https://www.city-journal.org/viral-epidemics-coronavirus
Over the past century, as globalization accelerated, viral epidemics have become a serious threat to humanity. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed about 50 million people around the world. The average age of victims was 20, and many died within a day. A comparable flu struck Mexico in 2009, infecting at least 1 million victims. This time, the average victim age was 40. Such flus or pneumonias, different from ordinary seasonal flus, kill the young rather than the elderly. Youth lack natural immunity because of their limited exposure to viruses.
These epidemics are becoming recurrent, too, and emerging more quickly. They’re especially prevalent in China, which has experienced remarkable growth since the turn of the century. In 2003, a pneumonia epidemic, SARS, infected thousands in China before reaching Canada and the United States. At the time, the SARS story paralyzed media, but even today, we don’t know how many people succumbed to the virus, because Chinese authorities hid the evidence.
Now China’s latest epidemic, the coronavirus, is causing anxiety worldwide while remaining largely a mystery. Coronavirus typically spreads between animals and humans, the illness leaping from one to the other, mutating and becoming deadlier as it evolves. The latest mutation originated somewhere in China’s Wuhan region, home to vast chicken and pig farms, where dubious hygienic conditions prevail amid a large population. But now the virus has traveled, as did previous epidemics. The Spanish Flu, for example, likely started on a U.S. chicken farm and then traveled by ship. It took one infected sailor, going from port to port, to create a global pandemic. But the risk is even greater today, with airline traffic making the globalization of a virus almost immediate.
When a new virus emerges, it takes months to create a vaccine for treatment. In the interim, only time and isolation can manage infection rates. Nor is there any remedy other than medicines that ease symptoms. The highly respected French epidemiologist Robert Sebag told me that, judging from past experience, it’s conceivable that up to 15 percent of those who contract the Wuhan virus could die. Chinese officials, though conceding that the virus is highly contagious (and more so than SARS), maintain that the more likely figure is 3.5 percent. This is, of course, largely guesswork for the time being. The only effective measure against the virus at this point is to isolate the sick to control contagion. But the source remains unknown, making management difficult; and not enough Chinese doctors exist—and not all are competent—to contain an illness spreading from city markets to the countryside.
