"The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out."Well.
Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?
Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.
Now we know.
My state, Oregon, has been fairly quick about responding in the only real way that a republic can; closing things like theaters and sports stadia, and - finally - schools. But that's because our government is in the hands of the relatively sane (i.e., not Republicans) and who are dealing with this new plague as it is, not as Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump want them to think it is.
I won't pretend I'm not frightened. At 62 I'm in the gunsights of this fucking thing. I'm relatively healthy, but I'm old, and this kills old people.
I'll tell you what, though.
If this thing is killing me, I promise you this; I will personally do my damndest to escape my deathbed, steal a jetliner, fly to Mar-a-Fucking-Lago, break into the clubhouse, tear off my clothes, and rub my naked dying ass all over that moronic orange chucklefuck. I'll take the stupid sonofabitch with me if it's humanly possible. To think that this country wasted weeks while the dingus played with his phone and claimed that all was well?
Goddamn him.
I haven't words to describe how furious that makes me. While this is a global pandemic, and it is unlikely that ANY President could have prevented it from becoming a national tragedy, it's going to be worse than it needed to be, and purely because this fucking simpleton and his cult members refused to listen to the people ringing the alarm bells in the night.
As of now Oregon is fairly quiet. The usual morons are flooding the grocery stores, but the streets and parks and public spaces are quiet. We're all hunkering down, most of us, which is really all we can do, no different from some 14th Century villein in his cotte and hose, desperately praying to St. Jude that the White Horseman will pass over his house and leave him and his by.
There is no defense against this illness; all the wire and mines and interlocking fields of fire will not save us. If it comes in to us then we simply have to hope that we are not the unlucky few whose bodies betray them in a "cytokine storm", and hope that we will not end up flung namelessly into the plague pit.
Will that happen?
I have no idea.
But it could. And I will simply have to go on, as you will all have to go on, doing what I can to prevent that, and hoping against hope that it will not.
We are all now living in the Plague Year.
4 comments:
While the defense options are limited today, we can perform a delaying action.
Limiting social distance, washing hands, limiting movement, etc etc.
Every day, at great cost in lives, the medical world is getting to know this disease.
Assuming that the health system does not totally collapse, if you catch the disease 3 months from now, you will be much better off. Keeping the medical system afloat is everyone's job right now.
Oh yeah, if China deigns to send us a Medical team for help, grab onto them like a drowning man grabs a life preserver. Don't let National pride get in the way. The Chinese medics are 2 or 3 months up on the learning curve. I note that the Italians were not too proud.
Stay safe Chief. Toronto just closed down dining in restaurants and Canada's banned travel aside from the US. Going to be an 'interesting' month or so...
About cytokine storms:
I've been watching the new about this fairly closely since the first stories out of China. Particularly Helen Branswell's pieces for Stat, since she's one of the best reporters covering emerging diseases. I've also been looking at the fatality/age data that's emerged from China.
This nasty doesn't seem to have the "W" mortality/age distribution that the 1918 flu made infamous.
The people most at risk from cytokine storms aren't codgers like you and me. They're the people we'd probably call "kids": 20-somethings and 30-somethings whose immune systems are already at their peak. That's where the "W" curve comes from.
Whatever other ugliness COVID-19 has in store, this doesn't appear to be a major contributor.
Ael: The Trumpkins will accept PLA medical teams when Jared puts on a grass skirt and does the hula. Good idea, won't never happen. I AM trying to do what I can to keep at a distance from people. Have to go to the grocery, tho. I AM keeping a box of gloves in the Prius.
Leon: Yep. That's for damn sure.
Stormcrow: Interestingly, that's similar to the 1918 flu, as well; it caused death from respiratory failure, and largely in healthy young adults. Weird.
The odd part of this whole Plague Year thing was reading the accounts from Wuhan and how creepily they echoed the fictional account of the opening of "World War Z" in the Max Brooks book. In it "Patient Zero" turns up in this little village in Chongqing; the "barefoot doctor" who is summoned recognizes that this is some sort of really scary shit and notifies Beijing. The CCP responds by punishing him and covering up the outbreak until it's too late and the zombie apocalypse has begun.
That, apparently, was Brooks' point; he wanted to point out that governments, and, particularly authoritarian governments, would respond very badly to a crisis like this.
Of course, we now have Trump, who is a sort of shit-grade Mussolini with the same sort of gut instincts, so we're pretty much completely hosed.
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