Who is Qualified to Assess the Consequences of a Pandemic ?
I am prompted to start this thread as result of news article called:
Doctors warn against pandemic fear-mongering
In it, a Canadian ER doc …dismissed ominous warnings suggesting chaos will erupt on Canada’s streets, prompting urban animal massacres and absentee police officers.
I don’t know about the urban animal massacres, but there will definitely be absentee police officers - 40% by most estimates.
There is good information in the article. Panicking is never a good idea and list of emergency supplies is provided.
However, the real question that I want to raise is: Why is anyone asking two ER docs what they think about police absenteeism or societal disruption? How on earth would they know? Just when in medical school do they teach med students about police staffing requirements? Or the effects of Grid failure on society? Is it after Gross Anatomy but before Microbiology? The only thing these guys know about police work is what they’ve learned from watching episodes of “Law and Order”. How about if I give them some advice on how to amputate a leg? No, I don’t have an MD. As a matter of fact, I have had no medical training whatsoever, but what the heck, I’ve watched some episodes of “Scrubs”. Surely that’s good enough.
My point is that there is no one person who is qualified to opine on what will happen in a pandemic. But, reporters seem to think ER docs or public health officials ought to be able to do this. Guess again. Most public health officials are either family docs with no background in science (but who are very attuned to what their governor wants) or epidemiologists who are very good with statistics but have never been in a lab and know little to nothing about virology. There are exceptions, Michael Osterholm being the most prominent example, but they are few and far between.
A pandemic is not just a health emergency. It is a police emergency; a water treatemnt plant emergency; a power plant emergency; an agriculture emergency, etc. Why don’t reporters ask police chiefs what will happen with 40% of their officers home sick or taking care of sick relatives? Same for other essential workers.
No one person can know all of the effects of a pandemic, but many public health officials and doctors are pretending that they do. They should stop it. They quite literally don’t know what they are talking about. Perhaps those ER docs ought to hang out with some RCMP for a couple of weeks. Once they’ve had a taste of that world, I wonder if they will still be confident that everything will be just hunky-dory with 40% of the cops gone.
One of the good things about Flu Wiki is that there are many different people here with different backgrounds. I honestly think people who take the time to listen and converse with the different content experts here have a much better understanding of what a pandemic will entail than most of the public health authorities do. Pity more public health authorities don’t come to Flu Wiki. They could use the education.
“Perhaps those ER docs ought to hang out with some RCMP for a couple of weeks.”
Monotreme. Are you sure you don’t want to move to Canada…social distancing is a way of life up here. /:0)
Tom DVM – at 00:06 social distancing is a way of life
yes, who would want to be close to a Canadian…… my attempt at humor.
DennisC…good one…actually, I think the quote indicates that Monotreme has already lived in Canada.
By the way, we dance with Moose and have one shower a month!!
Tom DVM – at 00:06
Canada wouldn’t be the worst place to be during a pandemic, but if I left the states, I think I’d pick New Zealand or Iceland ;-)
btw, I just read “jPod” by Douglas Coupland. He thinks Whistler is the place to be when TSHTF.
Tom DVM – at 00:13
I have spent some time in your lovely country and I have known some Canadians very well. Vancouver is one of my favorite cities.
Douglas Couplans is most definitely…in my opinion…’nuts’.
I knew it.
Tom DVM – at 00:17
He probably wouldn’t disagree with you.
It is Elk here and we wait till spring for a shower. We got our first snow today (about 2 inches). It is about as far south as you can go in the US and still get consistant snow.
and back to the thread. Monotreme is right- no one person/group can really see the total picture. We are lucky here to have a wide range of people and backgrounds. It is nice to know that there is a place where we can get input from a wide range of “experts”. I know that there are lots of PhD and others here in the forum that are may not be obvious to a casual viewer.
Monotreme – at 00:00 Could you be so kind and look at my post on the New Rumors thread and India II. I would value yours and Anon_22′s opinion.
