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God be with you till we meet again (1918)

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Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#81

Post by matchagaucho »

at_a_remove wrote: post #56
Waterluvian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The canary I'm watching is the whole "Chinese" or "Wuhan" vs. "COVID" virus naming issue. I think it is very clearly not the right time to point fingers. But when this is all past us, a post-mortem and finger pointing is probably warranted. I don't think we need to resort to name calling, but I'm curious to see how much people bend over backwards to absolve China of responsibility.

Amusingly, if you look at the talk section [1] of the Wikipedia article on the Spanish flu, some folks really (suddenly, recently, completely by coincidence) want to call it the 1918 flu. There's no con job like a retcon job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spanish_flu

"Spanish" Flu is not derogatory when used in the context of explaining the Spanish press were progressive and free to report on their surroundings without gov oppression.

Unlike the rest of world, who were covering up their military losses due to illness.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#82

Post by bobbydroptables »

aaron_m04 wrote: post #77
Waterluvian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The canary I'm watching is the whole "Chinese" or "Wuhan" vs. "COVID" virus naming issue. I think it is very clearly not the right time to point fingers. But when this is all past us, a post-mortem and finger pointing is probably warranted. I don't think we need to resort to name calling, but I'm curious to see how much people bend over backwards to absolve China of responsibility.

Let's not give racists any opportunities here. Calling it China virus or similar does exactly that, while confusing people with yet another name for this virus. The Chinese government needs to be called out, but specifically and unambiguously the government.

The government can only do so much to change culture, though, right?

It needs to be made unambiguously clear that you do not eat or recreationally touch bat or pangolin. Government needs to outlaw it yes, and culture also need to shun it.

As another example the Chinese slaughter of endangered species and sharks is a failure of both government and culture. I'm not sure there is a totally PC way to express that.

All of this is done by a small percent of people but they need to be educated or shamed into compliance. We don't have to allow bad behavior because it could be un-PC to call it out.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#83

Post by favorited »

yingw787 wrote: post #27

So, going beyond the depressing, I think one good thing that will come out of all this since this situation isn't experienced in any of our lifetimes (including our elders) we have to reach back to history to find comparisons. Maybe this will spark a curiosity in history! There's a number of really great history channels on YouTube; I particularly like "The Armchair Historian".

An historian on Twitter suggested people should keep journals of how COVID-19 affects their everyday lives.

I've been doing it as a method of self-reflection, and found it really valuable. I end up not just enumerating the changes to my life, but exploring how I am responding to them, trying to describe how they're affecting me emotionally, etc.

It's just for me, so I don't worry about missing days or being dramatic, or writing in an organized manner. But it's been really interesting, and not at all the chore I expected.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#84

Post by at_a_remove »

ceejayoz wrote: post #79
at_a_remove wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And shall we rename it?

Marburg's name is at least accurate . There are two separate issues here: Place-based names cause a stigma (an issue for new diseases, less so for historical ones) and that "Spanish flu" is actually completely wrong on the origins of that specific disease.

So why the timing to rename it? Why now?

I am asking that because you did not address it in my original comment, so I am going to harp on it again. Why now?

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#86

Post by favorited »

ceejayoz wrote: post #62
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\ This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly. Folks are over-thinking this.

Ebola is actually an example in the opposite direction you think it is. https://www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.htm... > But naming the virus Yambuku ran the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeri…

That said, we do still name individual species of ebola by where breakouts were discovered. Ebola Zaire & ebola Sudan were the first species identified after their respective outbreaks.

There's even ebola Reston, because of a breakout in Reston, VA. Reston infects humans (we develop antibodies), but does not cause Ebola virus disease in us.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#87

Post by chrisco255 »

triangleman wrote: post #43
Kye wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if, like with the 1918 pandemic, we'll find later that the first cases were somewhere other than China, but that place was better at keeping it under wraps.

A shrimp vendor at the Wuhan seafood market reported symptoms starting Dec. 10, so unless someone finds earlier cases elsewhere, I think that's as good a place as any to call the starting point. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cor...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-investigators-one-... Reports of a 70+ year old that had the disease on Nov. 17th. Patient zero probably originated in October or thereabouts, and was probably never tested for it.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#88

Post by at_a_remove »

ceejayoz wrote: post #80
Waterluvian wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I demand we stop naming hurricanes after people. I don't know how to handle a reality where my first name is associated with a bad thing.

We actually do exactly that: we retire hurricane names for being associated with a bad one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_retired_Atlantic_hurri...

Not what the poster asked for. We actually don't do that.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#89

Post by WilTimSon »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #52

Does anyone know what happened to the doctor? Did he make it out ok?

This would be quite hard to discover bar someone having access to army records of that time or having a family connection, I think. Not only has more than a century passed, there's also the issue of the letter simply being signed "(Sgd) Roy". Roy isn't that uncommon of a first or last name.

One fact that could help the search is in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703434

If, indeed, the Burt that the letter is addressed to has the surname Bouell or worked with someone named Bouell, that could help narrow things down substantially. If Burt is found, the Roy in question could be found as well.

Re: God be with you till we meet again (1918)

#90

Post by ceejayoz »

favorited wrote: post #86
ceejayoz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ebola is actually an example in the opposite direction you think it is. https://www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.htm... > But naming the virus Yambuku ran the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeri…

That said, we do still name individual species of ebola by where breakouts were discovered. Ebola Zaire & ebola Sudan were the first species identified after their respective outbreaks. There's even ebola Reston, because of a breakout in Reston, VA. Reston infects humans (we develop antibodies), but does not cause Ebola virus disease in us.

All of these predate the policy change.

https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-has-a-name-the-deadl...

> In 2015, after a few decades of what came to seem in hindsight like culturally insensitive missteps, the World Health Organization issued a policy statement on how to name emerging infectious diseases. Part of the point was to help scientists generate names before the public does it for them. So there are rules. The names have to be generic, based on science-y things like symptoms or severity—no more places (Spanish Flu), people (Creutzfeld-Jacob disease), or animals (bird flu).

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