basics down pat. This means identifying the likely symptoms—persistent cough, sore throat, runny nose, headache, (and more seriously) fever, shortness of breath, difficulty in breathing—all the usual suspects. Understand that coronavirus can be either symptomatic or asymptomatic, that it can be mild as well as severe, and that lethality generally (but not universally) hinges on considerations of age and serious pre-existing health conditions. Learn how to avoid contagion, what to do with the lethal weapons which are our hands – washing and drying them the correct way, eschewing the convention of shaking hands with people and start guesstimating our own personal space in public➄, sneezing into your elbow, not your hands, cleaning and disinfecting surfaces and door handles, using hand sanitisers, etc. Thus armed against ignorance, and hopefully the pandemic too, we will bunker down for the long haul, tough it out and try (very hard) not to add to the growing count of national virus statistics.
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➀ and thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy ➁ almost as unedifying was the sight of Aldi staff hurling blocks of toilet paper into the air so that demonic shoppers could jostle and wrestle each other for the prized commodity (classy look!) ➂ surgical masks have become a bit of an “us and them” issue, adding to the emerging divisive atmosphere…the war cabinet’s medical experts (in line with WHO’s recommendations) have pooh-poohed the wearing of masks for the general populace as not beneficial and unnecessary, saying they only need to be worn by people diagnosed with the disease. Given that the Chinese community in Australia tend to wear the masks sometimes for cultural reasons as much as protection, this leaves them open to wild and inaccurate assumptions about their health status as a group ➃ this will probably require a judgement call as some of the medical advice has been contradictory ➄ the latest edict in the social distancing caper from the war cabinet limits indoor gatherings of 25 in a space of 100sq m (one person to every 4sq m). I can’t wait to see police officers turning up in clubs and pubs armed with measuring tapes
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PS. All the big business houses and major financial institutions have started sending out “touchy-feely, look we really are human” messages, along the lines of we’re here to help “our people” get through COVID-19 … excuse me while I go and bolt down my raging cynicism to the floor.
The 1918 Spanish Flu: History’s Most Deadly Pandemic
The ongoing fight to contain the outbreak of COVID-19, the Coranavirus—now entering a new stage of transforming itself into a global epidemic—gives rise to recollection of another virus that swept the world just over one hundred years ago, the so-called Spanish Flu✺. For most of the rest of the 20th century, the Spanish Flu (sometimes known as La Grippe) was largely neglected by researchers and mainstream historians, and study confined to actuaries, specialist epidemiologists and virologists and medical historians [Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, (2017)].
(Credit: CNN International)
Why did such a devastating pandemic fly under the radar for so long? The timing of the outbreak goes a good way to explain this. After having suffered four long years of a unique world war, people tended to treat the Spanish Flu as a footnote to the Great War conflagration. Moreover, the war, concentrated in Europe and the Middle East, had a limited geographical focus for people, contrasting with the pneumonic influenza outbreak which was truly global [The Spanish Flu Pandemic’, (L Spinney), History Today, 67(4), April 2017]. As catastrophic events go, the two stand in stark contrast. With today’s scientific and medical advances experts estimate that the Spanish Flu killed at least 50 million people worldwide, some estimates put it as high as 100 million [NP Johnson & J Mueller 2002;76: 105-115 (‘Updating the accounts: Global mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish” Flu pandemic’, Bull Hist Med)]. Estimates of World War I casualties—military and civilian–—sit somewhere in the range of 20 to 22 million deaths [‘WW1 Casualties’, (WW1 Facts), http://ww1facts.net]⌖. By the late 20th century and early 2000s outbreaks of new viruses like SARS, Asian Bird Flu, Swine Flu, etc, spurred mainstream historians◙ to look afresh at the great global influenza of 1918-20.
An abnormal spike in morbidity and mortality The Spanish Flu was truly global, like the Coronavirus its lethal reach touched every continent except Antartica, both are novel (new) respiratory illnesses. Similarities have been noted between the responses to the two outbreaks, eg, the issuing of instructions or recommendations by the authorities for the public to wear masks, avoid shaking hands (part of social distancing), good hygiene, quarantine, an alarmist overreaction by the media [‘Coronavirus response may draw from Spanish flu pandemic of 100 years ago’, ABC News, (Matt Bamford), 05-Mar-2020, www.amp.abc.net.au]. The great flu of 1918’s morbidity and mortality rates were frighteningly high and far-reaching…one in three people on earth were affected by it✪. Between 2.5 and 5% of the world’s population perished, including India a mind-boggling 17M-plus, Dutch East Indies 1.5M, US (up to) 675,000◍, Britain 250,000, France 400,000, Persia (Iran) (up to) 2.4M, Japan 390,000-plus, Ghana (at least) 100,000, Brazil 300,000, USSR (unknown, but conservatively, greater than 500,000)⊞.
