Pandemics and Me.

Like all of you I am being inconvenienced by the corona virus pandemic.  Well, that's hardly fair.  I'm being inconvenienced but a lot of people are having their paychecks, retirement accounts and small businesses severely tested.

This too shall pass, although nobody knows exactly when.  Everyone hopes that days of sunshine and warmth will cause the virus to slink off the stage.

There's a lot of anxiety out there.  More than I remember in the previous such incidents.  Oh yes, this is not the first time I've been around when the First Horseman is supposedly galloping into town.

I have vague memories of polio.  This now extinct disease was once among the great terrors of parenthood.  It hit young children.  It paralyzed them.  They died or lived in iron lungs.  In its own way this was far scarier than old people dying.  I would jump in front of a bus for my grandchildren.  I would do the same for yours.

I recall when still very young hearing that you should not run through a water sprinkler on a hot day.  Because that caused polio.  At the time this was just the lingering "after rumor" from an earlier era where it was only vaguely understood that the virus could be water borne.   I might have gotten the first inactivated polio vaccine in the late 1950s.  I do remember getting the oral "attenuated virus" vaccine when it became available circa 1961.  There was a tiny paper cup half full of pink liquid.  I was in the basement of a school.  I swigged the stuff down and wondered why it did not taste much like medicine.

My next brush with Pandemic was in 1976.  A strain of the H1N1 influenza appeared out of nowhere and killed a military recruit in Fort Dix New Jersey.  It was feared that this was the same strain as had caused the great 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic that had killed unimaginable numbers of people.

Then President Gerald Ford took action.  A vaccine was rolled out.  His own sleeve was rolled up, and he publically got vaccinated.  I did too, in the student union of my college.  I remember very little of this.  Just standing in line.  And that the student union building was so aesthetically atrocious that it offended my sensibilities even at a time when I  sported large sideburns and wearing way too much polyester....

The Swine Flu pandemic never got off the ground.  Did the vaccine turn the tide?  One hopes so, as it had a legacy of - still controversial - causing a number of cases of vaccine related paralysis.

Since then the science has gotten better and the general nature of mankind has gotten sillier.  

I don't know if we are over reacting this time around.  As in 1976 it is an election year, that hardly helps the situation.  But everyone now is taking this seriously and it is encouraging to see the country united in this effort.

Hope you are all well prepared to ride this out.  Me, I've got some backlogged writing to do and a few books I need to get onto.  Several speaking gigs are or will be cancelled but they can be done another day.  Digging in England in May.....not looking too great at the moment.  Betting on a swift and effective response from the NHS.  Dubious.

But having shaken off a few non Covid-19 maladies this winter I'm doing great.  And I've laid in a supply of decent beer.  I can live on ramen noodles if necessary.  But life is precious, uncertain and always too short to drink bad beer.