Some very early thoughts on pandemics
Back in 2004, one of the first articles I wrote for The Tyee was about a possible flu pandemic as it might affect Vancouver. An excerpt:
Oct. 5, 2004: Vancouver reports its first case of New Flu, already labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The virus has moved around the world with frightening speed from Europe, where it was first identified just a few weeks earlier.
Oct. 11: Three hundred cases of New Flu have been confirmed in Vancouver.
Oct. 20: Vancouver has 3,000 cases of New Flu, 1,000 reported in the past 24 hours. The pandemic has swamped the city’s health system.
This is the spike of the first wave. By the end of the year Vancouver’s total cases number about 28,000 and 3,700 of them have been fatal. Two smaller waves hit, one in mid-January 2005 and the last in February and March. By mid-2005, New Flu has vanished. Vancouver’s total cases have numbered 170,000; 5,000 have died.
Vancouver is not alone. A quarter of the province’s 4,000,000 people have fallen ill, and 37,000 are dead. Most of the deaths are among those aged 20 to 40. B.C. First Nations fatalities total almost 10,000, including many children and elderly. Nine and a half million Canadians have suffered New Flu, and 285,000 are dead.
This science-fiction scenario assumes only that New Flu is just as deadly as Spanish flu was between October 1918 and March 1919; I have simply scaled up the numbers to reflect our much larger population. In 1918, for example, an estimated 30,000 of Vancouver’s 100,000 residents caught the flu, and 900 died. Of the 4,000 provincewide deaths in 1918-19, over 1,000 were of First Nations. The city now holds almost 600,000; we could therefore expect a sixfold increase in cases and fatalities.
According to the new Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan, a flu pandemic could kill between 11,000 and 58,000 Canadians while making 2.1 million to 5 million ill. No doubt we could fight flu more effectively than our great-grandparents did. But it’s instructive to see how they coped 85 years ago.
By early 2004, H5N1 had returned six years after the big Hong Kong outbreak, and a recent outbreak of another avian flu east of Vancouver, in the Fraser Valley had caught my attention. I created my H5N1 in March 2004 as an attempt to educate myself about the virus, and soon found myself in a curious world called Flublogia, made up of people trying to understand what looked like a serious threat. We educated one another. But as the years passed, we also learned that a single virus isn't enough; we had to look art the social contexts in which viruses thrive or vanish, and those contexts, as Rudolf Virchow understood in the 19th century, were created by politics.