The Plague Year

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year

by jsomers • 6 years ago

135 129 6 years ago

rgovostes2• 6 years ago

For subscribers to the print edition, this article spans 40 pages and space in the issue is dedicated to little else. I haven’t worked through the entire thing yet to decide if this is due to the gravity of the reporting or is typical of an end-of-year slowdown at the publisher.

zeofig• 6 years ago

40 pages! That's intriguingly long. There's also a nice audio version.

rgovostes2• 6 years ago

Yes, if you have 3.5 hours to spare!

andirk• 6 years ago

Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also be the plague year.

Exmoor3• 6 years ago

I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article:

* China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal.

* The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring.

* CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing).

* Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.

IfOnlyYouKnew7• 6 years ago

Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a single issue.

howlgarnish• 6 years ago

I hope this original is published as a book. (This is actually fairly common for journalism in the New Yorker.)

teeray• 6 years ago

While I get that some folks like The New Yorker’s long-form content, I would greatly appreciate a Cliff Notes version of many of their articles.

pdar4123• 6 years ago

Read it, listen to it, share it, discuss it. This is one of the most important pieces of journalism in American history.

sdenton44• 6 years ago

My understanding is that they have very rarely done this; John Hersey's pulitzer prize winning article on Hiroshima was one of the few other examples of dedicating the entire magazine to a single article. So, "gravity" all the way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)

overlordalex• 6 years ago

For anyone who is interested, the article is available to read online https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

Here is the most recent time it was posted (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712

paulpauper2• 6 years ago

this must be the longest article ever. the audio version is 3.5 hours, or about one LOTR movie

TBH, I don't think it matters that much. The virus is a serious situation but the stock market is acting like the worst is long over. I know the stock market is not the economy , but I think it is no longer a catastrophe but rather more like a wildfire. It could have been a far worse situation if the IFR was 2-4% as originally feared back in Feb-March. Then we would probably be seeing the S&P 500 about 50-70% lower than it is now, cuz when you got airborne cancer, that is not exactly something you can patch over by throwing stimulus money at it. Now it's more like a bad flu in terms of IFR for middle-aged people, but worse though for elderly, so I don't want to dismiss that. But it could have bene sooo much worse, and we were spared that.

Guthur• 6 years ago

I feel we build in a reaction expection based off the earlier unknowns wrt to covid-19 but as more data became available we never revised those perceptions and instead doubled down on the narrative that this was some world destroying super virus and it's just so clearly not now.

anonunivgrad5• 6 years ago

It became a point of civic religion to believe that the virus was catastrophically dangerous. Disagreement was not just mistaken but evil.

doliveira5• 6 years ago

It's disturbing to realize that, given the current zeitgeist, a virus with a higher fatality rate would probably have killed way fewer people. This virus really hit the sweet spot: not as inoffensive as to be trivially managed, not as lethal as to dissolve any political spin.

kitotik• 6 years ago

Imagine how catastrophic a wildfire could be to people who live in the areas that are burning.

IfOnlyYouKnew7• 6 years ago

If I'm understanding OP correctly, they'd still get out ahead if they invested in the right stocks.

estaseuropano• 6 years ago

The stock market is up because massive amounts of public money have been pumped into the markets. One of the most important long-term impacts of the crisis will be the massive wealth redistributipn from the people and the states to the rich.

Exmoor3• 6 years ago

For what its worth, this article is the best thing I've read on the pandemic in the USA in the last year and I'm glad it finally hit the front page. It's incredibly long, but I found the part 25% or so that focused on the USA's early failures at detecting the virus most enlightening and horrifying. I'd suggest reading at least that part.

In case you hit the paywall: https://archive.md/on1X2

gen2205• 6 years ago

The New Yorker has cast a merciless spotlight on governments' early actions (and inactions) against the pandemic.

As a New Yorker myself, the article in the May 4 issue [1], contrasting the responses of Seattle/WA and NYC/NY was a gut-wrenching read.

We should be grateful that journalism like this exists, to boldly contradict the political spin-jobs.

If your opinion even slant rhymes with "it was rough in the beginning, but we did as much as we could as early as we could, thanks to the courage/leadership of Mr. Cuomo / De Blasio", and you care about the truth, I encourage you to read.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade...

tomohawk• 6 years ago

The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention

By this time, Taiwan had already started quarantining travelers from China (starting Dec 31). They were bitten by the lack of transparency and paranoia of the China government with SARS in 2003, so had developed a focus on outbreaks in China so as not to be caught unawares again.

