Blog Mirror: The Dumbest Blog Ever; The Burden of Proof.

One of the new blog links added here recently is The Dumbest Blog Ever which in fact isn't the dumbest blog ever.  Far from it, it's brilliantly written and usually exhibits a Saki like sense of the ironic.  It's basically a series of daily short stories.

Every once and awhile the blogger steps out from his persona and writes seriously, as he did here.

The Burden of Proof

We've commented a lot here on the Coronavirus and we've accepted the strategy employed in the U.S. to date including the strategy employed by our own state.  But this blogger presents the counter argument, or suggests it, in a different, and indeed jurisprudential, manner.  It's short and worth reading (most things on our own blog being long and likely now worth reading).

An aspect of this that we're going to have to increasingly consider as a society, fwiw, is that at some point the economy has to be opened up.  It's a hard, hard thing to be willing to consider and some aren't.  But most people don't live in a world where they can't work, and frankly the resources of the entire nation can't indefinitely be tied up in the creation of fictional money to tied the economy over.  It won't work indefinitely. That inevitably leads to the point that those who are noting this are arguing to kill people for economic reasons.

That's not really what most people mean. There are those of course who completely argue to throw all caution to the wind and just open everything back up, or who argued never to close things down in the first place, but they're few. What most people mean is that at the point where it seems we've flattened the curve we have to cautiously open things back up.  It won't be instant but so far nobody is arguing that it take six months to fully reopen.

Lurking in the background of all of this is the big unknown question. What if SARS-CoV-2 comes roaring back as things lift?

There's a lot of negative speculation in the press and country right now which inevitably brings out the least likely worst possibility as the probable.  I frankly think, and I'm not ignorant on viruses in general, that a general revival of the pandemic next Fall is overwhelmingly probable.  My overall prediction is that a vaccine will come quicker than predicted, given the resources going into it, and antivirals that are not yet developed for this disease may be able to alleviate things by Fall (note, there's no proof whatsoever that anything currently out there as a medicine does anything on this bug).  So I think the current course of opening things up as we head from Spring to Summer makes sense, although I also think the pace at which we do it is critical.

But note also that all this does is "flatten the curve".  The real idea is that we flatten it flat enough that most of us or a lot of us get "herd immunity" via vaccines.  Also, by flattening it, we hope to avoid swamping emergency services, and it seems we've largely done that except in big cities.

Of course, big cities are where the disease is really prevalent in a desperate sort of way, or in other areas where there are dense crowded conditions.  That all says something about living conditions, but we'll save that for some other day.

We are also really hoping, as a society, and a species, that we'll flatten the curve out of existence.  While herd immunity is the acknowledged goal, a secondary hope, and not a completely unrealistic one, is we flatten the disease down to completely manageable.  We've done that with other viruses and there's sort of an unspoken hope that's the case here.  It seems to be the hope of the Chinese, whose population is so vast that they can't possibly avoid new spikes if that can't be achieved and their economy can't possibly endure that.  That will destroy their economy no matter what the Chinese attempt to do to address it. And it is the nearly spoken hope that the Prime Minister of New Zealand expressed the other day and seems to be their now acknowledged strategy.

But what if the doctor who spoke on Meet The Press this past week is correct.  I quoted that item here:

Well, first of all, let's just take the numbers. At most, 5-15% of the United States has been infected to date. With all the experience we have had so far, this virus is going to keep transmitting. It's going to keep trying to find humans to do what it does until we get at least 60% or 70% of the people infected. That is what it will take to get herd immunity. You know, Chuck, we are in the very earliest days of this situation right now. You know, if I could just briefly say one story here. Right after 9/11, I spent a number of days up at your studios doing filing around the issue of what was happening. The predecessor here, the late Tim Russert, used to say to me all the time, "Hi, Doc. How're you doing? Is the big one here yet?" And I would always say, "No, Tim, it is not." If he asked me today, "Is the big one here? Is it coming?" I would say, "Tim, this is the big one." And it is going to be here for the next 16 to 18 months. And people do not get that yet. We are just on the very first stages. When I hear New York talking about the fact they are down the backside of the mountain, I know they have been through hell. And that is an important statement. But they have to understand that’s not the mountain. That is the foothills. They have mountains to go yet. We have a lot of people to get infected before this is over.

In other words, Dr. Osterholm's view is that this is going to be with us until we get herd immunity, one way or another.  Elaborating on how that will occur, he stated:

Well, herd immunity is clearly going to happen if we do not have a vaccine. I do think that we have a better chance of a vaccine than some. The statement that came out yesterday from the World Health Organization suggesting there may not be immunity was misinterpreted to mean that we do not have evidence today that you are protected from humans. But we have actually animal model data, monkeys that have been infected intentionally and then rechallenged, that were protected. We have a new study on Friday that said vaccine protected them. So I think we are going to have it. I just do not think it is going to be soon. And we are on virus time right now, not human time. And so what we can get done in the next 16 to 18 months, that is great. But if we do not, we will not have a vaccine in time to protect most of the people in the world.