Tom has already told me I am nuts, would like to know if I am a walnut or hazelnut.
Yes Vancouver is great. I was impressed with how clean it was and the manners of the traffic and enjoyed the boat ride tour.
IF money were no object, I’d buy a small Carribean island, build a hurricane proof house on 60 foot tall legs, and post a LOT of no-tresspassing signs on poles around the island. Backed up with lots of large muzzle-loiading cannon. Aaargh, matey!
Sigh. Money is an object, however, and I’ll have to settle for my slice of heaven in West by God Virginia. Parts of Canada are very nice, however; I particularly recall a very pleasant visit to a big Dutch windmill outside of Goderich. Not to mention the London LaBatts plant…. <grin>
But anyway, ‘treme, doctors are particularly prone to “expertitis”, an inflation of the ego that results in the patient thinking that because they have some limited expertise in one field that they are automatically expert in another. Doctors, however are not by any means the sole profession that suffers from “expertitis”; I have seen it in a number of white-collar professions, especially managment types who think that they can be engineers or architects. Trades seem to suffer this less frequently, but they can get it too.
The cure for expertitis is easy. Apply a sharp pointed comment to the ego and lance that swelling before it ruptures the victim’s cranium. I just ask the sufferer- “do you have your head up your ass for the warmth?” or “were you born that stupid or did you have to study?” This usually brings the offender up short. You can then point out the affliction in more moderate words.
LMWatBullRun – at 00:33
I agree. Astronauts think they are experts on horseback riding and race car driving - and have the broken bones to prove they aren’t. Assuming that becuase you are good at one thing that you will be good at something else is human nature - and quite dangerous. In “Deep Survival” a Army Ranger is on whitewater boat trip. The boat overturns. The guide tries to rescue him. The Ranger just laughs and pushes the guide away telling him to save someone who needs saving. The Ranger is then sucked underneath a boulder and drowns.
The problem for us is that experts who aren’t experts but who are being treated like experts by the media won’t just get themselves killed, they’ll get us killed too.
This is one of the funniest threads I’ve read here on the Wiki! Monotreme at 00:00, I know your post is serious, and I completely agree, and thought the same thing when I read it earlier today, but your writing really struck me as funny. And LMWatBullRun – at 00:33, your last paragraph is hilarious.
Here’s an opinion about law enforcemnt during a pandemic from … law enforcement. They don’t seem to have the same cheery outlook as the ER docs. Now, who should I believe about the effects of a pandemic on law enforcement? Two ER docs or a judge and a sheriff? Hmmm tough call, but I’m going to go with the Judge and the Sheriff.
National and international health officials have for the last year been warning of the danger of a flu pandemic that could infect billions of people around the world and kill millions. One of the greatest dangers such a pandemic poses is that the sheer size of it could overwhelm healthcare and other systems with days of the outbreak, leaving most victims to fend for themselves as society collapses around them.
“There is no doubt our healthcare system will be overwhelmed” in case a flu pandemic hits Arkansas County, County Judge Glenn “Sonny” Cox told a group of about two dozen healthcare, education, municipal, law enforcement and other officials during a meeting on flu preparations in Stuttgart last Friday. “There’s no doubt our law enforcement system will be overwhelmed.”
[snip]
In the past, local law enforcement officials have been able to look to the Arkansas State Police of even the Arkansas National Guard in case of emergencies. That won’t be the case this time, officials say.
“What we’ve found in the last couple of years is ‘don’t count on it [help from the Guard]’ ” Neal said. “If they can be deployed, they will be in the urban areas. The rural areas will be on their own.”
Arkansas County Sheriff Allen Cheek agreed. The Sheriff’s Department has “10 fulltime deputies right now. If a pandemic hits here, I feel sure I will have to deputize some people — maybe a lot of people. Those people are going to need training.”
This is a great thread and I am so gld to see people on the wiki questioning sources!
