Terrific article on Covid-19 (Sars-CoV-2). in the LRB by Rupert Beale. He says written in haste but it doesn’t read that way. It contains some memorable lines.
As the US health secretary Michael Leavitt put it in 2006, ‘anything we say in advance of a pandemic happening is alarmist; anything we say afterwards is inadequate.’
And how do you think hard about research funding for the long term (I am old enough to remember when stroke and dementia were virtually non-subjects as far as ‘good research funding’ was concerned).
Virologists need more than clever tricks: we also need cash. Twenty years ago, funding wasn’t available to study coronaviruses. In 1999, avian infectious bronchitis virus was the one known truly nasty coronavirus pathogen. Only poultry farmers really cared about it, as it kills chickens but doesn’t infect people. In humans there are a number of fairly innocuous coronaviruses, such as OC43 and HKU1, which cause the ‘common cold’. Doctors don’t usually bother testing for them – you have a runny nose, so what?
And note the conditional tense:
The global case fatality rate is above 3 per cent at the moment, and if – reasonable worst case scenario – 30-70 per cent of the 7.8 billion people on earth are infected, that means between 70 and 165 million deaths. It would be the worst disaster in human history in terms of total lives lost. Nobody expects this, because everyone expects that people will comply with efficient public health measures put in place by responsible governments.
And to repeat my own mantra (stolen from elsewhere): the opposite of science is not art, but politics:
The situation isn’t helped by a president [Trump] who keeps suggesting that the virus isn’t that bad, it’s a bit like flu, we will have a vaccine soon: stopping flights from China was enough. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, deftly cut across Trump at a White House press briefing. No, it isn’t only as bad as flu, it’s far more dangerous. Yes, public health measures will have to be put in place and maintained for many months. No, a vaccine isn’t just around the corner, it will take at least 18 months. Fauci was then ordered to clear all his press briefings on Covid-19 with Mike Pence in advance: the vice president’s office is leading the US response to the virus. ‘You don’t want to go to war with a president,’ Fauci remarked.
And Beale ends by quoting an ID colleague.
This is not business as usual. This will be different from what anyone living has ever experienced. The closest comparator is 1918 influenza.
Caution: pace the author, ‘This is a fast-moving situation, and the numbers are constantly changing – certainly the ones I have given here will be out of date by the time you read this.’
Link. (London Review of Books: Vol. 42 No. 5, 5 March 2020: “Wash your Hands”: Rupert Beale)