Then what?

I frankly don't know.  I guess our economy could be shut down again in the Fall and probably would be, and I guess that can be justified, and maybe is moreover mandatory from an ethical prospective.

But it literally cannot be done indefinitely.

Or can it?

Shutting things down was basically what was done for the 18/19 Flu, to the extent that they could be.  World War One, of course, kept things from shutting completely down.  But there were repeated local quarantines again and again.  And at least into 1920, as we've seen from our 1920 entries here.

Maybe that's the new normal.

Blog Mirror: Death at Mrs. Cooney’s Hotel: When an influenza epidemic devastated a small town in Alaska

Death at Mrs. Cooney’s Hotel: When an influenza epidemic devastated a small town in Alaska

Blog Mirror: A Past Pandemic In Wyoming: The Spanish Flu, 1918-1919

A Past Pandemic In Wyoming: The Spanish Flu, 1918-1919

Random Takeaways from the Coronavirus Pandemic

In no particular order.

1.  The Human Factor

Human instinct doesn't want to quite accept that there is a pandemic or, if there is, that it isn't somebody's fault somehow.

On the first, I'll admit a lot of skepticism early on about the seriousness of it myself, but the stats are now large enough to make things undeniable.  Included in those things that are undeniable  is the fact that the disease is mostly a killer to the elderly, but it also kills in younger demographics.

So, yup, it's a genuine big problem from everyone's perspective.

Part of that is grasping statistics, which people don't like doing and generally don't do well.  The death rate is heavily weighted towards the elderly, this is quite true, but the overall statistics are really alarming.  Even if the death toll remains at the overall "low" rate, the infection attack rate is what makes it so deadly.

There have been a lot of comparisons to the flu.  But the problem with those comparisons is that they compare only one statistic, the infection death rate, and not the attack rate.  The flu has a much, much lower attack rate. . .normally.  The 18-19 flu was deadly not only because of its death rate, but it's attack rate.

The attack rate is the number of people the virus successfully infects.  Estimates really vary, but one estimate is that 30% of Americans will get Covid-19.  Nobody estimates that 30% of Americans will get the flu this year or the common cold.  So, even if we take the 3.5% overall death rate and think, gosh, that's not that bad (unless you are one of the 3.5%), it actually is as that translates into about 3,750,000 dead in the United States.

Angela Merkel predicts that 60% of the German population will come down with Covid 19.  I haven't kept up with it, but that would mean something like 900,000 Germans dying.  If that same attack rate applies to the U.S., the death toll will be around 8,000,000 or so.

I'm not saying that will happen, but it could happen.  Still, wrapping that attack rate and death rate around people's minds is hard to do.  A comparison might be made to AIDS, which was transmitted in an entirely different fashion and had a very low, accordingly, attack rate.  It couldn't attack most people. But it's death rate was 100% at first.  People only grasped the death rate on it, with the attack rate being harder to conceive of.

In spite of all of that, dying from a small unseen virus is something that's really difficult to grasp.  Therefore, people either assume that the attack rate is like the death rate and panic, or they grasp the mortality rate and assume they aren't at risk. And of course the inevitable "conspiracy" theories begin to circulate as nobody wants to believe that they might die due to a shear random event like picking up the virus at work, school, or at the grocery store.

2.  Modern Conditions Suit Infections. . . and if this one doesn't get a bunch of us there's one that will.

We might beat Covid-19 yet this season and we'll beat it sooner or later, but there's something out there that we won't be so lucky with.

There may come a day when we can beat any virus, but we're not there. Some had theorized that AIDS would bring that day to us, with so much research going into beating the virus, but it hasn't.  And we are likely a long ways from that day.

That means that a virus will evolve, or we'll run into it, that is a super killer, like the Black Plague, or AIDS, that has a high attack rate and lots of people will die.  It's not if, it's when.

And part of that when is controlled not only by simple inevitability. . . i.e., it's happened before and it'll happen again, but also by our having built an economy that we not only don't like, it just isn't good for us. This is one more way that it isn't good for us.

Packing people into closed buildings to live and work is putting them in a petri dish.  People don't like it, but viruses do.  Why are we doing that?

Now, make no mistake, there were plenty of nasty diseases that were around in more primitive and agrarian days.  The plague was a killer in an agrarian era.  Smallpox was too.  But with the exception of the plague, outbreaks tended to be very regional.  In the modern era with the absolute triumph of industrialization and capitalism, we've boxed up most people and set ourselves up.

We don't have to keep heading in that direction.

3.  Culture matters, and is hard to beat.

These diseases get their start in Asia for cultural reasons, which nobody wishes to admit.  Asian markets feature the living hosts of everything necessary to cause diseases to break from one species into another.  Until that's stopped, and nobody is really making an effort to stop it, annual outbreaks of new nasty diseases are inevitable.

Put more bluntly, COVID-19 is a virus that cycled through bats first, and on to us through a market munchy contact, or through pangolins, an endangered ant eating species that are smuggled into China in spite of their rarity due to the common and absurd belief in China that darned near every endangered species on Earth has some medicinal quality.  Scientists aren't sure which it is, although looking at the data, I'd guess bats.

People hate it when something like this is said, but year after year Asia is the point of origin for some horrible infection and year after year its caused by the same thing, living cheek to jowl with your food and barely cooking it (as in the case of flu that routinely jumps through pigs and ducks to humans) or by eating things that probably are really, really on the edge of things as food.  China, which has massive social control, as well as Vietnam for that matter, could do the world a huge favor by getting people to knock this off.  But as its a cultural thing, they're not going to do so.  The Chinese are essentially more comfortable with epidemics than they are with telling people "don't eat nearly raw bats". 

Asian governments are also largely authoritarian and a concept of personal freedom has never existed there. For that reason, ironically, Asia is able to more easily handle something like this than western nations are. By their very nature western nations loath restrictions and by the time any are imposed, it's probably rather late in the day.

This is particularly true of the United States, which abhors restrictions.  Even normal restrictions in normal times cause Americans to howl.  Things like controlling our borders are regarded as grave offenses against human rights.  We allow dimwits to avoid vaccinating their children and only try to argue them out of it.  Our culture isn't well suited for the development of these sorts of infectious diseases, the 1918-19 flu notwithstanding, but it's ideally suited for them to spread.

Freedom of information is also a Western value and so misinformation is widely circulated as well.  We see all sorts of examples of that being done here, including that the Chinese cooked up COVID-1 as a man made virus.  No, they didn't.  But another Western value of recent years, which is not to thrown stones at any culture other than our own, plays into this as well, that one being that Western nations are penetrating into the jungles and exposing the world to novel viruses.  Nope, that's not even close to true as we're largely not doing that and in the West the world is experiencing "re wilding".  Moreover, these viruses are new as in new this year as they exist in Asian conditions that allow for their spread and development, but most Western peoples aren't going to tell China that they need to get a grip on this.

Medieval market (public domain due to age).  The Great Plague is an example of a disease spread by conditions, in that case the incredibly dirty and densely packed nature of European cities of that period.

4.  Even those who grasp the stats tend to ignore them, particularly by age, habit and occupation.

This is related to the above, but an odd fact of our problem is that its almost impossible to get people to cease some conduct.

This has always been true.

No matter how the risks are appreciated, it's going to be very difficult to convince young people that they're sufficiently at risk to not congregate, particularly as time moves on.  For those who have a distinct social habit, no matter what it is, not engaging in it will prove to be difficult over time.  People who go to the bar after work, for example, will be doing that soon, assuming they're open. Indeed, the example of illicit and illegal businesses and occupations associated with really horrific diseases shows that it's difficult to stop some activities in spite of the risks associated with them.  And for some occupations, closing is just not going to be on the map, particularly occupations that are professional and service related.  Personal economies and the nature of their occupations won't allow for it.

The longer this goes on, the more this is true.  People staying home for a few days is difficult enough, for weeks, if it came to that, is extremely difficult.

And frankly, while nobody wants to talk about it (but we will below) some occupations actually can't close in our society.  That's simply a fact.

5.  Quarantines don't work the way that people think they do.

In spite of the way the press would have it, the President of the United States can't really  close things up by simple executive order.

Indeed, the ability of the US to do this is remarkably limited.  Powers to impose quarantines are limited to areas that laws address it and are allowed under the Constitution.  The only clear Constitutional authority to issue quarantines of any kind appear under the war powers section of the U.S. Constitution and actually pertain to rebellion and invasion.  In those instances, the US can suspend Habeas Corpus which is generally regarded as being equivalent to declaring martial law.

Having said that, the US has long imposed limited quarantines under the Commerce Clause, which makes sense.  As the U.S. has traditionally been regarded as having very broad power to control its borders, at least up until very recently, that's been taken to mean that  people and things entering the country can be quarantined at ports of entry, no matter how those are defined, or kept out entirely.  

States actually have broader powers than the Federal government to impose quarantines as its traditionally been regarded as a power reserved under Article 10.  