A Sheriff in charge of ten full time deputies isn’t really in the know, but I would find him more qualifed than an ED doc. There is a national magazine for police chiefs I’ll try to find. Maybe they’ve already written it up for us.
Monotreme - you know what you (or someone else) should do next:
Copy-paste this as an Opinion piece, perhaps with a list of links of examples of good, bad and mixed quality journalism (from this point of view of “who knows about this stuff, really”). Ok, partly done.
Then maybe Sandman and Lanard will quote you. Great honour, no? (And further spread of this important meme: “each one should examine their own implications”, or “together we have everything”.)
Now, please, someone else, link to said wikipage (and forum thread) from the “resources for journalists” section - if there’s such a section.
If there’s no such a section, we should definitely create it! Subsections:
You’re on to something, Monotreme. Amazing what we can all do if we have (and use) time!
Leo7 – at 03:23 There is a national magazine for police chiefs I’ll try to find.
www.aphf.org/thechief.html
policechiefmagazine.org
www.theiacp.org/pubinfo/pc/
What we really need is a good systems engineer to take a look at the question from a macro view. A number of other threads have touched on this question before, but this is far more than a health issue, it affects everyone and everything.
What we really need is one of Robert Heinlein’s ‘encyclopedic synthesist’ types.
FAO has recommendations for mammals around H5N1, good for vets and pet owners to see now except it is poorly-titled; Avian influenza and cats.
Bad headline pick for the original news post, too, because they could have said the Doctors Recommend Preparing, which the article doesn’t get to until page 2, where they also say no vaccines for 6 to 12 months after pandemic starts…
lugon – at 04:40
Thanks. I’ll turn this into an opinion over the weekend. Then, feel free to use it however you wish.
OnandAnon – at 13:07
What we really need is one of Robert Heinlein’s ‘encyclopedic synthesist’ types.
We need the Jasons.
Don’t forget the Hollywood Celebrities. They get asked their expert opinion on EVERYTHING.
Monotreme, I had copied your text over to a wikipage here. Do you plan on editting it to become a resource for journalists? Want some help from people reading this thread? Start a thread for journalists or reporters in general?
What we really need is one of Robert Heinlein’s ‘encyclopedic synthesist’ types.
Yes!!!
Now, how do we get it done? Do we file a proposal to Reader’s Digest’s experts? Are there journalist students or literature students who may take is as a job to write summaries? Could we contact them somehow?
We need to welcome people and turn them to where their help is needed. An updated welcome page?
Who is qualified to assess the consequences of a pandemic? If not us, then nobody is.
Simply put, no single individual can possibly possess enough specialized knowledge to make accurate predictions about such disparate subjects as virology, health care, law enforcement, economics, energy, shipping, demographics, political science, sociology, et cetera, all at the same time. It is important to note that even within a single field of study, it can take many years of college to approach the status of a so-called “expert”. Therefore, to assume that any one person can assess the consequences of a pandemic is probably unreasonable.
On the other hand, it is certainly possible to assemble people from a wide variety of fields and have them speculate about possible pandemic scenarios and outcomes, as we do here. By so doing, we have created a culture of critical thinkers— a real think tank, if you will. In our think tank we speculate each and every day about various pandemic-related issues and thereby help each other understand all of the nuances and potential consequences of a pandemic, whether mild, severe, or somewhere inbetween. But we do so collectively, and we do so without being able to state definitively what will unfold step by step. At best, our visions of the future are nothing but informed speculation.
Yes, we continue to search for more insights, yet as good thinkers as apt to do, we want to discuss every possible issue to see how it affects things we already know or assume to be true. When will it happen? How long will it last? Will the power go out? Will the megacities burn? What if the CFR is 10%? These are important questions to ask, but each of these questions has many possible answers, and each one will be case-specific and tied to previous events. We follow this path of critical thinking every day right here on Flu Wikie.
