Author’s Note: I have attempted to be quiet about the pandemic. There has been enough chaos in our response to a virus, and an input from another viral outbreak seemed not to be helpful. But there have been differences. I remembered a strange time that was not mixed up in the partisan acrimony of an election, the efficacy of the vaccinations, the necessity of additional boosters, masks, lock-downs and the constantly evolving strategies issued by people I once knew. Here-and-now there came some surprises amid modern snow emergencies. The contents of a desk-top computer from long ago were revealed here in 2022’s strange world. What follows are the words of a man just turning 50, and who had, through a series of completely accidental events, found himself as an action officer on a task force headed by Dr. Tony Fauci opposed to a viral outbreak with a 4% fatality rate. That is significantly higher than Covid, and could have produced a disaster with four times the deaths the modern outbreak. Reading it this week, I found these old words startling. Perhaps there is something from this entry that is applicable today. Our Covid, at inception of the pandemic, was initially known as “SARS-2.” This is a bit of what it was like to be part of what created our world today.

– Vic

02 April 2003

Quarantine

(Dr. Tony Fauci in 2003, when I met him. This account started with a short discussion of the war in Iraq, which is deleted to get to the relevant portions. Complete transcript on request. This was our world in 2003).

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.

(More detail on the war, or better said, the other, kinetic war. Then:)

… 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 into 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 HHS 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 attritted 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.

(The ending sentence was supposed to be humorous, but is unaltered from a morning 19 years ago. That was the word from the day, from the same Doctors who remain, and military experts of 19 years ago who are long passed. It is interesting how times change, isn’t it? Dr. Fauci then told us to watch out for the “Q” Word. He told me, in person, that the effects of that on society could be more severe than the virus. I wonder what changed his mind about a disease much less deadly?)

Copyright 2003 & 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com