(A Retrospective viewed from 21 February 2022)

I am leaving the original copyright date on this one, a two-part evolution I was not sure we would get to this morning. There has been a vigorous discussion between old Cold Warriors whose service lingered into the age of the Sole Remaining Superpower. You may remember that.

By accident, one of us observed the course of an earlier pandemic on the staff of the Secretary of health and Human Services. It ws interesting, watching the similarities between the art of tracking Soviet Submarines beneath the endless shifting waves and the migratory pattern of a new and invisible infectious disease. The effects of the COVID pandemic have yet to be plumbed, since we have not yet seen the end of the beginning after two years. We provide this account of the development and spread of a virus nearly twenty years ago only as a point of interest in what those “inside” the decision-making process knew then, and reflect on what they are doing now. Same people, for the most part:

“This is my first pandemic, or at least the first one I followed like a war campaign. So bear with me. SARS is what they call the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. I was listening to a briefing a few weeks ago in which the name was announced. Before that it was just the Scary Asian Flu, the one that killed. I knew something significant happened when it got a name. The World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta have agreed on the description of the scary flu: Elevated temperature. Headache. Cough. Pneumonia-like congestion in the lungs. Possible death.

The WHO was the first to jump on this thing, literally WHO’s on first, like the Abbott and Costello routine. But CDC wasn’t far behind and did a lot of heavy lifting on the investigation. When it started, the symptoms and the virulence were about all they could agree on. The thing didn’t have a name, either. The incubation of the virus ranges from 2-10 days, mean time to present symptoms is around 4-7 days. That means that the virus is a hardy traveler, and rides with its human host just about anywhere on earth in a day. And it did. The virus is reported to be fairly persistent, able to stay viable on surfaces for some hours if not longer. That has some implications for the airlines, not to mention trains and cruise ships.

Infection vectors all lead back to Guangdong Province in China, but it took a while to unravel the trail. My hat is off to the pros who did it, the ones who went out there to confront it and document it and collect samples. In person.

A month ago, the deaths in Canada were the ones that really set the alarm bells ringing. This was a cluster of disease reported that centered around a family in Toronto. A Chinese-Canadian couple in their seventies, and their 44 year-old-son who traveled to Hong Kong. We discovered later that they had stayed on the 9th Floor, the smoking floor, of the Metropole Hotel in Kowloon, the bustling New Territories district across from Hong Kong Island. That is where all the original and fierce contagion began. The mode of transmission is still under debate. Obviously airborne, but how did it leap from body to body? There were no maids who contracted the disease, not at first, and one of the ones who died only visited the floor for twenty minutes. Was it a powerful sneeze in the foyer of the elevator? Did it somehow get in the ventilation system?

An American businessman stayed on the 9th Floor on the 21st of February when this all came together. He went on to Hanoi from there and took the disease with him. Hanoi is where SARS was first noticed as a big deal, and the American was known as the first “index” case for tracking. That is an epidemiological term for the origin of an outbreak. But there was another, A Doctor from Guangdong Province. He was a respiratory specialist at the showcase Sun Yat Sen Hospital, and he was the one who apparently brought it to Hong Kong. Or perhaps what he had mixed with in a strange viral cocktail with the virus that lived in the businessman. They don’t know. They do know that when the virus arrived in Hanoi it was capable of infecting 56% of the health care workers with whom came in contact.

That caused the doctors to whistle.

And that wasn’t even the strangest since in the Vietnam swelter it is hard to maintain a proper mask and sanitary barrier. But one of the people that died was a painter, a laborer who wasn’t in contact with anything directly. And the World Health Organization physician who first identified the outbreak got it and died. And so it spread, first out of the hospital, by health workers who fled to Bangkok and to Singapore. And in Hong Kong it visited the Amoy Gardens Apartment Block where hundreds contracted the disease.

The Chinese insist that the outbreak in Guangdong is well contained, though others say that it is now in Beijing and Shanghai. They refused to let the WHO or Center for Disease Control investigators in, which fueled suspicion on what SARS really was. Was it something that escaped from a Level 4 research lab? A weapon? Was China under attack or was it something else, a template for terror?

Meanwhile, cases matching the diagnostic criteria for SARS have been reported in Australia, in Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, England, East Europe and the U.S. Of the 85 U.S. cases, 78 acquired the syndrome in one of the Asian vector cities. Seven others have contracted the disease from the travelers, and none have died. Most, in fact, have recovered.

The CDC director has said she is keeping an open mind, though her researchers seem to have identified the virus as a member of the Corona family, so known for the little spikes around the circumference that resemble a crown. That would put it as a malign cousin to the common cold. The experts say that it is an unlikely platform for weaponization, and that this may have just leaped across species lines to arrive among us. The virulence may attenuate as it passes through hosts, and that may account for the lack of death in the U.S. Now that they are fairly sure that they know what it is, they may be able to develop a vaccine. If they do, I will certainly line up to get it.

Because the disease doesn’t spread well in the summer. People are out and about and not shut up in their homes and the schools are out. The Flu season happens in the Fall. And that is when this thing will spike up. At least that is what one wise old Doctor told me. So, I think we better get on the vaccine thing.

Fall isn’t that far away.”

Some of the above seems relevant still, despite the years. Masks were recognized to only partially effective. Quarantine was known to spread social dislocation, and considered a “last resort.” How we handled SARS, a really scary Asian virus, and how we handled COVID suggests there are other factors involved in these sorts of things. And largely by the very same organizations and professionals. There is no report in this account of the discussion of outsourcing research on the SARS, since it had been banned due to its association with bio-weapons of mass destruction. It seemed like a topic worthy of research at the time. Funny how those things work out, isn’t?

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com