The China or ??? Virus

“For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government”

Trump Tweet, 4/13/20

Most of the world believes that COVID-19 (CV-19, also known as “SARS-CoV-2”) began in January (maybe December) in a very crowded and public “wet” market (still-living livestock and wild animals bought and sold as part of the food chain) in China. But is that true? Names and myths often attach to outbreaks that just may be inaccurate. The first recorded death from 1918-20 Spanish Flu actually happened at a US Army training facility in Kansas and was quickly carried eastward and across the ocean by US troops being posted in the last year of WWI. It got the “Spanish” epithet because most of those involved in the war (Spain was neutral) censored the severity, even the existence, of the outbreak – a disease that killed well-over 600,000 Americans and probably more than 50 million globally – while Spain’s journalists were not restricted. Folks thus learned the truth from Spain, and the name stuck.

COVID-19 was undoubtedly spread by that Wuhan wet market, but most knowledgeable scientists believe that the ailment originated from a tiny horseshoe bat (about the size of a moth, pictured above), and that may have occurred in China… or somewhere else in the region. We’re still looking. The first fatality seems to be traceable to October of last year. Nobody then could know what might happen. The virus is one of the most contagious diseases humanity has ever experienced. It targets the lungs, so anything in or around a face is its point of entry. Having no known cures or vaccines, for now, it is an explosive infection, one that has not generated human herd immunity that could mitigate against a second wave, and it is particularly fond of impaired lungs (due to age, lung ailments or a general inability of a body to manufacture antibodies).

It was not until January 11^th that Chinese state-controlled media reported its first death from the virus: a 61-year-old man, who was a regular customer at the South China Seafood Market in Wuhan. It took the World Health Organization an additional month before it declared an international emergency from the pandemic. But even back at the end of December, there were already reports emanating from China of a new a virulent form of pneumonia. “On December 30, Dr. Marjorie Pollack, an infectious-disease epidemiologist [at her home in Long Island, NY], received an alert from China’s version of Twitter about several cases of pneumonia, of unknown cause, in that country…

“It began for Peter Daszak, a British American scientist, a couple of days after Christmas. While the rest of the world trundled along, the president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance was in his office in lower Manhattan, picking up the first clues of something amiss.

“Weibo, China’s Twitter, carried the warning signals: An odd illness in the city of Wuhan. Patients in respiratory distress. Some developing pneumonia. A few dying, or so said the reports, unconfirmed. Most of the sick had worked in, or visited, a ‘wet’ market in the central Chinese city, where live fish, crabs and livestock are sold, gill-by-jowl, alongside more exotic fare, such as snakes, hedgehogs and bamboo rats.

“An ebullient zoologist and parasitologist, Daszak had associates around the globe in the One Health movement — the professional community trying to prevent the spread of disease between the animal and human worlds. But, as New Year’s approached, his colleagues in China suddenly went mum… ‘They were all saying ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk. We’re very busy. We’ll talk to you soon.’ They wouldn’t respond, even to a ‘Happy New Year’s’ message. That wasn’t normal,’ Daszak recalled. ‘That’s when you know, you just know, something serious is going down…

“Those fleeting days of 2019 and the first three months of 2020 have passed in a blur for America and the world, turned upside down by a virus previously not identified by humankind and now responsible for a death toll that has climbed past 100,000.

“For the 54-year-old Daszak and his fellow germ trackers, it’s been a period of long hours and roiling emotions — anxiety about the trajectory of the killer they spotted in its first days, a queasy satisfaction that their years of warnings had not been misplaced and a stolid determination to do more to prepare the world for the pandemics yet to come.

“There’s also frustration, and some anger, as they watch world leaders move too slowly to marshal healthcare workers, set aside medical supplies and, especially, to isolate millions of people with no immunity to the new invader.” James Rainey and Kiera Feldman writing for the April 12^th Los Angeles Times.

While some nations were completely prepared for the outbreak, like South Korea, much of the developed world dallied too long to stem what was coming. The United States was among the last, at least on a federal level, to begin to take this pandemic seriously. President Donald Trump even considered doing nothing: “In a Situation Room meeting on March 14 — the same day Trump extended his travel ban to the UK and the Republic of Ireland in a bid to slow the spread of the pandemic — Trump reportedly suggested allowing the US to develop ‘herd immunity.’

“The controversial approach — advocated by some experts at the time — involved letting the disease spread on the assumption that many would develop only mild symptoms and widespread immunity to the disease would begin to build…. ‘Why don't we let this wash over the country?’ Trump reportedly asked Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the top scientific experts on the president's coronavirus task force.

“Two anonymous sources familiar with the president's remarks confirmed the details of the meeting to the publication… According to the report, Fauci initially didn't understand what Trump meant by the phrase ‘wash over.’ When he realized what Trump was saying, he became alarmed and laid out the likely consequences... Mr. President,’ Fauci responded, according to The Post. ‘Many people would die.’  