The US CDC failed to learn from SARS and we're paying the price now. No one should trust that China will be forthcoming and transparent about these matters. The CDC needs to learn to "trust, but verify". They didn't verify, and they trusted a source with a long history of not being truthful or timely in divulging information.

Also, by this time, Dr Li had been hauled down to the police station and forced to recant his warning that this was human transmissible. So, the wheels of CCP governance were already grinding the truth under foot.

adolph6• 6 years ago

Out of curiosity, what did the US CDC fail to learn from SARS/MERS/Swine Flu/Ebola?

What were the actions that Taiwan took that could be replicated in a much larger scale liberal democracy on a large continent with a diverse globally engaged population?

thepangolino2• 6 years ago

"plague"

Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.

ianlevesque5• 6 years ago

In the United States 50,000 more people died of COVID-19 directly in 2020 than died in World War 2. I don’t get these comments.

leereeves3• 6 years ago

I'm sure thepangolino was talking about deaths worldwide, and it's probably true. Here in the developed world, where COVID was an aberration, it's easy to forget that it was barely a blip in Africa.

"Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined."[1]

"In 2016, diarrhoea was the eighth leading cause of death among all ages (1 655 944 deaths, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1 244 073–2 366 552)"[2]

1: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html

2: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

thepangolino2• 6 years ago

World population was also much smaller.

The Spanish flu killed 50 million people. That’s 5% of the word population at the time. Now 50 million would barley be over half a percent.

base6982• 6 years ago

Maybe try to learn why people make them? Why do you think people down play it?

closeparen• 6 years ago

WWII is important more because of the radical restructuring of society undertaken to fight it, the potential consequences had we gotten it wrong, and its lasting impact on the world. It's not about the sheer number of combat deaths. Same with COVID.

tinus_hn3• 6 years ago

In the United States more than 100000 less people died of COVID-19 in 2020 than of smoking. It is useful to put it all in perspective to keep from panicking.

timr3• 6 years ago

Diarrhea kills 800 thousand children every year, alone (something like 1-2M people die from it every year).

https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/global/programs/Globald...

paulpauper2• 6 years ago

Ageing probably will kill more people. But the problem is phycological. People tend to not fear things they think they can prevent through willpower. For people in developed countries, diarrhea deaths are preventable... airborne viruses, not so much.

sdenton44• 6 years ago

Keep in mind that the mortality rate is much better now than at the beginning, largely due to improvements in treatment as we've learned. (Prone positioning, better alternatives to ventilators, etc.) Without the massive effort undertaken early in, things almost certainly would have been far, far worse. Even still, parts of the US are teetering on the edge of having overwhelmed ICUs, nine months in.

Let's also remember the way the world was reshaped by 6000 deaths in new york in 2001...

Or to say it less charitably: Back at the beginning it was commonly foretold that we would do all this work to flatten the curve, and then some idiots would look at the resulting numbers and say 'See, it wasn't so bad at all!'

u801e3• 6 years ago

Let's also remember the way the world was reshaped by 6000 deaths in new york in 2001

I thought it was around 2600 in New York (just under 3000 total).

IfOnlyYouKnew7• 6 years ago

Diarrhea probably ended up killing more people than SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.

Only if you include the verbal kind.

mhh__• 6 years ago

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavi...

This article is also a nice microcosm of the whole American situation

neonate• 6 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210102201702/https://www.newyo...

https://archive.is/on1X2

u801e3• 6 years ago

I was surprised that there was no mention of the COVID tests from the WHO and why the US did not make use of them.

mchusma• 6 years ago

The content that is there is good, so I would recommend this article, however it omits anything related to the FDA, or Operation Warp Speed. For an article that purports to describe the year of the virus, this is a huge gap.

I think the biggest mistake of this whole pandemic was none of the things listed, it was banning all vaccines for almost a full year. The FDA was granted far reaching powers by congress multiple times to ensure they can approve vaccines quickly in a pandemic. The FDA instead forced. So as badly as Trump handled the pandemic (and he did handle it badly), at least he wanted a fast vaccine. You might blame the first 100k deaths on the disease, but everything after that is due to the ban on the vaccine.

