Post 24 - April 4, 2020
Day 24…
Every night at 7pm New York City erupts.
We walk out on our balconies or lean out of our windows.
We make noise.
We applaud the hospital workers and first responders who are putting their lives on the line every day.
We applaud, bang on saucepans, hoot and holler for about five minutes.
Every night.
When I was a kid in New Jersey, the town siren would go off at 6 or 7pm and we all knew that that was when we needed to get on our bikes and go home.
Now, every night for the last week or so, the joyful noise starts at 7pm and it marks the beginning of our evening with gratitude.
We’ve been here before.
In August of 1793 there was an outbreak of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia.
Nobody knew what caused it.
People panicked.
At that time, Philadelphia had a population of 50,000 people.
20,000 people fled the city.
Some neighboring towns refused to let these refugees in. Major port cities like New York and Baltimore instituted quarantines against people and goods from Philadelphia.
At that point in history, Philadelphia was the capital of the United States.
The federal government had now power to act in this crisis, so they didn’t.
The President, Washington, continued to meet to meet with his cabinet until September 10 when he left on a scheduled vacation. The rest of the legislature cut their meetings short a few days later when a dead body was discovered on the steps of the State House and they all freaked out.
The Governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas Mifflin fell ill so the Mayor, Matthew Clarkson organized the response.
5,000 of the population ultimately died. 10%.
The epidemic burned out by itself by the beginning of November of that year.
There were subsequent epidemics of Yellow fever - Baltimore in 1794, New York in 1795 and 1798, and Wilmington in 1798 and many more through the years.
It was nearly a century later, though, in 1881 that it was finally discovered that the fever was transmitted by mosquitoes.
There is now a vaccine for Yellow Fever which still occurs around the world - mostly in tropical locations.
About 30,000 people lost their lives to it last year - mostly in Africa.
Given how much I travel, I’ve been vaccinated against it.
In January of 1918 the H1N1 virus caused a pandemic that came to be known as the Spanish Flu.
By the time the pandemic was over, it had infected about 500,000,000 people or about 25% of the world’s population at the time. It is possible that as many as 100,000,000 people lost their lives around the world to this flu.
World War 1 would not fully come to a close until November of 1918 when the Germans signed the Armistice.
Ostensibly to maintain morale in light of the brutality of the war, censors minimized and clamped down on early reports of the virus’s mortality. Germany, the US, France and the UK all avoided factual reporting.
Spain, which had remained neutral, was free to report what was going on so the reports coming out of Spain were truly harrowing and included reports of the serious illness of their King. These reports created the false idea that Spain was particularly hard hit so that’s why it started being called the Spanish Flu.
Researchers now believe that an early epicenter was a UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, but there is some evidence that it had been circulating for months or even years before that. Some researches even believe that it possibly began in China.
Like COVID-19, particles of the Spanish Flu or H1N1 virus are transmitted between people by coughing and sneezing. Those particles enter through the eyes, mouth or nose. Crowded war-time conditions plus the lowered immune systems of the stressed-out soldiers in conjunction with massive troop movements across the world all contributed to the incredible spread.
In the US, the first case was reported in Haskell County, Kansas in January of 1918.
By March 11, the virus had reached New York with the first case being reported in Queens.
The pandemic came in two waves. The first wave was like a regular flu epidemic, the second wave which crested in October of 1918 was a result of the virus mutating. This second wave was devastating.
From what I can see, the people of the world did almost everything then that we are doing now.
Public institutions were closed, and public gatherings banned. Sporting venues and theatres were closed.
Some schools were closed, some weren’t.
Some churches were closed, some weren’t.
People wore face masks.
This happened all over the world and how different countries responded, dictated on how well they fared.
New Zealand was slow to close its’ ports and it got hammered as a result.
Here is a quote that I just read about the 1918 pandemic, “Cities where public health officials imposed multiple social containment measures within a few days after the first local cases were recorded cut peak weekly death rates by up to half compared with cities that waited just a few weeks to respond.”
