Around March of 2020, when the panics and lockdowns and whatnot began, someone asked me how long I thought it would last. I figured that we’d be dealing with masks and lockdowns for perhaps 18 months. This answer was met with unhappiness, but as it has transpired I was glitteringly optimistic in my estimate.
History might provide a basis to estimate the future. There have been a *lot* of pandemics through the ages; some, such as the Justinian Plague, might have wiped out half the human population of the then-known world. But these occurred in a very different world… one without fast intercontinental transport, one without anything resembling modern medicine, one without instant communications. There have, however, been pandemics in the modern world. Some, like AIDS, are not that relevant: AIDS, unlike the Wu Flu, is a *very* difficult disease to pass on; for all intents and purposes you have to actually *try* to get it. The Commie Cough, on the other hand, can be caught be simply walking past the wrong person.
Three pandemics spring to mind as being relevant: The Spanish Flu, the Asian Flu and the Hong Kong Flu. Note that these are all based on an influenza virus, not terribly dissimilar to the China Flu corona virus. note also that these are all named after places; those who screeched that calling COVID 19 the “China Virus” was racist are historically ignorant jerks. So what do these earlier pandemics suggest:
1) The Spanish Flu – which may well have originated in Kansas, and almost certainly not in Spain, sprang up in 1918. Due to the “Great War” and the international transport of millions of troops, it spread quickly across the planet, killing an estimate 1 to 2% of the entire planetary population. However, in this case it really did burn out in about 18 months. We would be done with the Pinko Pox by now if history had repeated. Maybe.
2) The Asian Flu broke out in late 1956 or early 1957 in southern China (a few hundred km from Wuhan of COVID 19 fame). It reached the US by summer of 1957, with a second wave in January of 1958. A vaccine began trials in July of 1957, and started to reach Brits by October of 1957. it seems the vaccine did its job, and the pandemic began to subside at about that time ending in 1958, with around 100,000 American deaths, 33,000 British death and about 30,000 West German deaths, with a worldwide total of around 1.1 million. While the pandemic seemed to end less than two years after it began, the virus itself was not exterminated. It continued to mutate, and thus in 1968 we got…
3) The Hong Kong Flu appeared in July of 1968 in, obviously, Hong Kong. It was the same virus as the Asian Flu, but with genetic changes due to antigenic shift: several genetically different strains of virus coming together to form a new one. By September of 1968 it had gone worldwide; in October it became widespread in the US. As before a vaccine was quickly produced, within four months. The Hong Kong Flu wreaked havoc in Europe, killing some 60,000 in the Germanies. It lasted until at least early 1970, with a worldwide total mortality of 1 to 4 million.
These earlier pandemics show the virus going through its course in around two years. Were the current pandemic to follow that timeline, we’d be nearing completion. But… that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, it keeps dragging on. Why, and for how long?
One of the main differences between now and 1918, 1957 and 1968 is the prevalence not just of high speed jet travel for the modestly well to do, but *reasonably* fast travel for refugees and colonists from the third world. In the 50’s and 60’s there were not millions of Chinese people enriched by the Chinese Communists embrace of state capitalism; indeed, the 1968 outbreak was sometimes referred to as the Mao Flu, referring to the Chinese dictator whose policies had extended the impoverishment of his people. The Chinese were pretty well locked in China. Europe was not being overwhelmed with military-age male colonists from the Middle East and Africa; the United States still had something resembling border controls. Additionally, there does not appear to have been quite as much distrust of the government, and thus distrust of the vaccines available at the time; it appears that there was much less “vaccine reluctance.”
And further: the population of the planet was far lower. In 1957 the US population was about 170 million, in 1968, about 200 million; today it is about 330 million. All these additional people are parked in the same area, in the same cities. Population densities are higher; chances are in many places you’d encounter more people in a day today than you might have 50 or 60 years ago. This will aid in transmission of any disease.
So long as vaccine reluctance is a major force, international transfer of millions of “refugees” is largely unchecked and unquarantined, and population densities are high, there’s little reason why the virus, which has shown itself to be quite capable of mutating, should grind to a halt. Had the US had enough vaccine from Day One to completely vaccinate the entire population, and had in fact done so, the US would of course have been better off. But the virus has shown itself capable of infecting and sickening the vaccinated; further mutations might well make this worse, to the point where existing vaccines are near useless. And had the US been fully vaccinated on Day One, without strict border controls and limits on international travel, as well as actually useful checks against Chinese (and other) efforts at biological warfare, the virus would have gotten in anyway, and would have continued to play havoc.
So how long will we have to deal with COVID 19? I don;t know. It doesn;t seem to be anywhere near over *now,* and a good rule of thumb in engineering is “if it has lasted this long, it could last this long into the future.” So I see not reason to suppose that it *will* be over by the beginning of 2024. Check back at that time. Maybe I’ll be wrong and the pandemic will be a memory, mask mandates will be over, Australia will be a nation of free people again. Maybe I’ll be dead, an unburied corpse among hundreds of millions of others.