“Trump was not alone in backing the ‘herd immunity’ strategy at the time… Top government scientific advisers in the UK reportedly initially backed a ‘herd immunity’ strategy, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson [himself subsequently infected and hospitalized] initially resisted the sweeping lockdown measures that were being put in place in other European countries. … It was only when new projections from scientists at Imperial College in London found that 500,000 could die if the disease was allowed to spread largely unchecked that the government abruptly changed course and introduced compulsory lockdown measures on March 23.  

“Sweden has also resisted introducing sweeping lockdown measures, with government scientists there saying that if introduced too soon, such measures can be counterproductive… With the death toll in Sweden rising, such measures could soon be introduced, according to reports. But the government insists no such plans are imminent.” Business Insider, April 12^th. To date, there have been no signs of any “herd immunity.” Had we followed that path, we would just be experiencing sequential waves of infections and untold numbers of additional dead.

The Trump administration received an early warning, for sure. On Jan. 3, his appointee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, indicated he had been alerted to the early reports of the spreading virus by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That information, and the news was even worse by then, was reinforced by a direct warning memo to the President from his senior trade advisor, Peter Navarro, on January 29^th.

The most effective federal group charged with preventing and limiting the impact of pandemics, the White House National Security Agency’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, had properly identified and thwarted a deadly virus (H7N9) that was killing 40% of its victims in China as recently as 2017. We generally have referred to this group as the White House pandemic group that Donald disbanded early in his tenure. Although it was operational as early as the Clinton administration, it became a formal entity during the Obama years (the response to the Ebola outbreak). Trump saw the group as financial waste, even though those in the group were simply moved into other federal assignments. No money saved there.

“Last month, when Trump was asked about the directorate’s elimination, he called the inquiries ‘nasty’ and said he knew nothing about it. But he also justified the layoffs of scientific experts as efficient: ‘I’m a business person — I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly,’ he said.” Los Angeles Times, April 13^th. “Thousands of people”? At its peak, there were 430 people in the Directorate (including those in the pipeline). What’s the relevance of bringing them back in an emergency when their job is to help prevent that emergency? Trump doesn’t like people telling him what to do, regardless of qualifications. He and his constituency hold scientific “elites” in disdain. And Trump tends to cut what he does not understand. Or dilute their voice.

Indeed, NIH’s Dr Anthony Fauci (federal government's top infectious disease expert), who has been consistently the most honest top federal medical official, finally seems to have crossed Trump’s red line by saying publicly that earlier steps to limit public interaction could have saved lives. On April 13^th, President Donald Trump responded and retweeted a message that ended, “time to fire Fauci.” Can this happen? Apparently, Trump can actually direct Fauci’s boss’ boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, in turn to direct the head of NIH (Francis Collins) to discharge Fauci. Should that occur, I would hope what limited credibility that remains with the Trump administration would plunge. But even if Fauci is not let go, expect his visibility to be contained.

Assumptions held by non-medical personnel, a priority where the President of the United States told the world that the economic costs to the country could easily eclipse the loss of life – tweeting, “we can't have the cure be worse than the problem” – combined with the confusion over who was supposed to provide essential equipment and supplies, the delay in implementing lockdowns and the contradictory messages from the White House have all contributed to our most dubious achievement: We now hold the record for the nation with the greatest tally to date on number of those confirmed to be infected and those who have died from COVID-19.

“Viruses have no regard for human constructs such as national boundaries, or even natural ones, like oceans. On Jan. 19, a 35-year-old man who had visited family, and the wet market in Wuhan, entered an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Wash. He had been coughing for four days, with a light fever. A day later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested his nasal swab and made it official: The coronavirus had arrived in America.

“CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Trump on Jan. 22 about the possibility of a pandemic. ‘No. Not at all,’ the president responded. ‘And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.’ It would be the first of many reassurances from Trump, and a few other elected officials, that would prove overblown.

“Even the virus watchers, armed with their expertise, marveled at the virus’ headlong progress. ‘I still find myself flabbergasted this is happening,’ [Helen Branswell, veteran journalist for the health website STATnews.com] said, ‘We’ve all been through a relatively recent pandemic, the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. It was pretty mild. ... I would have thought it would be a long time till the next one. And I was definitely hoping not to ever experience one as devastating as this one is and will be.’

“By mid-January, most public health experts in the U.S. had gotten the message from the germ hunters, in no uncertain terms… Exits on the freeway to pandemic had whizzed by: the virus quickly skipped from animal-to-human to human-to-human transmission, it leaped outside of China and it sped across continents in disguise; as many as 25% of its carriers apparently healthy even as they unwittingly exposed their friends and families to a pathogen with no known cure… ‘This is one of the smartest viruses we’ve run across,’ Pollack said. ‘It’s insidious. It gets out there quickly and quietly.’” LA Times.

Scientists are working full bore on treatments and an effective vaccine. All of that will take time. The watchwords for all of us is to continue be to take maximum precautions, and even if virus “peaks,” knowing that there will be plenty of additional killing power from this virus for some time to come.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and at least we should be grateful that the deciders on reopening the economy are the governors and mayors… and not the President; the fake news is probably the President’s tweet at the top.