Editor’s note: This commentary is by Howard Fairman, of Putney.
We elders now at greatest risk from Covid-19 remember life before there were any vaccines against dangerous childhood diseases, when we all took our chances while awaiting our fates. Some of us also remember life before there were any antibiotics.
And we remember how our parents tried to protect us and encourage us to protect ourselves, then nursed us through inevitables, praying that there would be no complications and that it wasn’t polio, when we could swamp hospitals and suffer lifelong consequences.
Déjà vu nowadays, when we elders are most at risk and most experienced.
Ivan Illich wrote in “Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health” (1975) that modern medicine creates the illusion of immortality.
Modern medicine also creates the illusion of invulnerability, now shattered by a pop-up pandemic that is natural in our globalized world, while demonstrating what bioterrorism could as easily do.
We elders never had illusions of immortality and invulnerability during our formative years. Current precautions against contagion are second nature. Contagion itself is no surprise. Nor is grave risk.
During a public Big Data in the Life Sciences Symposium presented by Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (May 2, 2019), we were told that international epidemiologists have no standard means of online scientific communication and collaboration worldwide.
We elders remember life when annual epidemics were expected, planned for, and controlled long before there were any modern technologies that humans now take for granted, but do not take seriously as preventives.
These international epidemiologists, on whom every human relies, did not expect and plan to efficiently communicate and collaborate internationally to control an emergent and growing pandemic. Nor did their employers, funders and overseers.
I suggested Microsoft Office (Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, SharePoint and Teams online collaboration, Word documents, etc.) and Azure (cloud computing), which was said to be too costly. I then had no reason to pursue the matter, but assumed that Microsoft could and would do good in the event. Microsoft?
There have been other pandemics in human history, each presumed to have been unique, past, and forgettable, except as history, and as living elders’ vivid memories.
The novel coronavirus is new to humans, all of whom lack acquired immunity, some of whom are at grave risk absent any antiviral medication nor vaccine. This vulnerability is not new: Covid-19 simply has demonstrated it.
Covid-19 also has demonstrated that a pop-up pandemic was, is, and will remain possible in our globalized world, whether patient zero was infected by nature or by bioterrorism.
No nation, international organization nor international epidemiologist can now presume that, because it hasn’t happened here, it can’t happen here.
We elders remember when this was life where we lived — and now is déjà vu.
So must we all.
