THE COVID PANDEMIC BEGAN FOUR YEARS AGO

Looking back in time, my posting on 28February2020 summarized my return from Thailand:

The fearsome factor was that Thailand had the second-most cases of covid-19 when I left Honolulu on February 12.  Today, it is #9.  No new cases appeared after I arrived in that country.  No one is known to have died.

(Interestingly enough, today Thailand is #33 in total cases and #143 in cases/million population.)

But on 11 March2020 the World Health Organizaton declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic.  

• This was the first time that a pandemic was caused by a coronavirus.

• 
  The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1200 points, the worst since 2008.  The eleven year bull market came to an end.
• China and Italy were locked down.

• 
  Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he and his wife Rita Wilson had contracted this virus.  They were in Australia.
• Two Utah Jazz players tested positive and the NBA canceled the rest of the season.

• 
  While thousands of schools would shut down by the end of week, and many workplaces, the Trump administration discouraged mask wearing.
• Joe Biden won a few more primaries, putting him on the path to clinching the Democratic nomination.  His target was Donald Trump.

• 
  President Donald Trump declared that China started this all and announced a 30-day ban on travel to Europe.  Critics said this was nonsense, for Europe was no worse than America.  There was confusion about American trade to Europe.

• 
  The big news of the day was Harvey Weinstein sentenced 23 years for rape and sexual abuse.
• The CDC said don't go on cruises.  In fact, stop traveling.
• There was a growing xenophobic sense that, as this virus came from China, Asian Americans were somehow to blame.

• 
  Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Robert Redfield, director of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) testified before a House committee and told them it's going to get worse.  
• No one wore a mask in the room.
• The virus had at that point infected more than a thousand people in 40 states, where at least 31 people had died, mostly in the state of Washington.

Four years later, the World just passed 7 million deaths, although most sources think this number is closer to 35 million.  AIDS has supposedly killed 40 million over half a century.  The 1918 flu might have had 50 million deaths, but if you consider that the population was then 1.8 million then, but 8 billion today, that would be equivalent to 178 million deaths a century ago.  Thus the Covid-19 Pandemic was relatively mild with respect to life, but devastating to the world economy.

About the U.S., more Republicans than Democrats died because 30% of Republicans never got a Covid vaccine shot, while only 10% of Democrats did not.  From the New York Times:

In other words, get vaccinated if you want to protect yourself.  In fact, Time magazine yesterday morning said:

Maybe you’ve noticed it too: these days, a lot of people refer to the pandemic in the past tense. “During COVID,” they say, or, “when we were in the pandemic.” The implication is that the virus is gone and the pandemic is over.  The former is clearly untrue. The SARS-CoV-2 virus still kills thousands of people around the world each month, saddles still more with chronic symptoms known as Long COVID, and continues to evolve, with the highly transmissible JN.1 variant recently causing waves of infection across the globe.  But are we still a pandemic? No one seems to know for sure.

Wikipedia lists the top 19 pandemics/epidemics of all time.

• #1 is the Black Death, where the disease was bubonic plague.
• Up to 50 million in the 1346-1353 period died, or up to 60% of the European population.  
• The scourge expanded also to Asia.
• Evidence that this disease was around 5,000 years ago.
• Bubonic plague was responsible for 6 of the 19 incidents.
• 
  It is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, and spread by infected fleas from small animals.
• There are now treatments, where the true mortality rate in the past was between 40-60%, and now only 1-15%.

• 
  Still around today, as nearly a hundred die annually from Black Death.  Where?  Congo, Madagascar and Peru, although China and India, too, have cases.  In 2015 16 in the U.S. got infected, all in the West.
• The third most serious pandemic/epidemic was the Plague of Justinian, where perhaps up to 100 million died, again up to 60% of the population, and this was much earlier, 541-549 AD.  Also bubonic plague.
• The sixth most serious was also the first worldwide event, or pandemic.  This was called the Third Plague, also bubonic, killing up to 15 million from 1855-1960.

• 
  #2 is the Spanish flu pandemic, H1N1 virus, where up to 100 million died from 1918-1920.
• #4 is the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has killed 43 million from 1981 to the present.

• 
  #5 is the COVID-19 pandemic, with anywhere from 7 to 35 million killed from 2020 to the present.
• There were other causes.
• #7 was a Cocoliztli epidemic, which might have killed up to 80% the Mexican population from 1545-1548, with up to 15 million deaths.  This microorganism is not really identified, but could have been a kind of salmonella.
• 
  Smallpox, measles, typhus and cholera also were causes of other incidents.
• For example, 33% of the Japanese population died from 735-737 of smallpox.

Some interesting artwork. Note the relative insignificance of COVID-19.  But that was because this graphic was produced in March of 2020.

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