COVID Chronicles: Let’s Get Real – How To Create a Pandemic
On the last episode of the “COVID Chronicles” (I always wanted to be able to say that), we left off with the two main reasons why a SARS-CoV-2 epidemic that originated in China, became such a worldwide problem.
Indisputable Facts
So, let’s get real here and realize that these two indisputable facts, greatly worsened what could have been a limited epidemic, instead of a worldwide pandemic:
1. China let people OUT; and
2. The virus had multi-mode transmission, which wasn’t revealed early in the epidemic.
Remember when foreign nationals were posting video messages to Boris Johnson on social media, begging him to send a plane to pick them up and bring them home? Other foreign nationals in China were doing much the same “please get us out” pleading to their home governments, because China initially did the right thing by keeping people in their homes and not allowing travel out of the locally-affected areas, which is standard operating practice for a viral contagion we didn’t (presumably) understand at the time.
A Brief Relaxation of Communism
Then China did something remarkable – they stopped, if only in one manner, acting like Communists. When various countries insisted that their people be allowed to return to their home countries if they chose, China caved, and allowed foreign nationals to leave China, if they didn’t show any symptoms of the disease, since viral RNA/PCR testing specific for SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t really refined back then. So the various nations sent planes, and China let them out.
Mistake Number One
Mistake number one: never break a quarantine until you either have a way to test everyone and everything, and/or if the contagion is contained.
So this part of the problem is pretty much two-fold – China is to blame for caving to international pressure (thus not being good little Communists), and other nations not seeing the value in keeping their people where they were.
Mistake Number Two
This brings up the second part of the problem: it was not known (or not publicized) that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can survive on nonporous surfaces, live, for up to 72 hours. This little nugget of truth is the main reason we have a pandemic.
Even before the Wuhan epidemic broke out, it’s very likely that visitors to China, passing through Wuhan or surrounding areas, would have contracted the virus and thus become what we in medicine call “colonized”. This, coupled with unrestricted international travel prior to the outbreak, would certainly have spread the virus beyond China’s borders – the only question is to what degree.
Spreading Contagion
I contend it could have been mild and contained in other countries, if contact tracing would have been accurately done immediately upon realizing that a virus outbreak occurred in a major area such as Wuhan, where thousands and thousands of foreign nationals live and work.
This notwithstanding, the fact that the virus could be spread not only by droplet, but also by contact, greatly increased the ability of a regional epidemic to quickly spread to pandemic proportions. The question, which given the Chinese penchant for secrecy and backside-covering when they screw the world, is: did Chinese scientists know this before everyone else did, and if so, when did they know it, and why didn’t they make it known sooner?
Cultural Convention Makes No Difference
So, despite the whole of the Far East wearing masks as a near cultural convention (and in China, it’s done a lot for the pollution in the major cities), those masks didn’t save anyone from catching the virus, nor did they prevent the virus from spreading on non-porous surfaces, including airplane cabin material. This, epidemiologists contend, is precisely how the virus got out of China en masse and spread so quickly around the world.
Now after the nations of the world demanded their people be exempt from Chinese quarantines and be allowed to return to their home nations, and China’s leadership doing nothing to stop this, the so-called “Wuhan flu” was let loose in the world, causing many nations to look to their own medical scientists and researchers, as well as to the WHO, for answers.
Think that’s the end? Not by a longshot.
Next: How to Make a Pandemic Worse – The Horrible Power of ‘No’
