Question, about this part of the letter: "I have four day nurses and five night nurses (female) a ward-master, and four orderlies".
Does anyone know why it was important to point out they were female? Were army nurses typically male?
Anyways, I'm reading about the 1918 flu a lot lately and came upon parts of this text multiple times. I'm still not sure if it's making me more or less paranoid about Covid-19, but it's definitely fascinating.
I've googled around a bit and when Florence Nightingale did her thing, it was mostly male nurses in the military. By early 1900s, this had changed, at least in the US, and most nurses were female.
I'm sure if we start a Twitter storm about it, we can get him cancelled. /s
Personally I think it was just observational, perhaps they were the only women in the place, so they were the exception. From what I know, historically nurses have been mostly female - but would be interested to find out if this was different.
The canary I'm watching is the whole "Chinese" or "Wuhan" vs. "COVID" virus naming issue.
I think it is very clearly not the right time to point fingers. But when this is all past us, a post-mortem and finger pointing is probably warranted. I don't think we need to resort to name calling, but I'm curious to see how much people bend over backwards to absolve China of responsibility.
I think the most evenhanded answer would be to use the correct names (SARS-CoV-2 for the virus, Sars 2 for short, COVID-19 for the disease, Covid for short) while freely reminding people that China's initial cover-up was a necessary condition for the present global crisis.
While I think that's a valid point to make. My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response in the total state space. Hindsight and all that.
I think a much more powerful complaint is pointing out that, despite numerous warnings, studies, SARS, and having successfully isolated the root cause of the SARS outbreak (Civets). Only four months later these animals were back on the menu. The government made a rational choice to allow the conditions for the current situation to exist. The whole world is paying the price for this rational, prolonged and often pointed out mistake. That, I think, is a complaint we can lay wholly on the government.
As an American, I was really disappointed in the CDC response. Even in the initial confusion, it's their fundamental job to prepare for and monitor these crises. Despite SARS and MURS, they still weren't prepared on a basic level to confront a respiratory disease (no meaningful stockpile of N95 masks or ventilators nor plans for ramping up production of the same) and then the whole debacle with the CDC vs WHO tests. The experts seem to be saying that tests are the most important aspect of the response and we botched that royally; only recently has our testing capacity begun to trend toward adequate (failing to address this sooner means the loss of life is exponentially greater). Note that these failures are independent of whatever initial confusion there may have been about this particular disease.
And I don't think this is a simple case of hindsight: we've had several respiratory epidemics in the last couple of decades and we were still caught unprepared.
I'm no expert and perhaps there is a reasonable explanation for all of this, but I suspect it was really negligence to the tune of thousands of American lives and who knows how much economic damage.
The maddening part is that we had the capability to deal with this and the systematically destroyed it.
There was a stockpile, but it was allowed to be depleted. There was a pandemic response team, but they got laid off. Hell, the Obama-Trump transition teams even wargamed thisexactscenario but it wasn't taken seriously.
>My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response
You can fault an authoritarian, oppressive regime for covering up the virus and suppressing whistleblowers. Now the world is paying for the CCP's SOP.
Amusingly, if you look at the talk section [1] of the Wikipedia article on the Spanish flu, some folks really (suddenly, recently, completely by coincidence) want to call it the 1918 flu.
> To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish flu". Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the pandemic's geographic origin, with varying views as to the origin.
It's not like we call syphilis "French pox" any more.
There are two separate issues here: Place-based names cause a stigma (an issue for new diseases, less so for historical ones) and that "Spanish flu" is actually completely wrong on the origins of that specific disease.
It was a global pandemic that didn't even start in Spain. We happen to be paying a lot of attention to it because it's the last really global pandemic of similar severity/spread to the COVID-19 outbreak. The increased attention to this little bit of history has us asking whether we should correct the inaccuracy in its name.
That isn't what I was asking. I asked, why now. What about this instance in time has prompted this? Also, I was talking about Wikipedia. Please do not move the goalposts on me.
I guess the Socratic method isn't going to work here.
Bluntly put, some folks are full Ministry-of-Truthing away at Wikipedia to help justify their attempts at erasure of the "Wuhan flu," China connection. That's why it is happening now. "See, we don't call it the 'Spanish flu,' so why should we call it ..."