As Flu Wikians, we already know more about pandemics than 99% of the population of this planet, and we continue to search for more answers. Somehow, we are driven to do so. That sort of makes us the experts, doesn’t it? So, who is qualified to assess the consequences of a pandemic if not the experts?
i agree Dr. Dave.
In all of my conversations on Panflu I am the complete authority on vitually every subject. It is amazing to me how much I have learned about so many things these past 1.5 years.
CRfullmoon at 13:50
Could you please provide a link? I’ve searched the site and couldn’t find your reference other than an admonition to keep cats indoors. Thanks.
I think it’s good that we all have different opinions. Just recently, I’ve had this strange thought running through my mind, and I think it applies to this thread in a way. I can’t get over the similarity between how the virus changes from day to day, and how we (whether we recognize it or not) change, even if it’s imperceptibly. Not one of us is the same as we were the day before. Our bodies have changed a bit (cells die and are replaced), and so do our minds. We are affected by what we see on television and what we read and what we exchange as information with each other (such as on this thread), whether we recognize it or not (hence my disagreement with “experts” who claim children are not affected by video game violence and the like of it on television as well).
Just the same, from my limited background in biology, it seems that the H5N1 virii are definitely not the same as they were the day before. Some of these virii have made changes to where they can no longer replicate (they no longer “believe” that it is possible to infect others :) ), some mostly look like the day before but have a slight change or two, which doesn’t seem to make a difference, etc.
The bottom line for me is that we will not be the same tomorrow compared to how we are today, and neither will the virus. Can you predict exactly which changes your body will make, or which changes your mind will make in assessing the situation? You can control what you read or see on TV to some limited extent, but some of it is out of your hands. I know selective pressure comes in to play with virii, but selective pressure cannot predict what all of the variables will be. I think Dr. Woodson cinched it for me when he referred to the large “biomass” of the virus out there. I think of that “biomass” as lots and lots of individual viruses, some just a bit slightly different from one another, all wanting to do their own thing. All it took in WWII was one Hitler. I’m thinking that the virus has its own version of that, somewhere out there.
Goju,
I have only been learning about pandemics and prepping for about a year, but I have yet to meet anyone outside of Flu Wikie who is as knowledgeable as I have become. This is not a boast, mind you. I find this truly disturbing. I do not feel at all comfortable in this role. Believe me, I would gladly defer to a higher authority.
DeJure 9:25 is a beautiful piece of writing…thanks. /:0)
De jure – at 09:25 “disagreement with “experts” who claim children are not affected by video game violence and the like of it on television as well”
I always found it interesting that the experts try to claim that the TV does not affect children and then the companies spend billions on advertisements. And every Halloween the children want to dress up like TV cartoon characters, try to act just like them, and eat from the cartoon of cereal with Superman on the label.
And this is part of the reason that people aren’t prepping and TPTB aren’t taking it seriously. Every so often you get some vet at the University of Middle of Nowhere who gets some coverage saying “AF not a Serious Threat” - no joke I saw this same thing the other day and meant to post it in the AF Hall of Shame. His rationale: because it hasn’t shown up in migratory birds this past spring, we won’t get it. And he wasn’t saying AF in birds, he was saying people.
I know there are lots of opinions out there about how serious the threat is. That’s the way the world should operate - free flowing ideas are better for everyone. But only IF everyone has access to all the information and has a chance/ability to evaluate all the information and make their own informed decisions. But because the media is spoonfeeding them mostly wrong or watered-down information, we’ll be left with a society ill prepared for what might come down the road.
In this intriguing, chaotic, deeply disturbing field, maybe the difference between someone new to the field and an expert is that the newcomer says “I don’t know”, and the expert says “we don’t know”.
I’m an expert relative to those physically close to me, and humbled by many many Fluwikians.
On the other hand, I believe we don’t need perfect knowledge to take action.
De jure
“I can’t get over the similarity between how the virus changes from day to day, and how we (whether we recognize it or not) change, even if it’s imperceptibly. Not one of us is the same as we were the day before.”
