By Robin G. Jordan
Like Kevin DeYoung I believe that we are at the front end of the COVID-19 pandemic . While some politicians are making noises that the worst of the pandemic is past and we can reopen churches, schools, and non-essential businesses, the public health experts are telling us that worst may be yet to come. They have studied epidemics and how diseases spread and they are far more knowledgeable than the politicians. They may not always get things right but what they are telling us is far more reliable than what we are hearing from the politicians.
As a student of history I have also studied epidemics—the Black Plague and White Plague in the British Isles; the cholera, typhus, small pox, and yellow fever epidemics in pre-Civil War and post-Civil War United States, and the various other epidemics that dot the history of humankind. I was educated in schools that were built to prevent the spread of tuberculosis—well-ventilated with windows that permitted plenty of sunlight in the classrooms. Tuberculosis was a scourge well into the twentieth century. People living in crowded, poorly ventilated row houses and tenements were particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis.
As well as studying how diseases have impacted human history, I studied early attempts to prevent their spread. The methods that worked involved better sanitation, better nutrition, uncontaminated supplies of water, quarantine, isolation, and the control of disease vectors like mosquitoes, rodents, and human beings. Vaccines and antibiotics would eventually supplement but not entirely replace these methods for keeping the spread of highly infectious diseases in check.
Vaccines and antibiotics, however, have their drawbacks. Viruses like influenza mutate producing new strains every year and requiring the production of new vaccines. Vaccination had its opponents in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century when it was first introduced as it does today.
The United States had significantly reduced the number of cases of measles only to see a resurgence of the disease in recent years because parents were failing or refusing to get their children vaccinated. In some cases it has been the result of ignorance on the part of the parents; in other cases it has been the result of the parents’ obsession with debunked claims that the measles vaccine causes autism in children and other mistaken beliefs. Parents are deliberately exposing their children to measles out of the belief that it was a harmless childhood disease, not the cause of blindness, brain swelling, severe diarrhea and related dehydration, ear infections, serious respiratory infections such as pneumonia and other serious complications in unvaccinated children and birth defects in unvaccinated pregnant women.
The widespread use of antibiotics in the treatment of various ailments has resulted in the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of harmful bacteria.
The biggest problem we are facing as the novel coronavirus spreads across the United States is not the economic damage that it is causing or even the high number of deaths as horrendous as that figure is, rather it is the reaction of one segment of the population to the pandemic—their reluctance or unwillingness to face up to the seriousness of the pandemic and to implement recommended public health measures.
I do not believe that they will be remembered kindly in the future history books of the United States. Indeed, they may become the object of study into why humans, when faced with a threat to their lives and the lives of others behave in ways that exacerbate that threat.
To mitigate the effects of the novel coronavirus upon the United States will require a unified effort on the part of the whole nation. History shows that this is the only way to beat COVID-19. What is needed is a nation-wide comprehensive plan for testing, contact-tracing, and isolation and the resources to carry out such a plan, not the current piecemeal approach driven by the exigencies of the moment and marked by disorganization and chaos.
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