While densely crowded communities were thought the biggest risk of mass infection, the Flu caused human devastation even in remote, isolated corners of the world, eg, in Oceania, Samoa bereft of immunity, lost 22% of its population in two months, the Fijian islands lost 14% in a 16-day period⌀. The kill rate was something around 2.5% cf. a ‘normal’ flu outbreak a rate of no more than 0.1% would be expected [‘The Spanish Flu Pandemic’, (Spinney, History Today ; ‘The Spanish Flu’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/].
(Source: National Library of Australia)
If the Spanish Flu didn’t originate in Spain, where did it originate? No one knows for sure is the short answer…but there has been much speculation on the topic. At the time of the epidemic a popular notion was that the Flu started in China, but China experienced low rates of infection compared to other regions of the world. The explanation for this perhaps lay in that China was subjected to an initial, mild flu season which gave its citizens an acquired immunity to the disease when the more severe strain of the virus hit them.
🔺 Red Cross volunteers: caring for the sick during the Spanish Flu fell overwhelmingly on women (volunteers and professional nurses) who bore the brunt of the work at quarantine stations and camps, as well as exposing themselves to great personal risk
🔻 Influenza-ravaged Ft Riley soldiers in hospital camp 
The military, mobility and zoonosis Another theory attributes the Spanish Flu’s beginnings to the movements of the combatants in WWI. Virologist John Oxford favours the village of Étaples in France as the centre of the 1918 influenza infection. From a hospital camp here, 10,000 troops passed through every day…with their immune systems weakened by malnourishment and the stresses of battle and chemical attacks they were susceptible to the disease which was probably transmitted via a piggery and poultry on the same site. Once contracted, it’s dissemination was likely facilitated by mass transportation of troops by train.
Another view that has gained wide currency locates the Flu’s genesis in America’s Midwest. In recent times, historians led by Alfred W Crosby have supported the view that the epidemic started not in Europe but in a US Army base in Kansas in 1917 (America’s Forgotten Pandemic). According to adherents of this theory soldiers training at Fort Riley for combat in Europe contracted the H1N1 influenza virus which had mutated from pigs. The infected troops, they contend, then spread the virus via the war on the Western Front. Whether or not the virus started with WWI fighting men in France or in the US, it is undeniable that the soldiers moving around in trains and sailors in ships were agents of the Flu’s rapid dissemination [‘Spanish Flu’, History Today, (Upd. 05-Feb-2020), www.historytoday.com]. A recent, alternative origin view by molecular pathologist Jeffrey Taubenberger rejects the porcine transference explanation. Based on tests he did on exhumed victim tissue, Taubenberger contends that the epidemic was the result of bird-to-human transmission [‘Spanish flu: the killer that still stalks us, 100 years on’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, 09-Sep-2018, www.theguardian.com].
(Image credit: Guia turístico)
Demographics: differential age groups The pattern of Coronavirus mortality points to the disease being most virulent and most fatal to elderly people (the seventies to the nineties age group). This accords with most flu season deaths, although unlike seasonal flu outbreaks Coronavirus contagion has (thus far) had minimal impact on children, in particular the under-fives (Honigsbaum). But the pattern of Spanish Flu was markedly different, the records show a targeting of young adults, eg, in the US 99% of fatalities in 1918-19 were people under 65, with nearly 50% in the 20 to 40 age bracket (‘Spanish Flu’, Wiki). Statistics from other countries on the 1918 outbreak conform to a similar trend.
