This big one is a virus

Out local CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) leaders have been advising for years that families prepare for the Big One by assembling 72 hour emergency kits of food, water, flashlights and much more, but certainly toilet paper. No one will know when an earthquake, tsunami or volcanic eruption will leave us helpless, without power or water or transportation access.

No one ever expected the big one would come ashore, in the dark of night, or not, as a virus. And, if we are not devastated, we are afraid. The shelves empty of hand sanitizer and the run on toilet paper –toilet paper! – are proof of our fears realized, run amok.

The coronavirus is new, but diseases from afar, pandemics – a disease spread around the world, affecting whole populations – are not new. The bubonic plague, also called the Black Death, was a factor in the 14th century being called the Dark Ages. Our very naming of it calls that out as frightening times.

If we knew our history, we would recognize the parallels, that this is not a new story for this region or the country. In the 100 years after Contact, Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest, as in every region of North America, were devastated by smallpox and other European-borne diseases. “Contact” was coined without irony, but the European touch has not been golden, but deadly. A touch, a breath, a kiss, a sneeze, a cough – all these (and purposefully infected blankets) decimated entire populations. The Salish Sea tribes loss of life was in the 90 percent range.

The misnamed Spanish Flu of 1918 killed perhaps 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the United States. That is five times the 115,000 American lives lost in battle in the world war. Soldiers from every country returned from Europe, travelling for weeks in crowded ships, bringing the flu home with them.

Spain was neutral in the war and had a free press. While the British, French and German governments censored information, not wanting the enemy to know of the devastation the flu brought, news flowed out of Spain, as if Spain was the source of the virus. It wasn’t.

The Dutch Elm disease, probably originally from Asia but researched by Dutch scientists, wiped out American Elms back east, as did the Chestnut blight, which came from Japan to New York.

Viruses from abroad, disease spreading across the country are facts of life, inevitable. When new, when frightening as the Black Death, our reactions are predictable. Runs on toilet paper make perfect sense.

But that is the first weeks, the first months. That is the phase and stage the American population – indeed populations around the world – is in now. The spread of fear, that can be controlled. It will not be cured by pills or a vaccine. The treatment is mental, emotional, social. Dorothy Downes, a nurse living in La Conner writing on precautions this week, counsels deep breaths.

An inventory of toilet paper makes good sense. Folks will tire of using hand sanitizer and many will find the cost budget busting over time. Washing hands is the effective, time honored, non-flashy practice. That’s a habit we can all use the rest of our lives.

So CERT leaders maybe will get more people attending their classes. One day a really big one will strike our Pacific rim. Still. the next really big one might turn out to be a virus. Another time, after COVID-19 is read about in history books, another virus will appear. However the big one comes, will we learn to prepare ourselves against fear? – ken stern