Watch the sun move across the sky - it doesn’t seem to move… but soon it becomes very dark outside.
Very well said.
Dennis in Colorado – at 10:40
Leo7 – at 03:23 There is a national magazine for police chiefs I’ll try to find.
www.aphf.org/thechief.html policechiefmagazine.org www.theiacp.org/pubinfo/pc/
The cheif’s don’t know squat except politics and budget.
You need to source publications targeted to the Captain level. The one’s who actually have to put together staffing levels, equipment requirements and know the demographics of their AO.
2beans – at 09:10 (sorry; just now saw your request)
FAO H5N1 March 2006 Scroll down to see General Information, and, Information for veterinarians.
Tom DVM – at 00:13 --- By the way, we dance with Moose and have one shower a month!!
I’ve heard that! ;-)
Monotreme – at 00:17
Vancouver is one of my favorite cities.
Vancouver is almost a part of Washington state, just as Reno, NV is almost part of California! ;-)
De Jure and DennisC,
This is totally off topic, but I could not help but comment on the idea that “experts” say TV is OK for children. What experts? All the published studies that I have seen indicate that TV is very detrimental to kids. It makes them fat and stupid. I could go on quite a long rant on this, but that is for another forum.
Here’s one reference:
Association between television, movie, and video game exposure and school performance.
lugon – at 07:27
Thanks. I’ll update the Opinion based on input from this thread. I think it would be great if you set up a Wiki page for journalists.
Monotreme - ok: A starting page for journalists.
The best way for such a page to get used is to get some feedback from journalists themselves, no?
The page needs some more work. Please feel free to jump in!
Lugon,
Check my post from 8:47. To paraphrase a well-known satirical comic strip, we have met the expert and it is us.
lugon – at 19:05
There are a number of Fluwikians who are journalists. I suggest we contact them and point them to your page for input.
If we start a page for/with journalists, we need to provide a link to Big Files and point specifically to some presentations there.
Now I know who the ER docs were responding to - a jouralist! I wonder if Mr. Nikiforuk is a Fluwikian, if not he should be. He’d fit in just fine here.
Next pandemic will break speed records, author says
The next flu pandemic will wing its way through the world at break-neck speed, hitching a ride on unsuspecting air travellers, speeding through train tunnels, and racing through shorter distances on bicycles, according to the author of a new book.
“Every year, one billion people travel by plane and in so doing provide viral hitchhikers unprecedented opportunities,” Calgary-based journalist Andrew Nikiforuk told CTV.ca.
[snip]
The impact of a severe pandemic will be ominous, he warns, describing scenes that seem to be straight out of horror movies.
“Within a week of the invasion, people will have trouble buying food and medical supplies. The cemeteries will overfill and local meatpackers will store the dead in refrigerated trucks. Rumours that cats and dogs may spread the invader will prompt urban animal massacres,” Nikiforuk writes in his book.
“Entire police precincts, fearful of hauling away the dead and weary of nailing red influenza signs on doors at the homes of the infected, will report sick and not answer calls.”
Canadians would be prudent to heed warnings before it’s much too late, said Nikiforuk, who added that disaster plans rarely work according to plan.
Who is Qualified to Assess the Consequences of a Pandemic ?
Anyone who survives it.
SIPCT – at 21:56
LOL, if I qualify. Otherwise, not so funny.
Well, it’s a matter of hindsight being 20/20, you know. Nobody has the experience of a severe pandemic in a JIT society on which to base their predictions. We must remember that if we say, “This, that, and the other WILL happen”, what we are peddling is religion, not science.
To say, “This, that, and the other COULD happen” is much more credible - and quite scary enough, thank you.
SIPCT – at 22:36
I agree.
Maybe this is that wrong thread but- Definition of an expert: an ex is a has been and a pert is a drip under pressure.
Funny - I always thought an expert is someone who knows when to call in a specialist.