"Spanish" Flu is not derogatory when used in the context of explaining the Spanish press were progressive and free to report on their surroundings without gov oppression.
Unlike the rest of world, who were covering up their military losses due to illness.
I don't know, now seems like a great time to point fingers at the small percentage of the Chinese population that is obsessed with eating weird shit like pangolin(probably the same people who are driving certain African wildlife extinct as well). Or that the authoritarian government cover up of the virus helped take it from a local emergency to a global pandemic.
No one has any issues saying that the US bungled the early stages of response for coronavirus.
On our priority list, containing the virus is way higher than making sure China takes responsibility (how is this even a debate?), but the US Executive branch leader (and everyone who follows that lead) has a major priority inversion.
The virus will be contained at some point, and then we can talk about responsibility. If China's policy on wildlife led to this pandemic, then they absolutely deserve to be shamed into changing their policies (permanently this time). They knew better.
Let's not give racists any opportunities here. Calling it China virus or similar does exactly that, while confusing people with yet another name for this virus.
The Chinese government needs to be called out, but specifically and unambiguously the government.
The government can only do so much to change culture, though, right?
It needs to be made unambiguously clear that you do not eat or recreationally touch bat or pangolin. Government needs to outlaw it yes, and culture also need to shun it.
As another example the Chinese slaughter of endangered species and sharks is a failure of both government and culture. I'm not sure there is a totally PC way to express that.
All of this is done by a small percent of people but they need to be educated or shamed into compliance. We don't have to allow bad behavior because it could be un-PC to call it out.
Yes, that's true. There is a cultural element that is to blame as well. My point is that the term "China virus" is not the right way to place blame where blame is due. There will be a lot of collateral damage if it becomes popular.
> It is salutary to remember that we do not really understand why the devastating pandemic of 1918-19 was so severe, and that we cannot therefore be confident that our modern medical measures would succeed against a similar future challenge.
Could it be that very dangerous viruses emerge more often, but only when they fall on "(very) fertile ground", that they then spread? The WW1-circumstances (a lot of men together on small space and harsh conditions) have contributed a lot, that the "spanish flu" spread, while others did not spread and so never became known to us ?
The conclusion of that article is that the basic lessons we learn today, were - in part - learned in 1918...
Back then, researchers had already traced the emergence of outbreaks to an encampment in France where men and animals were living in close quarters and unsanitary conditions.
As to the first part of your question, the answer is that more people encroaching on the animal and wildlife territory while not adhering to basic sanitary practices will increase the chance of new strains appearing and making the jump to humans.
Such events do not only happen in China in particular but they can happen virtually anywhere in the world.
Another ongoing pandemic is HIV/AIDS. Well, it is generally accepted that the jump to humans occurred in West-Africa in the 1920's. But it took time and globalization - increasing mobility - before HIV finally spread across the world:
May be a complete digression but it's much easier for me to believe the virus escaped from Wuhan Virology Institute than made the jump from a fish market.
I found a newspaper message from the 19th century that described a flu that gave pneumonia and undertakers hadn’t seen anything like it since the Cholera epidemics, this article was from Spain around 1840’s.
The article states under the header “news from Spain” :
“In the last days a terrible [amount of] dying has transpired that the gravediggers state that they have no recollection [of such a thing] since the Cholera. Most people die of lung and chest complications that follow from the flu.”
27-01-1848
Old Dutch is actually a lot like Old English, they’re both sister languages. Supposedly speakers of those languages were able to (mostly) understand each other, similarly to a dialect.
This would be quite hard to discover bar someone having access to army records of that time or having a family connection, I think. Not only has more than a century passed, there's also the issue of the letter simply being signed "(Sgd) Roy". Roy isn't that uncommon of a first or last name.
If, indeed, the Burt that the letter is addressed to has the surname Bouell or worked with someone named Bouell, that could help narrow things down substantially. If Burt is found, the Roy in question could be found as well.
