Strong Suit | The Real Reality Show Blog

A, B, C, D, E, F, G…

Happy birthday to me,

Happy birthday to me, …

Karma, karma, karma chameleon…

If I were a rich man,

Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb.

All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum,

If I were a wealthy man.

Are you still singing while you wash your hands? Are you still washing your hands? It’s a valid question. Mankind in general is not known for neither patience nor perseverance and washing your hands for a full 20 seconds every time you go to the sink takes both in quantities not many of us have. And it’s only been a few weeks. You should get used to it. Even in the absence of a pandemic you should get used to it but I’m thinking we are probably in for a longer ride than just a few weeks. Or even months.

Do you realize this isn’t the first pandemic to hit the world in the first quarter of a century? Let’s review:

20th century, 1918-1920, Spanish Flu, 50 million dead
19th century, 1817-1824, Cholera, 25 million dead
18th century, 1710, Smallpox, 8 million dead
17th century, 1603-1685. Plague, 3 million dead
16th century, 1520, Smallpox, 56 million dead
15th century (Quiet, but there weren’t that many people left.)
14th century, Plague, 1330 – 1353, 200 million dead!

Okay, so I cheated on the 14th century but I bet the Black Death as it is so famously known had its actual beginnings before 1325. You don’t just wipe out 60% of the population without a running start. And there were others...

Except for the two smallpox outbreaks do you notice something. None look like they were over in just a few weeks. You can tell by the way they stretch over years. One over an almost entire century. I don’t know how much a factor it will be in minimizing our duration, but sticking to those 20 second handwashings along with the social distancing and otherwise minimizing contact will be a positive factor. I’m just not sure if we can call it a possible factor. Like I said, patience and perseverance aren’t our strong suits.

Look at the most recent respiratory pandemics, all post 1950 so they are all within some of our lifetimes and all within the ages of mass communication, modern medicine, and soap. The Asian Flu pandemic of 1957-1958 killed 1.1 million people worldwide. The Hong Kong Flu of 1968-1970 was responsible for 1 million deaths. The Swine Flu pandemic hit from 2009-2010 and killed approximately 250,000 people. (As of April 7 COVID-19 deaths worldwide total about 75,000. COVID-19 was first reported in December 2019, noted a worldwide public health emergency by the World Health Organization on 30 January 2020 and then declared a pandemic on 11 March.) All of these stretched over at least 2 years. Viruses are sneaky little devils and they hide out well.

I would like to say at least the death totals are going down but the latest numbers have COVID-19 responsible for a third of the number of deaths of the Swine Flu in less than 4 months.

Next week I’ll post another more lighthearted take on something happening around me but for now, let’s get back to singing those songs, staying in, and, particularly now when every worldwide religion is celebrating some holiday, praying if you got them.

Alright, altogether now: