Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Ed Yong wrote this excellent analysis of why the US seems to be particularly bad in dealing with COVID-19. Initially, people thought it all due to Trump’s actions and inactions, but as subsequent events have shown: “The weaknesses were in the rootstock, not high up in the trees.” Around March-April, Biden had declared “victory”. As case counts fell: “Abbott Laboratories, which makes a rapid COVID-19 test, discarded inventory, canceled contracts, and laid off workers.” The Americans had seen what the highly infectious Delta variant did in India. And yet they were totally unprepared when it landed in the US: “Models failed to predict Delta’s early arrival. The variant then ripped through the U.S.’s half-vaccinated populace.” Leading to the question: “Delta was an audition for the next pandemic, and one that America flubbed. How can a country hope to stay 10 steps ahead of tomorrow’s viruses when it can’t stay one step ahead of today’s?”   At the heart of it, the p...

In the age of COVID-19, we hear a lot about the Spanish flu epidemic from 1918-19. Though it was found in the US, France, Germany and UK first, yet it came to be called the Spanish flu. Why? Because it happened during a World War! “To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized these early reports. Newspapers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain… these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the name "Spanish" flu.”   And how far did it spread and how many did it kill? Wikipedia again: “It infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time – in four successive waves. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.”   If that’s not scary, consider this additional point from David Quammen’s book on inter-species di...