Pandemics...?
In early January, three Americans proposed a plan for the “new normal”: that is, life with Covid-19.
The coronavirus, they wrote, should be seen as another circulating respiratory illness - like influenza or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Eradication or elimination of Covid-19 is impossible given immunity imbued by the current vaccines do not protect against infection in the long-term. Frankly, it means there’s no practical way right now to expel this bothersome newcomer.
Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez has suggested it’s time to treat Covid-19 like the flu. Bill Gates has said similar. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has said the coronavirus will circulate for years to come.
In the UK, Labour leader Keir Starmer has outlined a plan to coexist with the virus where people can “live their lives as normal” and never again face “tough restrictions on our lives, our livelihoods and our liberties”.
Professor David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has said the virus will soon be endemic.
The great parrot fever outbreak of 1930 has slipped from our collective memory. But at its peak, it was the stuff of panicked headlines .
It is easier to generate panic than to disseminate real information.
Richard Neustadt and Ernest May spelled out the dangers of epidemics when they looked at the 1976 swine flu debacle. Swine flu was then seen as an imminent danger to people.
The CDC then, and recently, used the horrors of 1918 as their “worst case scenario”.
George Bush announced, in 2005, having read John Barry's history of the 1918 pandemic, that avian influenza was the equivalent of the 1918 influenza epidemic and posited it as the world's greatest risk—replacing international terrorism.
Avian influenza in the 21st century triggered international responses greatly out of scale to its actual danger.
When it first arose in southern China in 2003, SARS was called “severe acute nervousness syndrome” because it was accompanied by almost paranoid fear. Here the model of an infection was manifest. The new disease was seen with much the same anxiety and paranoia in the West as a new cholera or Black Death .
By June 11, 2009, H1N1 was a designated pandemic.
Everyone was hyper-aware of H1N1 influenza from the city health officials who met you at the airport wearing masks and brandishing thermometers to the city's inhabitants, hidden behind their masks on the trams.
SARS was set to invade and destroy “civilization”. And the people in Hong Kong and south China were blamed for this.
Our ignorance about pandemics tends to swing to dangerous panic.
The germ theory of disease and other scientific advances in the 19th century fostered a sense of mastery over the microbial world. But pathogens have continued to crash our species barrier despite those advances — H.I.V. from chimpanzees, influenza from birds, Zika from monkeys, to name just three.
Fear has played a particularly vital role in coverage of the coronavirus outbreak
To put these observations into perspective, it is instructive to look to a comparison to coverage of seasonal influenza, which is estimated by the World Health Organization to kill 290,000 to 650,000 people around the world every year. Since January 12 2020, world newspapers have published just 488 articles on the seasonal influenza without mention of the coronavirus.
In sharp contrast to coverage of this novel coronavirus, fewer than one in ten stories about flu (37 of 488) mentioned fear or similar phrases.
And panicking that new diseases will unfold like previous ones generates inaccurate history and unnecessary fear in the present, sometimes with serious consequences.
Since the mid-1990s the media, scientists, the government, the security apparatus and eventually historians began to perpetuate an “outbreak narrative” about pandemic disease typified in popular culture, for example, by the 1995 movie “Outbreak.”
Each of these groups had its own reasons — whether generating more stories, fundraising or identifying new national security threats.
The result was a feedback loop: Studies emphasized potential dangers from infectious diseases, and it led to more research, preparedness exercises and media attention to infectious diseases, which in turn led to more research funding.
Once the pathogen’s identity is revealed to the public, a new name will become commonplace. The government will reassure the public that everything is safe (until it isn’t). Dissenters will critique the government for failing to prepare adequately.
The media will publicize the identity of the source (almost always foreign), trace the pathogen’s transmission and headline the number of infected and dead.
Doctors will heroically risk their lives to fight the disease and cure the pandemic.
Or consider traffic accidents, which kill about 1.25 million people every year yet seem to have little impact on people’s behavior, either good and bad.
Yet, despite the likelihood that the majority of people will never get the virus and that the vast majority who do will survive, people and governments are reacting in some extreme ways.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in soaring infection rates, widespread lockdowns, record-shattering declines in output, and spiking poverty.
The coronavirus feeds into this expectation by presenting it like an inevitable comeuppance. As Barkun put it, “We live in a time of apocalyptic motifs.” Or as a friend said to me, “Even if it’s not this one that ultimately gets us, it hardly matters. The next will or the one after that.”
Originally Posted by piroska
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