1918 redux
March 27, 2017 11:39 AM   Subscribe

By now, almost every major city around the world is witnessing people dying in offices, in public buildings, and right on the streets. Morgues are overflowing with bodies and there is a worldwide shortage of coffins. Developing countries begin cremating corpses in large ditches that are then immediately covered over by bulldozers. In the United States and other First World nations, morgues are forced to supplement with freezer trucks, but the spot shortages of electricity and fuel are forcing some difficult decisions on disposal. -- What the Next Global Pandemic Could Look Like
posted by Chrysostom (40 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
yup pretty much
posted by PMdixon at 11:45 AM on March 27, 2017


The US President in this hypothetical is implausibly competent.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:57 AM on March 27, 2017 [36 favorites]


This is an unrealistic "old politics" scenario, based on the premise that the United States government will respond to the crisis in a rational manner. It's more realistic to predict that Alex Jones will declare the pandemic a Chinese terrorist attack and that the president will drop nuclear bombs on Beijing within the hour.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:58 AM on March 27, 2017 [9 favorites]


The author is a little too into this for me to really take it seriously. The little intro blurb reads like a warning before a schlocky horror movie. "Some of the scenes in the film you're about to witness are so... There's a doctor at the end of each aisle." And then they really lost me with the Japanese apocalyptic cult.
posted by AtoBtoA at 12:04 PM on March 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


And then they really lost me with the Japanese apocalyptic cult.

About to read the actual article, but--you mean like the Aum Shinrikyo cult that released sarin gas into the Tokyo subways a decade or two ago? Because they're apparently still around as of 2015 and being watched by the Japanese government.
posted by sciatrix at 12:06 PM on March 27, 2017 [20 favorites]


And then they really lost me with the Japanese apocalyptic cult.

Not so far-fetched, actually.

But, overall, this just reads like bad real-person fanfic. Like that "What President Obama Should Have Said" subgenre of Medium article, except it's "What The World Will Do" instead.

Like, if you want to write an article about the failures and blindspots in our pandemic response procedures, knock yourself out. But don't resort to cheap fabulism to do it. Especially don't resort to cheap fabulism coming off a couple of decades of really effective pandemic containment responses.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:09 PM on March 27, 2017 [9 favorites]


This is reminiscent of the Wired Scenarios issue they put out in 1995 about a theoretical Mao Flu virus. For pure schlock entertainment value, it was pretty good for teenager me, who was particularly freaked out by the photo illustrations of bloated dead bodies floating in Kowloon Harbour and the wedding photo from a decade later where the entire wedding party and all the guests are wearing formal wear and horror-movie old-school gas masks.

That says nothing about how likely a Mao Flu or Shanghai Flu scenario actually is; I'm no epidemiologist. But these sorts of alarming theoretical mass-outbreak scenarios clearly capture people's imaginations. It certainly did mine back then; it's almost literally the only part of that issue of Wired I still remember 22 years later.
posted by chrominance at 12:15 PM on March 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


(also the thing that removes this from the realm of actual reporting: so, did you talk to anyone about why we are apparently woefully unprepared for a mass outbreak, and what experts/policymakers/anyone thinks we should do about it?)
posted by chrominance at 12:18 PM on March 27, 2017 [4 favorites]




The Japanese apocalyptic cult lost me not so much because I thought it was implausible but because it's a needlessly sensational detail, even if based on fact. Fine for mediocre near-future SF, which is all this really amounts to.
posted by AtoBtoA at 12:32 PM on March 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've lost interest in near-future speculative fiction for this reason - it presumes logical human behavior predicated on goals and their achievement. It rarely incorporates the sheer weirdness and improbability of life itself. The millions of people who would die of this plague would largely die of incompetence and politics, little of which is reflected herein. But how could it be, without writing a novel?
posted by Countess Elena at 12:45 PM on March 27, 2017 [10 favorites]


Meanwhile, Madagascar closes its ports and grounds all incoming flights at the first sign that half a dozen people in Shanghai have contracted a minor cough, and Antananarivo becomes the new cradle of civilization in a post-epidemic world.
posted by Mayor West at 12:45 PM on March 27, 2017 [15 favorites]


Countess Elena, I strongly recommend Seveneves.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:57 PM on March 27, 2017 [8 favorites]


Especially don't resort to cheap fabulism coming off a couple of decades of really effective pandemic containment responses.

