Photo for Headline Surfer / Arthur J. Byrnes of Holly Hill is shown here.
By HENRY FREDERICK / Headline Surfer / Blog: People, Places & Things
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Arthur J. Byrnes, a Holly Hill resident, who weighs in on local politics and other ills in social media is among the minions who see this Coronavirus Pandemic as a hyped-up media circus with miniscule numbers of fatalities compared to pneumonia deaths each year in the U.S.
I posted this comment on my Facebook page several hours after the World Health Organization on Wednesday for the first time officially labeled this coronavirus a pandemic:
Trump cancels his political rallies for next week, the NBA season is on hold until further notice, and Tom Hanks says he and his wife have the coronavirus. This is for real and it's only going to get worse before it gets better...
So what was Byrnes' reaction to my synopsis?
"It's for real Henry Frederick?" Byrnes asked. "Do you know anyone who is a sufferer? It's a panic of Chicken Little proportions."
So how does Byrnes know? He doesn't. Nobody does.
The last major pandemic indeed was in 1918, 102 years ago. It wasn't taken seriously at first then either. And the loss of life was catastrophic.
So here we are a century later and we haven't learned our lesson. Certainly, the politicians have not!
While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. Even to this day. And that's what makes this modern-day novel coronavirus so scary.
With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that could be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide back in 1918, were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.
So what has changed in that regard 20 years into the 21sst century with this coronavirus pandemic? Nothing! Quarantine seems to be about the only thing that can be done. And for those who think it won't spread with closed borders - ie, cruise ships, air travel, etc., think again. It's already here.
Think about the catastropc number of fatalities back in 2018: 675,000 in the US alone, or 12,981 deaths per week. And globally with 50 million deaths, that averages out to 961,000 deaths per week, Americans included.
Will we reached those horrific figures this time around? Nobody really knows. And a vaccine is at least 18 months to two years away, according to the CDC.
The same problems back then are plaguing us today - namely government inaction and people laughing it off - distracted by the toilet paper hoarding, the latter which defies any logic.
