Don’t panic, but do be afraid enough to be very, very cautious. The novel coronavirus epidemic almost certainly will get a lot worse before it ever gets “contained.”
That’s my key takeaway from an interview Monday evening with John M. Barry, author of the definitive work, The Great Influenza, on the flu pandemic that began in 1918. Barry’s research is so well-respected that he was appointed to the federal government’s official Board of Experts on Infectious Disease, and he now serves on the faculty of the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
“I think this is going to be very, very bad,” Barry said. “This is not a strain of influenza, so nobody in the world has immunity to anything like it. Nobody in the world has seen it before. So it certainly has the potential to spread very, very widely.”
Acknowledging that he is making merely an educated guess, Barry predicted that 40% to 70% of the entire U.S. population would get “infected — not necessarily full-blown sick, but infected” as it spreads. Furthermore, because the United States was slower than some other nations to mass-produce tests for coronavirus, he said that there are “certainly hundreds of cases in the United States, maybe thousands, that we don’t know about.”
It’s tough to contain an epidemic when an illness is misdiagnosed in the first place.
Do the arithmetic, and if 40% of the U.S. gets infected, and 1% of those infected end up dying, this could mean well more than a million U.S. deaths from the contagion.
Barry urged President Trump to stop making pronouncements on the disease itself but instead to push public health professionals front and center to be the only official government spokespeople on the outlook for, and handling of, the virus.
“They need to more clearly state what they are trying to accomplish, what they expect to happen, and what they are going to do about it when it does happen,” he said. “Give more guidance to the states. And prepare to hunker down.”
Meanwhile, Barry said that while most of the advice people are following about how to avoid the virus is good and sensible, there’s one piece of advice he thinks hasn’t been stressed enough: “I would make a point of saying that public restrooms can be a very dangerous place. Avoid them at all costs.”
A not-so-obvious corollary I would add: If you must use public facilities, touch as few surfaces as possible. It does little good to wash hands if you then use bare hands to turn off the faucet afterward. Use paper towels to do so.
The 1918 flu pandemic didn’t completely die out until 1920. When it did, part of the reason, Barry said, was due to people developing immunity to it, and part was due to mutations in that strain of flu that made it less deadly. We have no way of knowing with coronavirus whether mutations will similarly work in our favor.
“There’s no reason to think it’s going to be exterminated any time soon,” he said.
To that unhappy note, there’s little left to add. People shouldn’t treat the coronavirus as just a passing, seasonal thing, and shouldn’t expect easy solutions. Patience, obedience to official guidance, common sense, and an attitude of steady and hardy resilience should be our watchwords. This is indeed a very bad thing we’re facing. With steady purpose, though, we can handle it. Hunker down, indeed.
