(A replica of the Field Marshal’s baton that belonged to Field Marshal Kesselring. It is part of a trove of imaginary recreations of objects from very bad times that seems to have a continuing market in these interesting times. It features in the tale of the Field Marshal’s Daughter, part of the introduction to a life spent in the promulgation of intelligence estimates. We also know them by another more common name.)
Author’s Note: It has been an interesting year for us all. In its way, the strange re-opening after the plague emergency is being played out again with new varients of the dread disease. It is frankly tiresome. If you are old enough, you have lived through some of them. From a personal perspective, I think last year’s COVID crisis was hyped as “the worst.” That is based on estimates based on certain initial assumptions, which may (or may not) be accurate. If anyone actually does the numbers, absent the various political agendas now associated with public health, there are naturally variations on results.
I was afflicted- if memory serves, anyway- by the 2009 ‘Swine Flu” that caused a fairly significant panic. The version I experienced was certainly an attention-getter. Then we all got better, or at least those who did not die from it. There has been enough time now that some of the emotion of the time has been converted to something else. But, unlike the flu numbers in the time of COVID, the count of the dead for that crisis was an estimated 284,500 people.
The next deadliest flu outbreak was the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-1969, which started in Hong Kong and spread across Asia. Soldiers returning from Vietnam brought it back to the United States, and it soon spread to Japan, Africa, and South America. This widespread strain of the flu had a fairly low death rate, all things considered, but still killed an estimated million people world-wide.
I do not remember the 1956-58 Asian flu, though apparently I survived it. That one is said to have killed two million, with some estimates going as high as four. A similar pandemic was noted back in the season of 1889-90. It was called “the Russian Flu” and was the first flu pandemic noted in our modern world. The death toll, enabled by railroads and transatlantic travel, is said to have been a million.
I know- the one that is legendary is the massive one that followed the end of the Great War in 1918. The so-called “Spanish Flu” was caused by an H1N1 virus that had its origin in birds. There is no consensus on a specific geographic locale in which it leapt species, but the massive movement of demobilized armies certainly contributed to the spread. Here in the States, it was first identified in military personnel in the spring 1918, nearly six months before the Armistice.
It was massive. Some accounts estimate about 500 million people became infected. That amounts to one-third of the world’s population at that time. Worldwide fatalities were estimated to be at least 50 million, with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Unlike COVID, which was most deadly to an aging population with comorbidity afflictions, the Spanish Flu tended to kill the young. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, those 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.
We still do not know precisely what properties made it so devastating. There were no vaccines or antibiotic treatments. Some of the non-pharmaceutical control efforts sound familiar: isolation, quarantine, improved personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings were applied unevenly with predictably uneven success.
So, we just had a lousy year, but we have had worse. It would be premature to suggest COVID was not “as deadly” as other pandemics. The CDC has published numbers of deaths in the range of 360,000 in the U.S., while others range significantly higher.
Confusion on numbers appears to have been a factor in policy decisions to count wildly inflated positive test data as “cases,” even if no actual symptoms were observable. “Excess deaths” was a factor I used to calculate general severity of the pandemic. Recent reporting suggests that the period of greatest hysteria (Between March 1, 2020, and January 2, 2021) the US experienced 2,801,439 deaths, which was 22.9% more than expected. This would represent 522,368 ‘excess’ deaths than we would ordinarily observe. Of course, that is from ‘all causes,’ not just COVID. When we include overdose, suicide and other social causes, we see a spectrum of activity that could be related to the efforts to mitigate the disease, and not the disease itself. At the moment, we appear poised to insist on elimination of specific diseases as a cure, which is unlikely to occur.
Of course, there were other factors in play. The first of them being a necessity to change the government of the United States. That process was complex and naturally lead to a variety of assumptions about origin, reporting and implementation of public policy to combat a crisis representing not only great concern, but also great opportunity. Will we see an effective account of what went along with the pandemic? Possibly. But we may see more of government-by-emergency, since that seems to have been effective for a variety of purposes.
Taking advantage of the brief time of relaxed emergency, I took advantage to close out the Arlington property. That caused a number of other related issues to surface. One of them is about truth and numbers. And how things can work in a universe of lies.
– Vic
That was a teaser for a funny vignette that surfaced with other debris in the move. It is a romp through the last time our law enforcement and Intelligence agencies overstepped their authorities. The one I enjoyed most in re-reading is something called “The Field Marshal’s Daughter.” It is a romp through Cold War history and the notion of learning to live in a career based at least partially on a world of lies. More on that anon…
We will publish in full at the website.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra