Thread by @scasagra

re reading a fascinating article: How Pandemics End? nytimes.com/2020/05/10/hea…

#quote "According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes"

it also talks about the "epidemic of fear" that could occur even if no epidemic is running wild. They recall the story of Dr Susan Murray #SusieLMurray nejm.org/doi/full/10.10… about the fear of Ebola in 2014. That fear can kill also...

#quote: When a young man arrived in the emergency room from a country with Ebola patients, no one wanted to go near him; (...). Dr. Murray alone dared treat him, she wrote, but his cancer was so advanced that all she could offer was comfort care

#quote: A few days later, tests confirmed that the man did not have Ebola; he died an hour later. Three days afterward, the World Health Organization declared the Ebola epidemic over.

#quote: Dr. Murray wrote: “If we are not prepared to fight fear and ignorance as actively and as thoughtfully as we fight any other virus, it is possible that fear can do terrible harm to vulnerable people..."

today, thanks to all advances in science and medicine and overall wellness worldwide we do not have to adapt harsh measures, history shows that fear and not knowing what to do drives governments and/or people to implement terrible actions with horrible consequences...

During the bubonic outbreak of 1855 that killed 12 millions worldwide, "Health authorities in Bombay burned whole neighborhoods trying to rid them of the plague" theprint.in/theprint-essen…

did it end? not really "The plague never really went away. In the United States, infections are endemic among prairie dogs in the Southwest and can be transmitted to people. Dr. Snowden said that one of his friends became infected after a stay at a hotel in New Mexico"

but today "Such cases are rare, and can now be successfully treated with antibiotics, but any report of a case of the plague stirs up fear"

Tks to science we were able to medically terminated smallpox "But it is exceptional for several reasons: There is an effective vaccine, which gives lifelong protection; the virus, Variola major, has no animal host, so eliminating the disease in humans meant total elimination"

Influenzas are still with us, and apparently they will stay: 1918 flu, Hong Kong flu of 1968, however "That virus still circulates as a seasonal flu, and its initial path of destruction — and the fear that went with it — is rarely recalled"

what about covid? "One possibility, historians say, is that the coronavirus pandemic could end socially before it ends medically"

“There is this sort of conflict now,” Dr. Rogers said. Public health officials have a medical end in sight, but some members of the public see a social end."

“Who gets to claim the end?” Dr. Rogers said. “If you push back against the notion of its ending, what are you pushing back against? What are you claiming when you say, ‘No, it is not ending.’

"The challenge, Dr. Brandt said, is that there will be no sudden victory. Trying to define the end of the epidemic “will be a long and difficult process.”

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