🔺 Conveying the health message to the public (Source: www.shelflife.cooklib.org)
The Flu in a series of varyingly virulent waves The first wave of the Flu in early 1918 was relatively mild. This was followed by a second, killer wave in August. This mutated strain was especially virulent in three disparate places on the globe, Brest in France, Freetown in Sierra Leone and Boston in the US. There were myriad victims, some died (quickly) because they had not been exposed to the first, milder wave which prevented them from building up immunity to this more powerful strain [‘Four lessons the Spanish flu can teach us about coronavirus’ (Hannah Devlin), The Guardian, 04-Mar-2020, www.msn.com]. The second wave was a global pathogen sui generis. The bulk of the deaths occurred in a 13-week period (September to December). The lethality of the disease, and especially the speed with which it progressed, was the scariest part✧.
2nd wave curve in the US, 1918: note the different mortality peaks during Oct-Dec 1918 for St Louis (imposed a stringent lockdown) vs Philadelphia (much less restrictive approach)
(Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007)
The symptoms of this murderously effective strain were unusual and extreme, eg, haemorrhaging from mucous membranes, bleeding from the eyes, ears and orifices, etc. The extreme severity of the symptoms were thought to be caused by cytokine storms (overreaction of the body’s immune system) (‘Spanish Flu’, Wiki) [‘Spanish Flu’, History, 12-Oct-2010, www.history.com]. The third and last strain of the Flu, in 1919, was markedly milder by comparison to the second, but still more intense than the first.
Many parallels exist between the 1918 flu outbreak and the present pandemic – of a positive nature, the widespread advocacy of wearing masks to limit the spread of disease and mandatory lockdowns. Plenty of negative parallels too – the disregarding of science and medical expertise on how to tackle the outbreak; countries engaging in playing the “blame game” against each other rather then co-operating on a united approach to the pandemic. There was especially, but not only in the US, a repetition by some of the denial at the national leadership level to square up to the pandemic and give it the complete seriousness it demanded.
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In 1919 in the middle of the flu crisis, Irish poet WB Yeats wrote in a poem the line for which he is perhaps best remembered: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”
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Footnote: The health authorities’ inability to check the juggernaut of the 1918 virus was exacerbated by misdiagnosis – at it’s onset the Spanish Flu was widely believed to be a bacterium like the Black Death, not a virus. Misreading the symptoms, the influenza outbreak was variously and erroneously diagnosed as dengue, cholera or typhoid (Spinney, ‘History Today’; ‘Spanish Flu’, History).
(Photo: State Archives & Records, NSW)
PostScript: The lessons of a global catastrophe The Spanish Flu in its vast human decimation rammed home lessons for post-WWI governments and health practitioners in its wake. Being helpless to prevent or halt the virus once in full swing, the vital need to develop vaccines to counter pandemics was subsequently understood. Advanced countries started to restructure their public health systems to try to cope (such as the United States’ NIH – National Institutes of Health, which emerged about 10 years after the Spanish Flu) [‘The great influenza The epic story of the deadliest plague in history‘ (JM Barry), Reviewed by Peter Palese, (JCI), www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov]. And of course the 1918 flu virus had other, indirect, outcomes…it led to universal healthcare, alternative medicine, intensive care facilities and a modern preoccupation with the benefits of healthy exercise under clean, clear skies (‘Pale Rider’).
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✺ the name is a misnomer. The Spanish association came about thus: with the Great War still raging other combatant European nations such as France and Germany had imposed censorship restrictions on the reportage of the flu outbreak, whereas Spain being neutral in the war did not. When the Spanish press freely reported a serious eruption of the Flu, people outside the country unquestioningly assumed that the influenza came from Spain
⌖ to further break that down, more American troops died from the Spanish Flu than in combat during WWI (‘Pale Rider‘)
⊞ the numbers cited tend to be approximations given the paucity of adequate record-keeping at the time
◙ part of a new multidisciplinary approach to the subject including economists, sociologists and psychologists
◍ consequently life expectancy for Americans dropped by 12 years in 1918, and for the first time since Britain commenced recording data, the death-rate in 1919 exceeded the birth-rate (Honigsbaum)
✪ Pandemic: pan ⤑ all ║ demos ⤑ the people (not literally but fairly close)
⌀ although isolation did prove beneficial in some instances, such as in Australia where the virus didn’t arrive until 1919 and entry was closely monitored with a maritime quarantine program. As a result Australia’s death-rate of 2.7 per 1000 of population was one of the lowest recorded [‘Influenza pandemic’, National Museum of Australia, www.nma.gov.au]
✧ Philadelphia alone experienced 4,597 influenza deaths in a single week