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Medical historians describe how the coronavirus pandemic isn't a fluke event. Such a disease outbreak has long been expected, and will happen again. For the crime of spitting in public, New York City officials arrested and fined 144 men on Oct. 4, 1918, during the second — and deadliest — wave of the flu pandemic. Cases had suddenly spiked, and the city’s Department of Health became desperate to curb the spreading disease. With no hope for a vaccine nor a cure, the city posted bulletins imploring people to sneeze into handkerchiefs, avoid crowds, stop spitting, and wash their hands. During the heat of the pandemic, some New Yorkers donned masks. Yet now, over 100 years later, we’re stuck combating the latest human scourge, the newly emerged coronavirus, in mostly the same ways. (Though perhaps spitting is less of a problem.)
Our eventual savior — similar to combating afflictions like polio and smallpox — will be a vaccine, creating widespread immunity against the virus. Yet developing a new vaccine for this new human contagion will likely mean waiting a long time, at the optimistic best perhaps some time in winter or in 2021, when one of ten promising vaccine candidates might safely work. And any miracle cure, for those severely sickened, is unlikely to come much sooner (there’s still no evidence the touted malaria drug hydroxychloroquine curtails deaths). This may all come as sour news. But it’s not the most bitter news of all for our vulnerable species. The most troubling reality of a sustained pandemic that has killed over 112,000 Americans (as of June 10), shuttered cities, and emptied stadiums, is this isn’t some fluke.
It has long been expected. It’s totally predictable. And an outbreak will happen again. “The history of humanity is punctuated by pandemics,” said Dr. Richard Gunderman, an M.D. and medical historian at Indiana University. “This is just another chapter in that big volume.”....
