it's hard to know what he thinks now. He had absolutely no way of anticipating this current pandemic.
My entire life (and I'm currently 72) I've been reading apocalyptic predictions of an influenza epidemic at least as bad as the 1918 one. I've long been somewhat skeptical for a lot of reasons. For one thing, back then our understanding of how it spread wasn't quite as thorough or sophisticated as it is now. For another -- and I think this is far more important than people think -- a lot of people in what today we call first world countries didn't have running water. So hand washing simply wasn't happening all that often. And hand washing is by far the largest and most important public health measure ever. Something a lot of people just don't understand.
One important reason this Covid-19 is taking off in places like the Native American enclaves in the Southwest is that so many of them live in very rural areas with no running water.
A huge difference between influenza and Covid-19, is that the latter is a novel virus, meaning none of us has ever come up against it before. I suspect that's a huge factor in the vast range of responses, from being asymptomatic to dying. Same virus, hugely different responses. With influenza, we've all come up against it before, at least in a world without flu shots, such as a century ago. It's important to know that it's believed the reason older people in 1918 rarely came down with the flu that year, and if they did they mostly survived, is that some 50 years earlier a similar H1N1 influenza had been out there, and so those people had already been exposed and probably had some immunity. As with so many diseases, the immunity you get from actually having the disease is very often far better than the one you get from a vaccine. Which is NOT to be taken as an anti-vaccine statement, just as an observation.
It's also worth being aware that this past winter in the Southern Hemisphere, there was essentially no flu season at all. That's almost assuredly because travel to and from China was barely happening, and it's China where all the new flu strains originate. So whether or not you are anyone else gets a flu shot, there is no reason to anticipate a bad flu season here. In fact, it will probably be the mildest one in forever.
It really was an interesting book, and I strongly recommend it to anyone at all interested in the topic.
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