On January 27th, I wrote:
“The other day I heard someone ask a friend, “So are you really worried about the Wuhan virus?” The reply of “No, I haven’t been a hypochondriac in at least a decade,” made me laugh with recognition. I was the child terrified by the movie Outbreak and the real-life Ebola outbreak, the child who was constantly afraid of contracting HIV even though there were virtually no ways in which I risked doing so, the child so anxious about Brazilian purpuric fever that she seemingly (and nonsensically) willed herself into not getting pinkeye for a decade. Everyone who knew me before college assumes that news about SARS or MERS or coronavirus will send me into high alert.
But as devastating as any virus that causes increased mortality is, I’m no longer a child hypochondriac; those who have known me as an adult know I’m more of an armchair epidemiologist, and that public health would be my alternate career if my life had gone slightly differently. So my roommate was correct when he asked me if I was following the developments because it seemed like something that would interest me.
It is fascinating that the Netflix documentary Pandemic came out right before/as the Wuhan outbreak came to light. Or not – the whole premise of the miniseries is that an animal-to-human flu or respiratory virus like SARS or H1N1 is overdue, and that it’s only a matter of time. Scientists have been working on a universal flu vaccine for years precisely because they know that something like this virus will appear or reappear and eventually one won’t be able to be contained as effectively as SARS and MERS were. But even in the absence of a vaccine, that’s not a cause for panic. This isn’t a hemorrhagic fever with an 80% mortality rate; it’s a heightened version of seasonal flu. I don’t say that to downplay the deaths that have occurred or the care that needs to be taken to attempt containment, but to counter the run on hospital masks and the crashing of the stock market that have resulted from overreaction and fear. “
Now:
Even as a non-hypochondriac adult with well-managed OCD, over the weekend I determined that it was time to be worried. Not panic, but worry. It seems like the combination of Covid (I thought they would go with WORS(E) or WARS, but I know they aim to stay away from place names – even in acronyms – now) being less deadly than SARS/MERS and it having a long, infectious incubation period will combine to make it impossible to contain. So…of course that on its own could be hugely devastating, if the published case fatality rates are accurate (they range from .2% for healthy people under forty – but again, that’s a lot of people if the entire population ends up getting it – to 10% in those over 80; 1918 flu pandemic was about 2.5%) – but then the seasonal flu is devastating in terms of lives lost, and many things are devastating, so while I don’t want to minimize case fatality rate of COVID, what concerns me more is that no immunity is conferred by catching/surviving COVID. (There isn’t hard data yet to confirm this, but there are reports of people catching COVID, recovering, and then contracting it again a few weeks later). What? Is that normal for all coronaviruses? Was the the case with SARS? I was operating, for the past six weeks, under the assumption that if you caught COVID and lived through it, as you’re likely to, you never had to worry about it again.
So then I got worried.
There are also unsubstantiated reports of people with reinfections having much worse cases or even permanent organ damage…but again, unsubstantiated. But I can see why people have latched onto it; it’s one thing to go through an ordeal – a serious disease in this case – make it through it, and then regardless of whether you’re unscathed or not, assess the damage. You’re able to know, in most cases, and the diseases that cause silent internal damage (Chagas, eg), aren’t tested for, and take you by surprise are the most frightening to me. And without immunity conferred (if that’s the case, or if the immunity is short-lived)…is the world going to turn into one huge petri dish with everyone passing COVID back and forth, no one permanently immune, until there’s a vaccine?
And then I worry about the election, and whether Trump will try to use this as a means of further dismantling democracy…and then I try to return to a state of alert-but-not-panicked. It’s a work in progress.