Since "Bouell" isn't a word, but it is a name, and "Bouells" is a plausible misspelling of "bowels", it could be a pun connecting the two. (medical bowel care and a person named Bouell)
Unless it's something specific between them, perhaps it means to keep the heart open, to stay in kindness and compassion. Which would be a traditional, positive thing to say to a dear friend at the end of a letter. Or a physician joke between them, alternatively.
So, going beyond the depressing, I think one good thing that will come out of all this since this situation isn't experienced in any of our lifetimes (including our elders) we have to reach back to history to find comparisons. Maybe this will spark a curiosity in history!
There's a number of really great history channels on YouTube; I particularly like "The Armchair Historian".
An historian on Twitter suggested people should keep journals of how COVID-19 affects their everyday lives.
I've been doing it as a method of self-reflection, and found it really valuable. I end up not just enumerating the changes to my life, but exploring how I am responding to them, trying to describe how they're affecting me emotionally, etc.
It's just for me, so I don't worry about missing days or being dramatic, or writing in an organized manner. But it's been really interesting, and not at all the chore I expected.
I'm doing something similar too! Morning / afternoon / evening pages on my personal blog: https://blog.yingw787.com
I don't think I've ever shared my personal blog before, it's my personal scratchpad as opposed to my professional content on Bytes by Ying, but if it helps people understand how one rando on the Internet processes emotions during this time, maybe I can do some good.
> There's a number of really great history channels on YouTube
I really rate Drunk History (I generally don’t like Hollywood humour, nor American history, but somehow it is done brilliantly and is super informative).
Thousands* of hours in EU4 where you listen to an immersive playlist æsthetic to the nation/region you're playing and spend 80% of the time paused and reading Wikipedia about said nation/region.
I'm more of a heavy metal EU4 player actually haha! I'm not a big fan of the cultural music while I'm playing but for some reason heavy metal just amps me up when I'm playing that game. It's (obviously) Sabaton, Black Label Society, Iron Maiden, and Rammstein most of the time. Otherwise I'll have hip hop or deutschrap on. If I'm in the HRE, it's most definitely deustchrap lol.
I find the language very beautiful. How come we don’t write like this anymore? Where does one learn to speak like that? We don’t see beautiful language on emails.
I wonder if, like with the 1918 pandemic, we'll find later that the first cases were somewhere other than China, but that place was better at keeping it under wraps.
A shrimp vendor at the Wuhan seafood market reported symptoms starting Dec. 10, so unless someone finds earlier cases elsewhere, I think that's as good a place as any to call the starting point.
1. The 1918 Flu origin is still up for debate, in my opinion the China origin theory is still the most plausible, but we'd need to find a corpse that died from the virus in 1917 to prove that it was the migration of laborers to the French frontlines.
2. China is probably the country best equipped at "keeping it under wraps".
3. There's many reports and tweets of it outbreaking in early December and the CPC covering it up for over a month.
Mid January they were still saying it wasn't transmissible and refused to shut down the market. They let at least 5 million come and leave the city.
They let a doctor die from it that blew the whistle on them.
Your meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something like "the Chinese virus".
I agree with the analogy, but I think it goes the other way.
The "Spanish flu" was, so far as anyone can tell, not originally from Spain, nor was it especially bad there. It got called "the Spanish flu" because Spain was more honest than other countries about how much of it they had (there was a lot of deception going around on account of there being a war). And a hundred years later it's still being called "the Spanish flu" as if Spain were somehow to blame for it.
That's a really bad outcome.
(Obviously, its badness pales in comparison with the badness of the thing itself and the suffering and death it caused. But, as merely terminological things go, it's really bad.)
It would be much better if everyone didn't call the 1918 influenza "the Spanish flu", but obviously it's too late for that now. And it would be much better if we didn't spend the next century calling today's pandemic "the Chinese virus". The Chinese have handled it better than a lot of other countries, after all.
(It's slightly less unreasonable to call this one "the Chinese virus" than to call the 1918 one "the Spanish flu", because it does seem as if it did in fact originate in China, and an initial bad response by the Chinese authorities may be one reason why it wasn't better contained. I still don't think it's a name China should be saddled with for the next hundred years.)
Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\
This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly.
> But naming the virus Yambuku ran the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeria in 1969.
