Off The Editor’s Desk – 3-24-2020
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Coronavirus is affecting everyone!
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are doing the scare about the COVID-19 virus has changed everyone’s life and a change that could have lasting effect on our future. My prayer is that no more people get the virus and that we can return to normal living as soon as possible.
We were in Las Vegas when the President announced social distancing and closing all places where people might congregate including bars, restaurants and non-essential businesses.
The news media made me think that maybe we would be quarantined in Las Vegas and not be able to drive home. We left a day earlier than we have originally planned and drove north through Utah and onto Denver and home, staying two nights in motels on the way.
Those motels had many rooms open and the morning breakfast was reduced to just a bag lunch with coffee and the only way we could get fed was with gas station food or from the drive thru from fast food places. But we made it home. As side comment about gas prices is that we paid $1.66.9 a gallon at a Kum-Go station in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Do you remember when we had the Swine Influenza (H1N1) back in April of 2009, with a world population at that time at just about 700 billion people and it was estimated that somewhere between 700 million and 1.4 billion people contacted the illness. The death total was put at somewhere between 150,000 and 575,000 with 12,469 deaths in the United States. About 60 million people in this country got the illness.
The Obama government did take action back in 2009, declaring a public health emergency the same month that H1N1 infection was first reported. But Obama did not declare a national emergency until six months later. It was not until August of 2010 that the World Health Origination declared the swine flu pandemic officially over.
But, our medical science has blessed us with defenses against this illness, and if we compare the 2009 outbreak against the 1918 influenza pandemic that was the most severe pandemic in recent history, an H1N1 virus of avian origin caused it. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in the spring of 1918.
It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 deaths in the United States. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic.
While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. With no vaccine to protect against influenza and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide 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.
The above information came for the CDC.
The 1918 pandemic had an infection rate of about ten percent and I would hope that with the aggressive action taken by the Trump administration that the infection rate will be much less.
It seems that today we have some pharmaceutical interventions and hopefully a vaccine in the near future to control the outbreak of the virus, we can have this pandemic controlled within a short time.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton
