Crisis? What crisis?

A friend has pointed me to an article in the Lancet which sums up some thoughts I’ve been formulating about our reaction to Covid-19.

Whilst the validation of such a respected medical journal is welcome, of course, it is far from reassuring and raises more questions than it answers; questions which will probably exercise us all for many years to come.

'Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics' by medical historian, Mark Honigsbaum, is a timely reminder that we have been here before and survived to tell the tale — or rather, to downplay it. The official and public reaction to these past pandemics differed very greatly from the current one. The outbreak of the so-called 'Asian Flu' in 1957 killed an estimated 20,000 people in the UK and at least a million worldwide and yet it seems it passed with almost no official reaction or public panic. Honigsbaum suggests that the Soviet Union’s launch of their Sputnik satellite and the fire at Windscale nuclear reactor attracted far more press and media coverage at the time. Similarly, the 1968 'Hong Kong Flu' killed 30,000 in the UK and up to 4 million worldwide and yet, despite it affecting more younger people, schools and businesses carried on pretty much as normal.

So what’s the difference now? Well, there are several compelling possibilities. The 24-hour globalised news cycle is almost certainly a major factor. Looked at cynically, Covid-19 coverage in the UK took over neatly from the flagging Brexit story, with journalists not having to work too hard to find stories of staggering government incompetence. Then there’s modern society’s increased risk aversion — despite the popularity of Keep Calm and Carry On merchandise it seems we like it on a teatowel but aren’t willing to apply it to our daily lives!

In her fascinating BBC Four programme, ‘Plague Fiction’, Prof Laura Ashe also looked back over historic literature written during previous pandemics and found surprisingly few references to them. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his ‘Canterbury Tales' just after the Black Death and yet he barely touches on it. Similarly, Samuel Pepys was writing his diary as the Great Plague raged in London yet, again, mentions it only in passing — being far more interested in what he was eating and wearing and who he was meeting and screwing! (Intriguingly, Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’, a graphic semi-fictionalised account of the same outbreak presented in diary form, is not contemporaneous, being written almost sixty years after the event, and yet offers a more vivid account than Pepys’.)

The 'Spanish Flu' pandemic following the First World War killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and yet daily life went on much as before. It may be that the traumas of the Great War had inured people to mass death and terrible loss, or perhaps they were too exhausted and too busy trying to rebuild shattered lives and economies to dwell on it. It surely can’t be a coincidence, however, that the advent of the Roaring 'Twenties ushered in the Jazz Age, which saw the hedonistic and nihilistic abandon of the flappers and bright young things, fuelled by cocktails and cocaine. This phenomenon was almosr certainly a delayed reaction to the horror that had gone before.

So where does all this leave us now? Well, it has made me wonder if we haven’t been suffering from some form of mass hysteria, fuelled by febrile press and media coverage and panicked politicians. This isn’t a comfortable thought — we’ve all seen the crazed Covid-deniers, libertarian-right maskless demonstrators,young ravers and selfish celebrities and I wouldn’t wish to be associated with their sentiments.

And yet, and yet… Were it not for all the obsessive press and media coverage and muddled government messaging this pandemic might barely have impinged on daily life. Yes, we would still have had to wear masks and queue to shop but so what? They did it for five years during the Second World War, and had to endure bombs and rationing too so let’s get a grip! I certainly don’t want to downplay the tragic consequences of this virus, though many of them, such as deaths in care homes, were predictable and avoidable. However, I can’t help questioning whether the reaction to this pandemic (not the first and assuredly not the last) hasn’t to some degree been whipped up by vested interests?

The current pandemic is clearly a very serious one and Coronavirus (only identified in humans in 1965) doesn’t yet have a vaccine, unlike 'flu. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t raise legitimate doubts about the handling of the crisis. We may be too close to it right now to form objective judgments but the subject will doubtless provide fertile ground for examination by historians, sociologists, epidemiologists, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists, novelists, playwrights — and commentators like me!

Meantime, Keep Calm and Carry On is not a bad motto for these times and, whilst taking every sensible precaution against the virus, we might do well to reflect on Franklin D Roosevelt’s reassuring words in his 1933 inaugural address, given in the midst of the Great Depression: “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”.

Related posts:

Symbolic and hard links are one of those topics that can get people starting out in Bash a bit confused and mired in the annoying process of distinguishing the two. I remember starting out myself and…

Evasive or Defensive driving is a method of tactical procedures adopted while driving through hostile conditions. Generally the objective would be to get away from pursuers or to safely extract an…

Hunting is a vital way of life for many people in Washington, and it contributes to important statewide conservation efforts. There are a variety of hunting opportunities for seasoned and first-time…