Dr. Thomas J. LewisHappy 4th - Pandemic Information
Our video "Plague Time," is now available on our youtube channel.
Dr. Paul Ewald wrote the book "Plague Time" over 21 years ago. However, what he teaches, in the book, explains that this "unprecedented" virus - is just that!
What does this mean?
Decades and centuries ago, pandemics were not only possible, but somewhat common. Why? Because of timing.
Today, we are completely globalized. Modern transportation has put essentially every human in contact with one another. By extension, so too have we been in contact with every animal - bats included. Thus, if anyone or any thing is harboring a pathogen, it has already been transmitted. We have been exposed to most, if not all, pandemic-causing pathogens.
As an example, Ebola is an infectious viral disease that affects humans and nonhuman primates, such as monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees. Although the virus was identified for the first time in 1976, it has existed for more than 10,000 years.
So a scant few years ago (2014), there was an ebola outbreak. Some pundits in the U.S. thought there would be massive deaths, but there wasn't, because the infected were easily identified and isolated. Nine of the people contracted the disease outside the US and traveled into the country, either as regular airline passengers or as medical evacuees; of those nine, two died. Two people contracted Ebola in the United States. Both were nurses who treated an Ebola patient; both recovered.
This result is easily explained by the chart above. High lethality = low transmissibility because:
It's easy to identify and isolate those infected
The infected don't live a long time to transmit the virus
As you go down the "lethality - Mortality" curve (X-axis) - the probability of transmissibility goes UP because it is less obvious who has the virus - at least short term (timing).
Dr. Ewald makes that point that the TRUE pandemic is chronic diseases - most of which have an infectious component (I know you haven't been told this) which Dr. Carter and I showed to be the case in our "COVID" paper we published last year.
