December 2020
On Thanksgiving Day we’d had a pleasant, extended-family feast — a larger gathering, perhaps, that the Center for Disease Control had recommended — and of course we had our fingers crossed that no one had spread COVID-19 as a result.
The next big gathering would happen at Christmas.
Across the US, the number of confirmed COVID cases and confirmed COVID deaths were spiking, but the real reasons behind the spike was anyone’s guess. Dr. Tony Fauci, one of the more prominent voices in the public health industry, had warned that we might see a dangerous increase in cases and fatalities as winter arrived, due mainly to people spending more time indoors, in closer quarters.
But we’d also been reading about the questionable testing technology currently in use here in the US, where laboratories appeared to be running excessive PCR “cycles” — according to the New York Times — and as a result, “confirming” numerous cases that were likely false positives.
Have we been living through a real pandemic? Or were the experts in charge causing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to appear more threatening than it actually was?
Was the cure worse than the disease? Did all the mask-wearing and social distancing and economic damage really provide a benefit? Or did the virus do its murderous work successfully… regardless all our mitigation efforts?
I suspect we will never know the answers to those questions, no matter how long we live.
Humanity has struggled long and hard with diseases of various types, and for the first million years of human existence, various catastrophes — wars, epidemics, famines, floods, plundering bandits — managed to keep the global population at fewer than 1 million people. The number had grown to perhaps 200 million, however, by the start of the Christian Era — thanks mainly to technological advancements in agriculture and medicine. And in spite of continual wars, famines, epidemics, and criminal activities, the world made room for about 1 billion people by the early 1800s… and hit 2 billion by the 1920s.
Continuing advances in food production and public health allowed our global population to reach its current count: about 7 billion. Concurrently, global travel became commonplace. Even middle-class families were commonly traveling to foreign countries — sometimes on the opposite side of the globe — for a two-week vacation. Products, ships, airplanes — and people — moved constantly across oceans and continents.
The world was ripe for a global pandemic, and the public health industry had been making plans for just such an event. COVID was the first big chance to learn how well prepared the World Health Organization and all the national health organizations were, for a global crisis with a previously unknown disease.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus turned out to be quite contagious, compared to some other viruses, but has exhibited a mortality rate of only about 2% — not nearly as deadly as SARS (10% mortality rate), MERS (30% mortality), Hantavirus (36% mortality), Ebola (50% mortality), or Marberg (80% mortality).
The most deadly viral disease in recent memory was the 1917-1918 Spanish Flu epidemic (which, despite its name, did not originate in Spain) which infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide — about one-third of the planet’s population — and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims.
Another comparison from history: the Plague of Justinian, which was reported in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire between about 540 – 750 AD, may have killed as many as 50 million people — about half the world’s population at the time.
By comparison, the COVID pandemic has killed perhaps 2 million people worldwide, according to the data posted on The New York Times yesterday. That’s about 0.03 percent of the global population. (In a “normal” year, about 57 million people die of all causes, worldwide… which amounts to about 0.8 percent of the world’s population.)
The nations hardest hit by COVID, so far, have been Italy (one death per 760 people), the UK (one death per 800 people), Peru (one death per 830 people), the United States (one death per 875 people), Spain (one death per 890 people), Mexico (one death per 940 people), France (one death per 975 people) and Argentina (one death per 1,000 people).
On December 11, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine for emergency use, and health care workers in Colorado started getting vaccinated on December 14. Four days later, the FDA endorsed the Moderna vaccine.
As of January 12, nearly 200,000 ‘first doses’ have reportedly been administered in Colorado… and people age 70 and over will begin getting vaccinated this week. Or so they say.
Here’s an excerpt from an article by Matt Bloom posted to the KUNC website yesterday, January 12.
Claire Sandford had been looking forward to the news for almost a year.
Colorado was expanding the group of residents eligible to receive a dose of COVID-19 vaccine, which included her 88-year-old mother, Peggy.
Governor Jared Polis made the announcement on December 30, moving people 70-and-older farther ahead in the state’s prioritization plan along with first responders, “moderate-risk” health care workers and teachers. Shortly after, Sandford logged on to her computer and started to look for an appointment for Peggy. She thought the independent living community her mother was a part of in Longmont would have answers. But when she emailed, they replied that they didn’t have a timeline or information about when her mother would get vaccinated.
Then, she reached out to Kaiser Permanente, Peggy’s health care provider. No luck navigating the website, either. On Facebook, she started seeing posts from friends getting their first dose of vaccine. First, a young, healthy firefighter. Then, a hospital administrator who works from home.
“I thought, ‘If these people are getting a vaccine, why isn’t my mother?’” Sandford said.
Nearly two weeks later, Sandford is still looking for answers. She’s one of many families caught in a wave of demand crashing against Colorado’s public health departments and hospitals, who are administering their limited supply of vaccines as fast as resources allow. Many providers have set up wait lists to try to handle the sudden influx of interest, but in the meantime residents are dealing with long wait times on the phone, conflicting messages from multiple levels of government and, ultimately, uncertainty about when vulnerable relatives will get their first dose of vaccine.
“I sure wish the messaging had been different, because we could have at least had a calm learning curve instead of that human feeling that someone’s getting something that I’m not getting,” Sandford said. “It’s a really yucky feeling to have.”
There were more than enough yucky feelings going around, as 2020 came to an end and we entered the Twilight Zone of 2021.