Post 68 - May 18, 2020
Day 68…
A New York City Health Inspector has now traced an outbreak of cases in several wealthy households in the city back to a single person who had been working for each of them.
It seems that each time, a short while after the person, who had, and continues to have, no symptoms themselves, started working in the house, the family got ill. When that happened, the person left for another job.
So far, the Health Department have contact traced 53 cases back to this same person.
Of those 53 people, three have died.
This was in 1906.
The person’s name was Mary Mallon.
She worked as a cook.
The disease in question was typhoid.
I find it surprising that nobody’s made a movie about Typhoid Mary yet.
It’s has everything you’d want in a story - great characters, intrigue and more than a touch of tragedy.
It’s even a perfect part for Saoirse Ronan.
One of the families who had gotten ill after Mary worked for them, hired a researcher named George Soper to look into what had made them ill.
It was he who put the pieces together and figured out that the one thing that all of these afflicted families had in common was their cook.
When he finally confronted her, she didn’t believe him.
She refused to give him either a stool or urine sample (the disease typically lodges in the gall bladder) and came after him with a meat cleaver.
He convinced the authorities that she was a danger to the community and the Health Inspector had her quarantined.
She was kept forcibly under quarantine for three years.
When questioned she admitted that she never washed her hands.
In 1906, the concept of germs was still new.
The theory that diseases were caused by germs that traveled between people was still not widely accepted.
Her stool and urine samples, which she was forced to give, were, indeed, teeming with typhoid bacteria but, even so, she refused to believe that she carried the disease.
After three years the NY State Commissioner of Health released her after making her promise that she would not work as a cook again.
A few years passed where she tried to work as a laundress, but she couldn’t make enough money at it, so she secretly changed her name and went back to work as a cook.
Predictably, outbreaks of typhoid started up again and, after a long thrilling cat and mouse chase, the police finally tracked her down and arrested her.
She spent the rest of her life - twenty-three years - in quarantine.
She died under lock and key, a minor celebrity, in 1938.
At any point she could have had her gallbladder removed and the source of the contagion would have gone, but she held firm to her belief that she wasn’t carrying the disease and never allowed it.
She preferred to remain imprisoned.
She put her faith in God and the church and, by all accounts, found solace in that.
After her death, a post-mortem did indeed find evidence of the live bacteria in her gall bladder.
They never did an autopsy on her.
There is a theory that the authorities did not want to cause a city-wide panic with the results.
Mary Mallon was the first person identified as an asymptomatic carrier of any disease.
By the time she passed away, 400 other people had also been identified as typhoid carriers but none of them was ever incarcerated.
It doesn’t appear that anyone ever tried to educate Mary about the disease.
A prickly and stubborn person, she was, instead, imprisoned and used as a lab rat by doctors.
A friend of mine went hiking recently and passed by two guys, one guy wearing a mask and the other bearded guy not.
We are all struggling with keeping our mouths shut these days.
Everybody has their own risk threshold.
If somebody is doing something that somebody else feels might be putting them at risk, it is usually possible for the person who feels that they are at risk to just get out of the way.
My friend who was hiking couldn’t do that because the trail was narrow. Against his better judgement, as he passed them, he said something along the lines of “Nice mask, the beard doesn’t count.”
The response from the guy in the beard was, “If I believed in the virus, I’d wear one.”
Dimitri Ivanovsky first discovered that sap filtered from a diseased tobacco plant remained infectious to healthy plants in 1892.
128 years ago.
Six years later, in 1898, Martinus Beijerinck called the filtered substance a virus.
122 years ago.
It has been 114 years since the concept of an asymptomatic carrier was first identified in the guise of Mary Mallon.
In as much as nothing can ever be known with total absolute surety, COVID-19 exists.
Nothing separates the lack of knowledge of Typhoid Mary and the Guy with the Beard except 114 years.
Doctors didn’t try and educate Mary and our Administration is doing everything they can to not educate the Guy with the Beard.
When that happens, we cannot expect any other outcome except ignorance.
Scientific inquiry is adding to what we know about this virus every single day.
In addition to the five sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt who seem to have gotten COVID-19 a second time, there have been a significant number of people in South Korea that that appears to have happened to as well.
What scientists there now think is happening is that these people aren’t getting it again as much as they never fully got rid of it in the first place.
It is possible that the virus never fully left their systems.
Studies from China and Hong Kong seem to show that even after nasal swab tests indicate that the patient is clear of the virus, it is still present in the lower lungs and intestines for up to a month longer.
This should be, potentially, very comforting news.
Antibodies may, in fact, convey some immunity.
People may just need to be isolated for a few weeks longer following their infections to make sure that the remnants of the virus leave them.
What it could mean is that we simply need to be testing from the other end.
The overall curve of cases in the US appears to be going down.
This is after all of the re-opening.
That seems great until you really start to take the information apart.
The problem is that what those numbers indicate is just an overall national average.
If you go state by state you can see that some states, like New York, are seeing cases going down while some states like California are seeing cases remaining steady.
And some states, like Texas, are seeing their cases rise.
New York, with its massive number of cases, trending down, affects the national average far more than Montana with its small amount of cases does when their cases trend up.
We still need more time to fully assess what effect the reopening might really be having on our numbers.
Our Government needs to navigate us through this crisis with the best-informed approach possible.
That has to be based on science.
We currently have 50 different governments at the helm and each of them are steering their ships in a completely different direction.
It is inevitable that we are going to crash into each other.
Each day that passes, sees a further decline in our National leadership.
Yesterday, what we were all privy to, was an insult fight between two Presidents.
It was a new low.
Our President is actually calling his predecessor names.
Like a kid on a playground.
Really?
Should we not expect more from our leadership than that?
I have friends all over the planet.
They are looking at us with their mouths open.
Amazed.
Some of them are in places with spectacular leadership and some of them are in places with questionable leadership, but none of them can take their eyes off of the dumpster fire that is OUR national response to this crisis.
Until we can coordinate a nationally coordinated testing plan and a nationally coordinated contact tracing plan, we will never be able to deal with this virus.
Not only are we not doing that, we are being told over and over again that this virus isn’t a problem.
We are being told by politicians that it doesn’t exist.
As angry and incredulous that some of us are when we hear about people who aren’t following any guidelines, the Guy with the Beard’s response is perfectly rational given what he is being told.
He’s listening to the politicians who are telling him what he wants to hear and not to the scientists who are, instead, giving us some hard-to-face facts.
The facts are evolving daily.
Sometimes the news is good, sometimes it seems a bit dire.
With every passing day, though, we are learning more.
We are moving towards the day when we will have enough information in our grasp to deal with this virus and resume our lives.
Science is pushing the curve of our ignorance downward.
Am I basing that opinion on faith?
Yes, I have faith in what is demonstrable.
I am basing that opinion on demonstrable science and demonstrable history.
We would get through this crisis far quicker if we had national leadership that wasn’t undermining the science every single day.
You just have to look at Woodrow Wilson’s response to the Spanish Flu pandemic to see that what we are doing now is going to make getting through this much harder.
He did a lot of the same things that our leadership is currently doing, and it didn’t end well.
Even with that, they did get through the Spanish Flu.
They got through it and so will we.
I have faith in the science.
I have faith in the history.
I also have faith in some things that can’t be so readily proved by science.
I have faith in love.
Keeping each other safe is an act of love.
If there is something that I can do that might help, then sign me up.
Inconvenience is a small price to pay for keeping my community safe.
Science, at the moment, says staying apart and wearing masks will help keep us from giving the virus to our neighbors, friends and family.
If, as time passes, science tells us that some of the things we are doing now had no real effect, then I will get together with those I love, and we will laugh at our idiocy.
For now, though, I am going to follow what the scientists are saying.
Because I have faith in the science that tells me that it MIGHT help.