In Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!”, the point of the tale is that eventually there was a wolf, but the boy was not believed because he had given too many false alarms. In my view, the Covid-19 coronavirus is indeed a wolf, or at least has the potential to be one. Many people, including President Trump, think we are over-reacting, because so many past scares have been exaggerated. I think that’s wrong.
Coming from you, a friend said to me the other day, that’s scary. I am known as an obsessive and serial debunker of false alarms. I have been at it for almost 40 years ever since I realised as a science journalist in the 1980s that acid rain was being wildly overblown as a threat to forests (I was right). This scepticism has served me well. I did not believe that mad cow disease would kill hundreds of thousands of people, as some “experts” were claiming in the mid 1990s. In the end just 177 died. Likewise, I refused to panic over bird flu, swine flu, SARS or ebola.
I set out to debunk exaggerated claims about the population explosion, peak oil and peak gas, nuclear winter, the ozone hole, pesticides, species extinction rates, genetically modified crops, sperm counts, ocean acidification and the millennium bug. In every case this made me unpopular and unfashionable, but close to the truth. I said climate change would happen more slowly and with less impact on storms, floods, droughts, sea ice and sea level than even some experts were claiming in the 1990s, let alone the extreme environmentalists, and it has.
It is very easy, in other words, to bet on the tendency of journalists and their readers to engage in a competitive auction of unjustified alarm. “The whole aim of practical politics,” said H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And no, the fact that the millennium bug was a damp squib was not because we were well prepared; some countries and industries did nothing and were still fine.
So why don’t I think this hobgoblin is imaginary? First, because lethal plagues have a long track record. From the plague of Justinian to the Black Death to the Spanish flu of 1918 to the HIV epidemic, new diseases have proved they can burn through the human population with frightening efficiency. It’s true we have got better at eradicating infectious diseases through vaccinations, pills and public health, but most viruses are still very hard to cure and some are very easy to catch.
The second reason is that new diseases are often more dangerous than existing ones and this one has jumped from bats, possibly via pangolins. In the past respiratory viruses have generally proved to be low in virulence once they become highly contagious: hence the large number of rhinovirus, adenovirus and coronavirus strains that we call collectively, “the common cold”. Even flu has been relatively less lethal since the special wartime conditions of 1918. But when they first infect our species, viruses can encounter a vulnerable immune system and run riot.
The third reason for alarm in this case is the speed with which Covid-19 has crossed regional and international boundaries. It does seem to have acquired an unusual skill at getting passed on from one person to another, usually not making them so sick that they stay away from meeting other people, which is what prevents ebola causing pandemics, but yet being capable of killing about 1% of people it infects. This is the frightening combination of traits that we have feared might one day arise.
Then there is the effect of globalisation, and the huge growth in international travel. I wrote in my notes in 1996, when reviewing a book on new viruses, “If we persist in creating conditions in which viruses can be easily transmitted and amplified, then we will persist in experiencing waves of new viral epidemics. The problem lies in the ecology of our society, not destruction of the environment.” Human beings are just too tempting an ecosystem for an ambitious virus.
But we have indeed cried wolf over so many issues, that it has contributed to us being underprepared. We should have seen that globalisation would cause such a risk to grow ever larger and taken action to prevent a new virus appearing. We should have worried about things other than climate change.
The Gates Foundation has been doing something in the Seattle area that I first heard put forward by a microbiologist who happened to be an NBC officer, back in the 1990s: Survey the public and sequence every thing they have going. Back then, it would have been expensive as hell, but he pointed out that the costs would drop with improved technology and mass production.
Basic idea he had was that if you got sick, before you got your over-the-counter meds, you went to the pharmacist, they handed you a sampling kit (anonymized, but with the ability to find you again, if need be…) and you’d turn in samples for analysis to see what was ailing you. Likewise, you go into the doctor, you get sampled.
This would allow epidemiologists to get a handle on what’s actually out there and active in the population, enabling public health officials to get out in front of anything going on. Back in the 1990s, this would have been massively expensive, but now…? Maybe not so much. And, it would enable the creation of an actual public health survey of national health.
Right now, unless you go in and have testing done for it, nobody is doing this sort of thing. His idea was that you surveyed across the population, not just the folks who got hit hard enough to go into the doctor. He also wanted to have it set up so that the person being swabbed would report their symptoms and severity, because the point he made was that every strain hit everyone differently. There was some stuff that was so low-level that it never made the scopes for the folks doing epidemiology, but the disease spread across the country with a speed that was breathtaking, when they went to look at it.
One of the things that came up while I was talking to him was that there was a lot of suspicious speed to how West Nile virus got from where it had its toehold in the Northeast to the West coast so damn fast. Per what he was saying, classically it would have taken years for that disease to get out to the Pacific Northwest, but that it was literally a blink of the epidemiological eye before it was being reported in the West. There was also an interesting association with the way the disease “hot spots” were centered on a lot of western US university campuses that had a lot of Middle Eastern students.
Some of that could have been explained away by other means, but there were an awful lot of “interesting” connective potentials there. Particularly since the strain of West Nile that was prevalent across the US was very close to the one our genius academics had sent blithely off to Iraq back in the late 1980s and 1990s…
I like this idea. There are all kinds of things out there that get misdiagnosed, particularly if it is viral. You may get sick, get well (or not), and the docs have no idea what you ACTUALLY had.
I have mentioned my friend who is a professor at the university in Lund, Sweden, who studies the genetics of mosquito digestion.
Two things she has mentioned to me in conversation, one being that West Nile was a great boon to mosquito research, as the money taps got opened up. The other thing, was the phenomenon of “airport malaria”, where someone presents at hospital, tests for malaria, and never ever went anywhere where malaria is endemic.
Fortunately, the numbers are so small, that it is unlikely to be re-introduced, but keep in mind that malaria used to be endemic to much of the US and Canada, and we have several mosquito species that can still carry malaria, so if enough infected people come to North America, it could theoretically get reintroduced……
Every time I wander near a protected “wetland” in Ontario I reflect that these once were malarial “swamps” to be drained, not protected.
I think sometimes our modern enthusiasms will be the death of us.