StemCell Therapy

A pestilence isnt a thing made to mans measure, Albert Camus observed in The Plague. Therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. Panic is exhausting. Only so many witches can be tossed into wells or rolls of toilet paper hoarded before knee-jerk anxiety progresses to a steady state of fear. Cities go dark, governments quarantine exposed populations, institutions begin shutting down, and, as we have seen with the erratic stock market, economies sputter. A population huddled indoors cant till the fields or man the pin factories. Oxen, asses, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens and even dogs . . . were driven away and allowed to roam freely through the fields, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in the Decameron. The crops lay abandoned.

According to Cirium, an aviation-industry consulting firm, more than 200,000 flights in and out of China have been canceled, a 60 percent decline. In 2003, in the midst of SARS, global air travel was down 25 percent. Planes flew into Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kongs international airport, completely empty of passengers. Hong Kong, a city renowned for its shopping, became a retail ghost town. The eighth-of-a-mile walk from one Prada boutique in Hong Kongs Admiralty district to another Prada boutique in Central, usually a 30-minute journey due to all the jukes and spin moves required to avoid the throngs of mainland shoppers, was now a five-minute straight shot.

Concerned about the health of my staff at Time Asia, I consulted other managers at various subsidiaries of what was then the Time Warner empire. The local boss of CNN was in New York with his family and would be staying there for the duration of the outbreak. The head of Turner Entertainment Asia hadnt made any plans, but was eager to hear what I had in mind. Nothing was more fatal, Defoe had warned, then the supine negligence of the people themselves. Determined not to repeat the folly of Defoes Londoners, I did what managers everywhere do when they want to look like they know what they are doing: I convened a meeting. But when I suggested that anyone who had been in contact with a possible SARS case should stay away from the office, it became clear that everyone in the room already knew someone who might be infected. In fact, our circulation manager had dined the evening before at her father-in-laws apartment at Amoy Gardens. There was really nothing we could do, I realized, besides shutting down our publication. But that wasnt an option: We were a newsmagazine, and this was news.

Fear dissipates eventually, replaced by a more realistic sense of the risks. An epidemic, even one of a disease as seemingly easy to transmit as COVID-19, while burdening public-health systems and potentially deadly for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, is eminently survivable by the majority of the population. This fact becomes obvious as people become sick, yet recover; doctors and nurses get a better handle on treatment; and most people go about their life and never succumb. In some ways we were lucky at Time Asia, because we had no choice but to continue visiting hospitals, talking with doctors, and interviewing virologists. We were worried, yes, but proximity to the professionals gave us clarity about the actual risks we were facing.

Follow this link:
The Pattern That Epidemics Always Follow - The Atlantic

This entry was posted on March 9, 2020 at 3:48 am and is filed under Immune System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |