COVID-19 Turns Five Today. The Next Pandemic Is Lurking

Five years ago this morning on Dec. 31, 2019, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and my laptop. I was a member of “Flublogia,” a group of journalists, health scientists and kibitzers like me who had been tracking reports of disease outbreaks for years. I started every morning by checking my friends’ sites and Twitter feeds.

News had been slow lately; an Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was fading out. But this morning, several of my friends had picked up a report from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection about a “cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.”

Then Helen Branswell, a Canadian health journalist based in Boston, commented on the Wuhan reports: she didn’t like the sound of them at all. If Branswell was worried, the Flublogia group was instantly alarmed.

I checked Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection website and then went through the media reports from Wuhan. As the day progressed, I posted translated stories from the media in mainland China and Hong Kong, which culminated in the formal declaration of a “pneumonia epidemic” with 27 confirmed cases — seven of them serious.

Suddenly, lockdown

Twenty-four hours after I’d first learned about Wuhan, I posted a report that the Huanan seafood market had been “closed for renovation” at 5 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

That, of course, was the authorities’ first disastrous mistake, cleaning the market so thoroughly that it would become impossible to find any infected animals or contaminated surfaces.

We would soon see bitter scientific and political clashes over the origin of what became known as COVID-19. After mistakes by the local authorities, Beijing took over and startled the world by locking down not only Wuhan but all of Hubei province.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Jan. 30, 2020.

On March 11, with 118,000 cases and 4,291 deaths in 114 countries, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.

But for me and my fellow Flublogians, the pandemic had begun with that first public announcement on Dec. 31, when COVID-19 had already been spreading for weeks.

We forget pandemics, and gradually remember them

I had become interested in pandemics only in middle age, when I began reading books on the 1918-19 “Spanish flu.” I realized that my parents had been toddlers then; my grandparents must have been terrified, both for themselves and for their children. Yet no one ever mentioned it as I was growing up, though they sometimes talked about the politics of the time.

I would eventually learn that, as Laura Spinney put it, we remember wars and gradually forget them, while we forget pandemics and gradually remember them.

I didn’t imagine, though, that we would forget COVID-19 so quickly. I grit my teeth when I hear people say “Since the pandemic...” because the pandemic is assuredly still on. Governments have simply stopped reporting numbers.

We did take it seriously in the beginning, though health authorities avoided calling COVID-19 transmissible as an aerosol. So we stood two metres apart and put Plexiglas shields between us and the cashiers at the checkout while the virus infected us anyway. We wore masks.

In the process, we accidentally killed off influenza B/Yamagata, another nasty virus that became collateral damage. But COVID-19 was a lot tougher.

And then, about the time the first vaccines became available, the wheels started coming off public health.

A vaccine mandate was medical common sense, to protect both health-care workers and their patients — not to mention all the workers in face-to-face contact with colleagues and customers.

Yet many people who obey speed limits and file their taxes on time suddenly decided their civil liberties had been grossly violated.

From solidarity to a bleak new reality

Remember when we used to bang saucepans every evening, just to thank the health-care workers?

We fell silent, but they kept working and falling ill and coming back to work.

Masks went from required to optional to weird. (When New Brunswick recently recommended masking to fight whooping cough, it was actually newsworthy.)

People went into hospital for routine procedures and caught COVID there. Kids spread COVID in their classrooms, but air purifiers were optional even when they could be made easily and cheaply.

So public health lost trust both on the right because it asked too much and on the left because it asked too little. Few governments anywhere in the world, even China’s, now have the stomach for serious measures to curb infection. Basic hygiene has been labelled “restrictive” of freedom when it is really protective of freedom by keeping people alive.

It’s a truism among novelists that “stress reveals character.” Put your hero through hell, and they’ll show you what they’re made of.

The stress of the pandemic has revealed the lack of character of our politicians, most of their health experts and many of our fellow citizens. If we feel disillusion, it’s still better than living in an illusion.

What we haven’t learned, and must know now

And now, very inconveniently, yet another virus, my old pal H5N1, is rising rapidly on the charts, infecting not only wild birds and poultry but also mammals from sea lions to domestic cats and dairy cattle.

Most dairy workers who contract H5N1 seem to recover easily (though we still don’t know if “long H5N1” is in their future). But a few people, including a B.C. teenager, have contracted the classic bird flu that has killed half its victims in the past 20 years.

Like all influenza viruses, H5N1 keeps mutating. Most of its variants die out or are no worse than their ancestors. But the mutation that lets it thrive in mammals is a lucky break. Eventually, a sub-mutation will let it attach itself easily to cells in our respiratory systems and then to ride on our breath to other humans.

If COVID-19, with a one per cent fatality rate, could bring us to our knees, a mutant H5N1 with a 50 per cent fatality rate would knock us flat.

Even if public health could recommend suitable countermeasures, the politicians would be reluctant to enforce them, and many victims of the new pandemic would die, insisting with their last gasp that H5N1 is just another hoax, or a biowarfare weapon, or both.

If H5N1 does become the next pandemic, it will be on our doorstep within the next few years, if not the next few months.

When it starts, we will have to answer with “you do you” — masking, physical distancing, air purification.

And we can only hope that enough of a health system survives to develop and distribute an effective vaccine before H5N1 breaks down society into frightened little communities with short life expectancies.

That, at least, would give them a chance to grow into courageous larger societies again, in which individuals will be safest by caring for one another — not just for themselves.

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