There was a complete lack of leadership from Washington. State and local governments stepped in, erratically, to fill the vacuum. Public officials lied and made up facts.
Woodrow Wilson actually got it and the White House kept it a secret.
He made no mention of the virus publicly.
States received no help from the government.
Newspapers sugar-coated what was going on because they didn’t want to be seen to be undermining morale given how World War 1 had ravaged the country.
People could not trust what they read.
Then it passed.
The virus seems to have mutated again and it literally just stopped.
It killed twice as many people as those who died in World War 1.
On April 24, 1981, Ken Horne was reported to the CDC with a rare disease, Kaposi’s sarcoma.
He became known as patient zero for the AIDS pandemic.
Nobody knew what it was.
Nobody knew how it was transmitted - was it passed by physical contact? Airborne?
None of us knew.
People were afraid to get anywhere near people who might have it.
I was in college in NY.
We were all terrified, truly terrified.
The response from Washington?
Nothing.
The President Ronald Reagan never referred to it by name.
Officials in the White House joked about it as being the “gay plague”
The Government honestly did NOTHING.
ACT UP and other groups forced the Government to acknowledge HIV/AIDS.
Broadway Cares and Equity Fights Aids were both started to help people suffering from this disease because NOBODY ELSE WAS.
75 million people have been infected with AIDS worldwide.
32 million people have died.
In 2009 another H1N1 virus appeared - the same family as the so-called Spanish flu.
SARS.
8,000 people infected.
10% died.
There have been others. A lot of others.
Epidemics have been a part of human life since time immemorial.
They will be going forward too.
With the advent of global travel, the outbreaks have grown to pandemics.
There is nothing new about COVID-19 except its molecular make-up.
It is just the latest in a very long line.
These outbreaks happen and then we forget.
You think we haven’t forgotten about AIDS? Ask a 20-something.
As impossible as it seems, once COVID-19 has passed, we will forget about this one, too.
In February of 2018 President Trump proposed deep budget cuts to both the CDC and WHO.
In May of 2018, National Security Advisor John Bolton dissolved the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense that had been set up after the Ebola outbreak in 2016 by President Obama.
The White House’s response to COVID-19 was to appoint Vice President Pence to head the taskforce. This is a man who not only has no medical expertise whatsoever, but also a man who is responsible for a sizable increase in HIV/AIDS cases in his home state of Indiana where he was Governor.
Now, for some reason, his son-in-law Jared Kushner who has no government experience, let alone medical experience is addressing us about the response to the coronavirus.
When Kushner misspoke about the purpose of the national stockpile, a reporter pointed out that the Government’s own website contradicted him.
Rather than correct Kushner’s remarks, the Administration has RE-WRITTEN THE WEBSITE DESCRIPTION.
Of course, this is Trump’s White House, so they only did it in one location and left the original description in others.
The take-away from all of this?
We’ve been here before.
Not only have we been here before, but we’ve been here before with exactly the same kind of seemingly total Governmental incompetence that we are experiencing now.
Those who don’t remember history are condemned to repeat it.
And repeat it.
Apparently, every couple of decades we are going to repeat something like this because there seems to be something in us as a species that makes it impossible for us to remember.
Maybe, in some regards, it’s a blessing.
It allows us to go through life with less anxiety.
We do need to make sure that our Government doesn’t forget.
We need to fund the CDC in perpetuity and create a task force that allows us to have a concerted, unified response when these things begin.
That’s for after.
For now, though, we are in it.
We may forget later, but we can’t let up NOW.
Follow the social distancing guidelines.
They are making a difference.
What I’ve learned from all the reading I’ve done this morning on global pandemics is that like all of the others, this one WILL pass.
There are countless people out there working every hour of the day to make this better.
For us.
With us.
Tonight at 7pm, lean out your window and make some noise for the incredibly brave and dedicated ones who fighting the good fight right out there on the front lines.
We are in the hands of our doctors and nurses who are risking their lives.
For us.
With us.
Let’s make a LOT of noise.