Could you elaborate? What are the current protocols to counter pandemics? I'm genuinely curious.
posted by IndigoJones at 12:58 PM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


I assume that a more accurate present-day scenario would involve Trump fleeing the White House with his family into an underground bunker and letting the rest of us plebs suffer through as best we could.

And then re-emerging after the pandemic was over to take credit for somehow defeating it.
posted by bibliowench at 1:59 PM on March 27, 2017 [6 favorites]


I take this fairly seriously because I know some virologists. A couple of years ago when bird flu was big news, I started asking them what they thought, expecting that they'd say that it was all overblown media hysteria. But nope, they got all grave about it and said they too were just as worried.

Now, admittedly, this one with the two waves is sort of the worst case, but even the first half of the story is pretty grim.
posted by Frowner at 2:05 PM on March 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


Now, admittedly, this one with the two waves is sort of the worst case, but even the first half of the story is pretty grim.

The 1918 influenza pandemic had at least two waves, with the second one being much worse than the first (though it seems the predominant theory now is that the second wave was actually a different flu virus). Other flu pandemics have also exhibited a second wave in the past. It seems like it's well within the realm of possibility, though again I ain't no scientist.
posted by chrominance at 2:36 PM on March 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


My brother is an infectious disease specialist. He travels around the world and is currently doing a lot of work on Zika, but he also went to West Africa during the last big Ebola outbreak, responded to SARS in Hong Kong, and so forth.

From what he has said over the years, I don't think he would find this description completely unlikely. I do recall that he thought the Soderbergh film Contagion was the most believable pop-culture look at how a pandemic was likely to go.

We are not prepared.
posted by suelac at 2:37 PM on March 27, 2017 [6 favorites]


Could you elaborate? What are the current protocols to counter pandemics? I'm genuinely curious.

I don't know the details, but I do know we're not all dead of bird flu and ebola right now.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:42 PM on March 27, 2017


did you talk to anyone about why we are apparently woefully unprepared for a mass outbreak

The swine flu pandemic in 2009 proved that to my (dis)satisfaction. And of course we are not prepared for any kind of disaster that requires a lot of spare capacity because that's inefficient.
posted by hat_eater at 2:43 PM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


I love this kind of shit, thanks. Fingers crossed!
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:15 PM on March 27, 2017


I love this kind of shit, thanks. Fingers crossed!

I can't tell if you're rooting for or against a global pandemic here.
posted by leotrotsky at 3:44 PM on March 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


I do recall that he thought the Soderbergh film Contagion was the most believable pop-culture look at how a pandemic was likely to go.

Any article or book on this topic that doesn't at least mention the film Contagion is suspiciously alarmist, to me, anyways. It can't be sufficiently praised.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 3:55 PM on March 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


"The US President in this hypothetical is implausibly competent."

totally. if Bush was the "heckuva job, brownie" president, i can hardly imagine what trump would say in the case of a pandemic.
posted by wibari at 5:21 PM on March 27, 2017


Man I don't think this is sensationalist enough. I can't imagine the current state of the world handling things as serenely as portrayed. I'd see riots in major cities, looting, martial law in some places, the whole nine yards. Imagine a Katrina situation countrywide.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 6:27 PM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


We live in a world obsessed with apocalyptic thinking. I don't think this analysis recognizes that the media hypes every potential epidemic the first time someone coughs, just like the vast majority of zombie fiction do not take place in worlds with zombie fiction.

I don't think hype is enough to save us, but it would certainly make any apocalypses weirder. The mention of "right-­wing televangelists" calling the flu divine retribution is such a '90s way of looking at it, like from Contact. In the modern world the far-right wing kooks are more likely to be causing public panic by labelling the disease as an NWO plot, which leads to a militant anti-vaccination movement. There would also be a rise in a lot of DIY doomsday preppers retreating to wilderness communities, and other people attacking and looting those communities. A lot of preemptive counteraction to things we saw in the movies. The way people will react to a pop cultural dream, is different from how the dream describes they will.
posted by Apocryphon at 6:39 PM on March 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


As a member of the LA region of the Medical Reserve Corps, I was training this past weekend in how to set up a Medical-POD, one of the places we'll distribute the necessary drugs/vaccines should the time come. You want to do something about this, volunteer.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 6:45 PM on March 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


"So Much Cooking" is my goto pandemic SF.
posted by creade at 7:14 PM on March 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


I last read Frank Herbert's novel "The White Plague" in the early 80s but I don't think it would require much tinkering to still work today.

