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The pandemic to end all pandemics?
May. 11th, 2020 01:40 pmThe COVID-19 pandemic continues to seem totally surreal to me. I've been mulling over the instructions we get from public health officials and politicians - the ones who really have the final say on what we are or are not allowed to do - and I honestly can't pinpoint any crisis from the annals of recorded history where so much was demanded of so many people in every walk of life.
Are these demands realistic or sustainable? And are we really going about things the right way?
I've read some accounts, both fictional and nonfictional, about people afflicted with TB, or "consumption". Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Or Clara's Rib, co-written with her sister Anne Raina, about Clara's experience at the Royal Ottawa (the "San"). Also about polio (something that definitely affected my generation) and the flu pandemic of 1918. It strikes me that while specific families and individuals might at any time be in quarantine, it wasn't EVERYONE who was expected to self-isolate for weeks and months on end. And that was before we had a lot of the medical expertise and infrastructure and pharmaceuticals and knowledge about day-to-day hygiene and smart buildings and cities that we have today - or indeed a lot of the the social and institutional framework like medicare, unemployment insurance, parental leave and benefits and so on. We also have far more vaccines than we did back then, including for the major childhood diseases which most of us got during our first few years at school.
Perhaps one of the biggest things that distinguishes this from earlier pandemics is that even the experts don't entirely know what they're dealing with. They can provide at minimum an educated guess as to how we should proceed, although it would probably be fairer to call it somewhat-informed speculation and recommendations as to the best way forward. I mean, at the beginning, they were telling us that to flatten the curve, we had to just ASSUME everyone we might come into contact with was already infected, which doesn't sound very scientific to me! After a while, they were able to ascertain (or at least reasonably hypothesize) which cases had been contracted through travel and which through community spread. And now there's contact tracing as well.
Now that testing has been ramped up, I think we probably have a better handle on the numbers. But how to interpret them? How many of those who test positive can be expected to recover, how much misery and how much treatment will be required, and what does it depend on? What about the asymptomatic people (most of whom have not been tested, although I gather some sort of sampling may be in the works)? I think we really need more antibody testing and of course the simpler the test the better, as long as it's reliable. Home tests where we could test ourselves, kind of like pregnancy tests, would be ideal. Even something like the colon screening tests might not be too bad.
Of course, there are some hopeful signs around us. Even in the hardest-hit provinces. Quebec kids cautiously re-entering the classrooms, at least in the early grades. Farmers' markets and plant nurseries starting up, at least for curb side pickup. Some standalone stores are re-opening too. We're at that betwixt-and-between stage where we're not quite sure when we might run afoul of some arbitrary restriction.
Some people would rather stay in their cocoons. It's a bit unsettling to contemplate the aftermath of all this. For sure there will be fences to mend, not to mention bridges and interprovincial borders. And a lot of aftershock pandemics like the mental health pandemic and the economic one.
One thing we know with 2020 hindsight: The Great War was definitely NOT the war to end all wars.
Need I say more?
Are these demands realistic or sustainable? And are we really going about things the right way?
I've read some accounts, both fictional and nonfictional, about people afflicted with TB, or "consumption". Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Or Clara's Rib, co-written with her sister Anne Raina, about Clara's experience at the Royal Ottawa (the "San"). Also about polio (something that definitely affected my generation) and the flu pandemic of 1918. It strikes me that while specific families and individuals might at any time be in quarantine, it wasn't EVERYONE who was expected to self-isolate for weeks and months on end. And that was before we had a lot of the medical expertise and infrastructure and pharmaceuticals and knowledge about day-to-day hygiene and smart buildings and cities that we have today - or indeed a lot of the the social and institutional framework like medicare, unemployment insurance, parental leave and benefits and so on. We also have far more vaccines than we did back then, including for the major childhood diseases which most of us got during our first few years at school.
Perhaps one of the biggest things that distinguishes this from earlier pandemics is that even the experts don't entirely know what they're dealing with. They can provide at minimum an educated guess as to how we should proceed, although it would probably be fairer to call it somewhat-informed speculation and recommendations as to the best way forward. I mean, at the beginning, they were telling us that to flatten the curve, we had to just ASSUME everyone we might come into contact with was already infected, which doesn't sound very scientific to me! After a while, they were able to ascertain (or at least reasonably hypothesize) which cases had been contracted through travel and which through community spread. And now there's contact tracing as well.
Now that testing has been ramped up, I think we probably have a better handle on the numbers. But how to interpret them? How many of those who test positive can be expected to recover, how much misery and how much treatment will be required, and what does it depend on? What about the asymptomatic people (most of whom have not been tested, although I gather some sort of sampling may be in the works)? I think we really need more antibody testing and of course the simpler the test the better, as long as it's reliable. Home tests where we could test ourselves, kind of like pregnancy tests, would be ideal. Even something like the colon screening tests might not be too bad.
Of course, there are some hopeful signs around us. Even in the hardest-hit provinces. Quebec kids cautiously re-entering the classrooms, at least in the early grades. Farmers' markets and plant nurseries starting up, at least for curb side pickup. Some standalone stores are re-opening too. We're at that betwixt-and-between stage where we're not quite sure when we might run afoul of some arbitrary restriction.
Some people would rather stay in their cocoons. It's a bit unsettling to contemplate the aftermath of all this. For sure there will be fences to mend, not to mention bridges and interprovincial borders. And a lot of aftershock pandemics like the mental health pandemic and the economic one.
One thing we know with 2020 hindsight: The Great War was definitely NOT the war to end all wars.
Need I say more?