> It was Karl Johnson, another researcher from the CDC, and the leader of the research team, who suggested naming the virus after a river, to tone down the emphasis on a particular place.
We were already going "place-based names kinda suck" in the 1970s.
That said, we do still name individual species of ebola by where breakouts were discovered. Ebola Zaire & ebola Sudan were the first species identified after their respective outbreaks.
There's even ebola Reston, because of a breakout in Reston, VA. Reston infects humans (we develop antibodies), but does not cause Ebola virus disease in us.
> In 2015, after a few decades of what came to seem in hindsight like culturally insensitive missteps, the World Health Organization issued a policy statement on how to name emerging infectious diseases. Part of the point was to help scientists generate names before the public does it for them. So there are rules. The names have to be generic, based on science-y things like symptoms or severity—no more places (Spanish Flu), people (Creutzfeld-Jacob disease), or animals (bird flu).
Correct, I was speaking more in the context of Ebolavirus itself. As you pointed out, Johnson suggested naming it after the river in the 70s – but every Ebola species named (the last one in the early 2010s) still had a local name attached.
No more people? That's a huge mistake. There's a long history of naming diseases after the first to characterize it. Eponymous disease names are the majority?
Ebola is a relatively local disease, since it travels by animals and direct contact, not couhing, and because it so dangerous that it kills or incapacitates before people travel too far.
Even so, it's misleading because Ebola doesn't care about geographic boundaries.
Yeah maybe a tiny village in Africa has an issue. But I imagine the entire nation of China would survive it. E.g. the German Measles haven't impacted tourism in Munich...
And to be frank, if this virus was in fact generated by the markets in Wuhan (like so many other flu viruses over the years?) then maybe they should own it. Housing mammals and birds so closely together in large numbers is a health hazard to everybody, as we're learning to our dismay. They've had 20 years to do something about this.
> And to be frank, if this virus was in fact generated by the markets in Wuhan (like so many other flu viruses over the years?) then maybe they should own it.
The US currently has the worst infection curve and the most cases, despite months to prepare. Should it be called the American virus because of our fuckups here?
Red herring? Flu viruses are created by irresponsible livestock management, costing billions in lost work every year. Now, possibly millions of lives. All avoidable at the source, and well-know for decades.
Let's flip this around - is there an especially good reason to name it after a place? Is there some benefit we gain that counteracts the possibility that this will reinforce the existing stigma against Asians for the current situation? The virus has a name already - why work to change it to another name that may be more harmful if there is no good reason to?
> Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.
Certainly there is a difference between calling it ebola and "the african disease". Or lyme disease being called the "american disease"? Calling it the "chinese virus", especially given the current climate fraught with geopolitical implications. Especially when there are subtle accusations by both sides blaming the other for intentionally passing the virus to them.
> This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way.
Given the histories involved here, I don't think so. And toss in the trade war, it's really naive to not see the obvious here.
> Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly.
Sure for recognition and to be credited for discovering the disease. Are you saying "the chinese" should be credited and honored for the virus? Should "the chinese" win the nobel prize for this discovery?
> Folks are over-thinking this.
Nothing to over-think. It's pretty obvious what the intentions are, not to mention the political motivations.
History is fraught with naming diseases, insects, etc after countries to attack those countries. Syphilis was called the french, italian, spanish, etc disease depending on politics of the nations involved. Cockroaches were called "german cockroaches" by the french, while germans called it the "french cockroach", etc depending on which nation was mad at which nation at the time. HIV was initially called a gay-related disease. But heterosexuals can get HIV. And non-chinese can get the "chinese virus" so maybe it wouldn't hurt to call it something else? What do you think?
As I posted earlier… I see President Trump's tweet from 7:19 AM - Mar 27, 2020 — after chatting to President Xi — now refers to "the CoronaVirus" and "the Virus".
It was called the Spanish flu because they were a neutral country and hence the reporters were allowed to report on the flu. It doesn't have much more than that in common with Spain.
Does anyone know why it was important to point out they were female? Were army nurses typically male?
Anyways, I'm reading about the 1918 flu a lot lately and came upon parts of this text multiple times. I'm still not sure if it's making me more or less paranoid about Covid-19, but it's definitely fascinating.