Now, as the vaccines are distributed they are requiring them to go through an ineffective CDC, who is holding back 50% of the vaccines, to the states who aren't able to distribute more than 30% of what they get yet.

The FDA, CDC, and states need to just stop banning people from getting a vaccine. Let private industry help.

Should Trump have proposed legislation to fix this? Yes, but so should Democrats and Republicans. Our beaucracies failed, both parties failed. Even Biden is coming in with goals like "vaccinate 100M in the first 100 days." What a low bar, since we have already bought 200M doses for delivery by the end of Q1 (70ish days into his term). So Biden's goal seems to be "not approve any more vaccines and try not to lose most of the vaccines we have." His goal should be vaccines for everyone that wants it within 60 days. That is achievable with existing supply+ Astrazeneca and if J&J looks good too then that makes it a slam dunk, unless the government gets in the way again.

Swenrekcah• 6 years ago

I find this to be unreasonable. How would they have known in March which vaccines proved to be effective?

Even if they’d guessed right, how many people would have taken an untested vaccine?

And what if a lot of people had, and then side effects show up. That would probably cost more lives over the next decade by public distrust of the drug approval process.

IfOnlyYouKnew7• 6 years ago

No serious scientist is going to give an untested drug to millions of people. There are over a hundred vaccines in development, of which two or three have been successful.

Yes, it seems like the success rate may be higher than for "regular" drug development. But, crucially, nobody knew this. There haven't been a whole lot new vaccines developed in the last few decades.

Besides, as far as I know production capabilities were being built and stockpiles created while the trials were ongoing.

vharuck• 6 years ago

it omits anything related to the FDA, or Operation Warp Speed. For an article that purports to describe the year of the virus, this is a huge gap.

The FDA is addressed in the article, mostly when talking about the botched tests in February.

You might blame the first 100k deaths on the disease, but everything after that is due to the ban on the vaccine.

That's a reckless way to approach vaccination. From TFA:

"Like COVID, [RSV] is dispersed through particle droplets and contaminated surfaces. In the nineteen-sixties, a clinical trial of a potential RSV vaccine made children sicker and led to two deaths—a syndrome called vaccine-enhanced disease."

Potential vaccines can make things worse, which is why we have three test phases. Even if you want to let people get an untested vaccine, which ones get approval? Do they need to get multiple? Will they interact badly?

Even Biden is coming in with goals like "vaccinate 100M in the first 100 days." What a low bar, since we have already bought 200M doses for delivery by the end of Q1 (70ish days into his term).

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this is because the approved vaccines require two doses per recipient. Factoring in logistics and public outreach, that's a reasonable goal.

JimTheMan2• 6 years ago

> "If flights from China were halted, Matt asked, could America have more time to prepare?

Paul was hesitant. Like most public-health practitioners, he held that travel bans often have unintended consequences. They stigmatize countries contending with contagion. Doctors and medical equipment must be able to move around. And, by the time restrictions are put in place, the disease has usually infiltrated the border anyway, making the whole exercise pointless"

Except Australia and New Zealand have shown that is not really true. If you shut the border early enough and police it well enough, you can suppress the virus.

The idea that doctors can't travel doesn't have to be true. Put them in hotel quarantine for 14 days on arrival and then get them to work. 14 days on the way back too. All too often I hear problems(excuses truly) as to why something can't be done. But with additional planning and willpower (and not just rolling over) it can be.

adolph6• 6 years ago

If I recall correctly, the initial US infections came from Europe not China, so Paul's hesitance to a China-specific travel ban wasn't a bad call.

Island and smaller nations have some capabilities as far as population movement controls that the big ones don't have or can't sustain for as long. Eventually COVID will come for all, suppression strategies only allow a nation to adjust the timeline.

This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Finding SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in asymptomatic people before the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy may reshape the history of pandemic.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/

cameldrv2• 6 years ago

China itself is neither an island nation nor small, and it has managed to prevent further large outbreaks. This probably would not be possible if not for travel restrictions and strict infection control at the border (test before boarding, 14 day quarantine, test after quarantine).

Essentially all countries that have kept COVID in check have similar testing and quarantine policies. This is a reasonable alternative to closing the border entirely, but it was never taken up by the U.S.

The Plague Year

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