Also, I carefully read all the email traffic on the Pro-MEDMail list about infectious diseases and that community is already really damn busy: http://www.promedmail.org/
posted by wenestvedt at 7:55 PM on March 27, 2017


I recall an ironic comment about how the solution for the pandemic in the film Contagion was whipped up by scientists working in the CDC, but at the same time in real life people were talking about legally restricting the access of virus samples to the CDC because they were paranoid about scientists experimenting with viruses.
posted by ovvl at 9:14 PM on March 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


I remember seeing Outbreak in a theater where someone was coughing, which was a somewhat harrowing experience.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:21 PM on March 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


SARS panic in Toronto in 2003 is an example of various mobs acting and reacting both rationally and irrationally at the same time.
posted by ovvl at 9:24 PM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


yes. sars is covered well in china syndrome. really, that sars and bird flu flamed out is luck. we're really gonna get it if something brutal pops up.

good reportage, choppy prose fwiw.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:28 PM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Surveillance suggests a mortality rate between 4% and 6% in those who contract the Shanghai flu in Western nations, but it is considerably higher in developing nations, where the health care systems have completely broken down.

Where do the US and UK fall here?
posted by acb at 6:00 AM on March 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


>I don't know the details, but I do know we're not all dead of bird flu and ebola right now.

Ebola. My recollection of that was Kaci Hickox deciding that quarantine decisions were a matter of her civil rights rather than everyone else's public safety. I'm not sure that's reassuring. Fortunately, we dodged a bullet. If it had been airborne, if HIV had been airborne....
posted by IndigoJones at 7:20 AM on March 28, 2017


Ebola. My recollection of that was Kaci Hickox deciding that quarantine decisions were a matter of her civil rights rather than everyone else's public safety. I'm not sure that's reassuring.

Your recollection was wrong. She was asymptomatic and tested negative not just once, but twice. She was held, against her will by know-nothings who ignored the general consensus of medical experts, including federal public health authorities, to stoke panic in the populace.

Fortunately, we dodged a bullet. If it had been airborne, if HIV had been airborne....

This is extremely ignorant of how viruses work, seeing as how mutations that drastically change transmission vectors are almost unheard of.
posted by zombieflanders at 7:47 AM on March 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


The plausible nightmare scenario for AIDS is not it becoming airborne, I think, but it breaking out of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1940s or 50s instead of the 70s. There were isolated cases as far back as 1959. so it's not out of the question, and we didn't even know about retroviruses until 1965 or reverse transcriptase until 1970. There's a window in there where the only way to diagnosis it would be when the opportunistic infections started, and there would be no possibility of anti-retroviral drugs.
posted by Quindar Beep at 8:08 AM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I've been reading some articles on the response to the recent Ebola outbreak and it's hard to conceive of how many more people would have died if Trump had been president at the time, instead of Obama. I don't doubt that Trump would have rejected Liberian President Sirleaf's request for aid without even thinking twice about it. We are so incredibly lucky that Obama was willing to take the political heat to mount a robust response.

But the region now had thousands of confirmed Ebola cases, and there was nowhere to treat the sick and the dying. On Sept. 9, Sirleaf sent Obama an urgent plea:

"I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us," she wrote.

The next day, high-level administration officials met at the White House to discuss military options. "People were asked to do more homework on the how," and then report back two days later, on Sept. 12, a senior official said.


It's hard for me to think about the counterfactuals if Trump had been president, since they're so terrifying.

How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump
posted by longdaysjourney at 11:53 AM on March 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


My recollection of that was Kaci Hickox deciding that quarantine decisions were a matter of her civil rights rather than everyone else's public safety.

This says more about what media you consume than anything about epidemic preparedness.
posted by PMdixon at 1:05 PM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, never mind. Once Trump & the Republicans are finished with CDC and NIH, you won't have to worry about preparing for an epidemic.
posted by sneebler at 6:32 PM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


« Older visiting McDonald’s with my Grandmother   |   The children knew, though. Children loved her. Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments