02 April 2003

Quarantine

Iraq went to daylight savings time today. Our time change is still a few weeks away, taking an hour in the moring and granting one in the afternoon. Spring ahead, as they say to help us remember which way to turn the big hand. In Washing ton it makes everybody feel jet-lagged for a few days. It will be useful in Iraq, and will give the Republican Guard another hour of daylight to be pummeled. The are saying on the news that the Third Infantry (Mechanized) and the First Marines are pushing forward. The Third is pressing through the Karbala Gap and reporting light resistance and the Marines have secured a key bridge across the Tigris River. Saddam's loons have launched a couple surface-to-surface missiles into an Najaf, the Shia Holy City, and site of the Tomb of Ali. They were hoping to catch some Americans unawares.

They were "clean" rockets, which means in today's parlance that they contained only high explosives.

It was a special April Fool's Day yesterday. The President's major initiative on Smallpox vaccinations melted down. Ten states have cancelled their programs based on the news that three have died and others have experienced heart palpitations. So there that goes, 29,600 inoculated thus far, far short of the number needed to care for the population if the awful bacillus is released. The legislation required to enable the restitution program for health care workers who become ill from the vaccination foundered in the House. The Senate will try to cram it in as part of the hodge-podge omnibus bill to pay for the war, but hope seems to be fading on that. Thus dies a good try at protecting the homeland.

Was it the word from a colleague who has a friend in Baghdad, the producer for Peter Arnette? He talks to his fiancée here, and she to my friend. There is a story there, a desperate one in a city under attack. is to escape this night, morning in Iraq, on a special bus by a route that is supposed to be secure. I hope that it is true. He has a story about poor lost windbag Peter. He stays on in town, but from my friend-of-a-friend comes a queer story about an off-the-cuff interview with an Israeli paper that got him in hot water with his Iraqi hosts. Then there was the interview with the Iraqi media that quoted him as saying the American war had failed. That got Peter in hot water back home, and got him fired. He wound up working for the Daily Mirror, one Fleet Street's finest. So maybe Peter is not on the "A"-list anymore. But it turns out what he was chasing was an interview with Saddam himself.

He related a story of a long car drive in a sand-storm. Based on my memory of the meteorological conditions, that would have put it Wednesday last week in this 14-day war. Imagine driving through a sandstorm so thick that his escorts did not bother with the blindfolds. They then met with Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister for some bluster. You have to admire the thugs who are hanging on, the ones who know the score. Like driving somewhere in Berlin to meet Goering or Himmler, not knowing where the Fuhrer is. Saddam for his part retains his sphinx-like silence and we don't know if he lives or is in deep hiding, fearing the breech in his security that brought down 40 tomahawks that first night two weeks ago.

There is something else on the advance. Something just as scary and it already has secured all sort of bridges. Late yesterday American Flight 128, inbound from Tokyo's Narita to San Jose reported that some people looked sick in the back. The Captain radioed ahead and Gov. Gray Davis, intrepid leader of the Golden State, acted swiftly. He had the airplane quarantined when it arrived, the sick passengers whisked away. The remaining travelers were issued cards, instructing them to monitor themselves and call in if they didn't feel well in the next week or so. The "Q" word is fraught with peril. The last time it was used in earnest, with the power of law, was in the McKinley Administration. 1901. Wasn't even used in the 1919 pandemic. The power of the "Q" is reserved to the States and locals.

This morning the explosion of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is significant enough to come right after the story of the beginning of the Battle for Baghdad. There are hundreds if not thousands of cases in China, and hundreds in Hong Kong and hundreds in Hanoi and hundreds possibly in Canada and nearly seventy dead from it. It starts with a headache and a fever and then it gets in to the lungs and then it interferes with breathing and then, in around 4% of the cases, the patient dies. Doesn't sound like much, after all 96% live, but think what a number 4% of China's population is. Or anywhere.

It first popped up at the Metropole Hotel in Kowloon, and then leaped over to the Amoy Garden Apartment Building in Hong Kong's New Territories. It got there from four visits of one of the ill patients at the hospital to a relative. Then it jumped into a few hundred residents there. The World Health Organization physician who first identified it died from it. But the queer thing is how it jumped from Guangjong Province to the smoking floor of the Metropole and then across the Pacific to Toronto and then across Ontario. And London and Paris and Australia and now it is popping up across the U.S. It will be visiting a city near you soon.

This is a huge deal. At the morning meeting yesterday I asked, ironically, what we would do when SARS came to our office. The WHO is recommending self-diagnosis. If you feel the onset of headache or fever, you should voluntarily isolate yourself for ten days. In my moment going around the table, I recommended we follow that regimen. If anyone felt a little headachy they should call in and say they are starting self-diagnosis and would be back in ten days. One of the staff said he wasn't feeling so good and needed to get to a liquor store. He was going to see if Maker's Mark or Jack Daniels was the better prophylactic. A field trial, he said, one with the left hand and the other the right.

Sometimes I don't think they take me seriously.

Last night I walked into the apartment to find that a massive special ops operation has gone down. Jessica Lynch, 507th Maintenance Company, multiple gunshot wounds, is OK. And she is home. Several days in captivity, a strange pseudo hospital possible only the Saddam universe. Maybe it was her bloody fatigues the Marines found the other day. Not among the "rescued" was Chemical Ali, the little weasel who was responsible for gassing the Kurds. He was rumored to be there, but they did not get him tonight. The latest is that they also recovered the remains of as many as eleven dead Americans, the ones the Iraqis executed. That is new news, and of course, subject to revision, since the first thing you hear is always wrong.

CNN tells me Tommy Franks has been informed the Republican Guards Divisions have been attrited to below 50% combat effective. That is the magic number and Washington has turned the decision over to Tommy on when to go to the capital. It looks like the troops are surging forward. It is well into the day there now, just as we are starting ours. The status of the front lines will be known soon, and we will know if this was the beginning of the Battle of Baghdad.

I'm wondering if I should stop at the liquor store on the way to work and stock up. I think I am feeling a little feverish.