The Pattern That Epidemics Always Follow - The Atlantic - 0 views
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More Homo sapiens have probably died from infectious disease than all other causes combined
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Only in the past 150 years, owing to nutritional and medical advances, have we emerged from living in constant worry that a cough or fever or scrape might be a death sentence. But that fear of infectious disease remains embedded in the brain, as visceral as our sudden alarm when encountering a snake in the wild.
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I have noticed a pattern in how the media, governments, and public-health systems respond to infectious-disease outbreaks. There are four stages of epidemic grief: denial, panic, fear, and if all goes well, rational response.
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According to Cirium, an aviation-industry consulting firm, more than 200,000 flights in and out of China have been canceled, a 60 percent decline. In 2003, in the midst of SARS, global air travel was down 25 percent.
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Fear dissipates eventually, replaced by a more realistic sense of the risks. An epidemic, even one of a disease as seemingly easy to transmit as COVID-19, while burdening public-health systems and potentially deadly for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, is eminently survivable by the majority of the population
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Which brings us to the last stage of epidemic grief: rational response. After denial, panic, and fear, we can finally get down to the business of basic sanitary measures and infection protocols
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there are only four things you need to know about a virus: “What is it? What does it do? Where does it come from? And how do you kill it?”
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We never did develop a vaccine. With SARS, infections peaked sometime in May 2003, at about 9,000 cases. By then, the daily rate of new infections had dipped below the number declared cured or dead
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Why did the rate of transmission slow? Part of the answer is seasonality: The Northern Hemisphere’s virus season tends to run from winter to mid-spring, perhaps because people aren’t clustered indoors and so are less contagious, or because viruses might weaken in lower relative humidity or direct sunlight. (Nobody actually knows.)
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In the antibiotic era, infection control has been largely delegated to IV drips rather than sanitary cordons. With respiratory diseases like SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, 19th-century medical techniques and equipment—masks, gloves, galoshes, sealed wards, quarantines, and ventilation—are what comprise a rational response.