Knight, Death and the Devil (1513)

Almost everyone on "my" blogs is sanguine about the coming pandemic. Here's something to think about.

I am going to make several assumptions in what follows.

• I am assuming that H5N1 "earns its jump wings", i.e., either mutates or recombines out a strain that is airborne-transmissible between humans.


• I am assuming that the "jump wings" strain is capable of using migratory birds as a vector, much as the Qinghai Lake strains have been doing for the last six months.


• I am assuming levels of lethality and contagiousness similar to the 1918 pandemic. Barry gives an overall percentage fatality rate of 0.65% in the U.S. for the 1918 pandemic. That's 675,000 deaths out of a total population of 105 million. Scale to today's population size and you get roughly two million American fatalities. Please note that I'm not citing Barry as any kind of authority on this influenza. It's simply that the 1918-1920 pandemic is the closest historical parallel I know of, and Barry's account of 1918 is the best I've seen in print.

Early Stages of the Pandemic

Panic "above and beyond" the level merited by risk

One thing that emerged from Barry's exposition was the way in which the newspapers of the time compulsively lied about the coming pandemic and the risks it posed. They fixated on "happy talk" in much the same way that modern presstitutes do.

The predictable result was that fear turned into blind panic, since the fog of disinformation left people with no way to get any sort of handle on the actual risks or ways they might be partially mitigated.

In early 2003, the government of the People's Republic of China went to great lengths to cover up the mini-epidemic of SARS then present in the PRC. Predictably, this attempt failed miserably, leading to exposes in the foreign press like this story in the Washington Post, this one run by the BBC, and this one, archived at Time Asia's web site.

In due course, a public approximation of sanity prevailed, and the usual suspects were duly beheaded.

But the damage was already done.

* * * * * *

A Graver Extreme: Shutdown of Essential Public Services

If this happens, things could get very very ugly, very very quickly.

I am thinking of several possibilities here, any one of which could generate bands of armed and desperate people out foraging for food and/or supplies, without much care as to who was first owner. With all of the potential for lawlessness and bloodshed that entails.

• Shutdown of the land line telephone system.

  This doesn't sound too serious. Most of us have cell phones, right? It has been some months since I last used my land line.

  But if the root cause is a breakdown in the "backbone" providers, this could also deal a severe blow to Internet connectivity. Today, this is a luxury because we can physically go to a store to shop for necessities. What does one do when that act entails a very real heightened risk of contagion? What if the store, as a public space, is shut down either voluntarily or by fiat?

• Shutdown of the gas mains.

  Unless your living space is heated electrically, this is going to be a serious issue come winter. Fireplaces?? Most of the heat goes up the flue, and firewood is going to be hard to come by in a suburban community of, say, half a million or more, nearly every resident of which is suddenly dependent upon combustibles like wood for winter heat.

• Shutdown of the electric power grid.

  Forget televisions. How do you recharge that cell phone when its lithium battery goes flat? How do make your way at night when you've used up your last saved alkaline cell? If you have to order some necessity from a delivery-based reorganized retailer, you'ld better hope the land lines are working, because otherwise, absent a cell phone, you are S.O.L.

• Shutdown of the public water utilities.

  There is your hot water tank. Given the metal that has to leach into the water, this will not likely be potable over the long term. But given its finite capacity, "long term" isn't really an issue, is it? So how many gallons of water do you have on hand? And just how well-wrapped are you going to be after three or four weeks without a real bath?

• Shutdown of the sewers.

  Cholera? Unlikely in the short term, from what we've been told during the NOLA disaster. The vibrio has to be endemic in the area first. But when your toilet no longer disposes of human waste, you've got a real problem nevertheless.

• Shutdown of the network of supply that sends sacks of grain or milk or battery hens from agrobusinesses in Minnesota or Mexico through the Interstate Highway system to your local grocer to your dinner plate.

  Food riots within a week. Tops.

  If you're diabetic, you've got a real problem, over and above that last.

  If you are on some sort of prescription med on a permanent basis, same deal.

  "Lifeline" animals who need such inputs are also at risk. This is not as trivial as it first seems. More than one NOLA resident was discovered drowned simply because he or she point-blank refused to abandon an animal, and stayed behind to die.

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The above is only a very small part of his assessment ~~ See: Just a Bump in the Beltway.

Yep. I'm a worrier. . . Just finished up my Y2K supplies. Point is, being prepared didn't hurt me at all.