Every state has laws regarding this topic and almost all of them are really old.  Wyoming's statutory provision clearly is, as it still speaks of railroads as being the primary means of transportation.  It states:

35-4-103. Investigation of diseases; quarantine; regulation of travel; employment of police officers to enforce quarantine; report of county health officer; supplies and expenses. 

The department of health shall, immediately after the receipt of information that there is any smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, diphtheria or other infectious or contagious disease, which is a menace to the public health, in any portion of this state, order the county health officer to immediately investigate the case and report to the state health officer the results of the investigation. The state health officer shall, subject to W.S. 35-4-112 and if in his judgment the occasion requires, direct the county health officer to declare the infected place to be in quarantine. The county health officer shall place any restrictions upon ingress and egress at this location as in his judgment or in the judgment of the state health officer are necessary to prevent the spread of the disease from the infected locality. The county health officer shall upon declaring any city, town or other place to be in quarantine, control the population of the city, town or other place as in his judgment best protects the people and at the same time prevents the spread of the disease. If necessary for the protection of the public health and subject to W.S. 35-4-112, the state health officer shall establish and maintain a state quarantine and shall enforce practical regulations regarding railroads or other lines of travel into and out of the state of Wyoming as necessary for the protection of the public health. The expenses incurred in maintaining the state quarantine shall be paid out of the funds of the state treasury appropriated for this purpose and in the manner in which other expenses of the department are audited and paid. The county health officer or the department may employ a sufficient number of police officers who shall be under the control of the county health officer, to enforce and carry out any quarantine regulations the department may prescribe. The regulations shall be made public in the most practicable manner in the several counties, cities, towns or other places where the quarantine is established. If the quarantine is established by the county health officer, he shall immediately report his actions to the state health officer. The county health officer shall furnish all supplies and other resources necessary for maintaining the quarantine. Upon certificate of the county health officer approved by the director of the state department of health, the county commissioners of any county where a quarantine has been established shall issue warrants to the proper parties for the payment of all expenses, together with the expense of employing sufficient police force, to maintain and enforce the quarantine. For purposes of this act, "state health officer" means as defined in W.S. 9-2-103(e).

Prior to this event, I frankly never would have guessed that there was a law which allowed the county health officer to issue a quarantine order and hire police to enforce it.

The point is that contrary to what people seem to think, the President of the United States cannot really order the whole country on lock down. That people would think this isn't surprising, as people believe the President has all sorts of powers he doesn't, and in fact modern Presidents have gotten away with a lot of stuff that's flat out illegal as they lack the power to do them.

States, surprisingly can act quite broadly, as this is a reserved power under Article 10 of the Constitution.  Not specifically, but just by reference.

Here, however, is a rare example of a panic creating acceptance.  Hardly anyone questions what the states may now do, and under the old interpretation of the law the can do a lot.  Having said that, but for a period of crisis, it's really difficult to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court of the 60s through the 80s not smugly smacking such powers down.  They wouldn't now, but only recently has there been a trend recognizing the more traditional arrangements of the law.

Child Quarantine, Trenton New Jersey, 1916.

6.  There is no "American health care system", but there is.

This is related to the item immediately above.

The press keeps talking about "the health care system" as if there is one.  But all year we've been told by campaigning Democratic contenders that there isn't one.  And noted Democratic columnist Robert Reich just wrote an interesting article simply proclaiming there isn't one, which can be read here:

America Doesn’t Have a Public Health System

What we don't have is a national comprehensive system that provides personal care from prenatal to death but a series of private arrangements augmented, in some instances, by government payments that takes care of individuals.

Americans have been extremely resistant to a personal national health care system and by and large the examples of other countries suggest that they really only come in during a time of crisis.  Whether this crisis causes that to be the case for the United States is yet to be seen, but that tends to be the way they work.  The British national healthy care system, for example, was really a byproduct of World War Two.  The German one was a byproduct of World War One.

This isn't to say that there's no "public health" at all, but it covers limited areas and some of them very comprehensively in spite of what people might believe. The US has a large network of government laboratories that work on tests for infectious disease and have been working on this epidemic since prior to its breakout into the United States.  We heard very little about this, as they work in the background, and in this instance they ran into a testing glitch that unfortunately put them a critical two weeks behind, at which point they took the rare step of authorizing private laboratories, of which there are an enormous number, to work on tests independently.  Normally that isn't done.

And the US does have an effective Center for Disease Control that's part of all of this.

All that does put the US in a good position for learning of diseases and providing tests for them and coordinating a response.  It doesn't mean that we have, however, a system that provides treatment for everyone on down, although something of that nature somewhat exists to some degree.

That really started coming in during the progressive era nad was limited to really rural areas.  It received a boost during the Great Depression, but even then it never covered a majority of Americans.  Since that time, it's existed basically as a public assistance program and oddly enough as a uniformed service of the United States that has a very limited role.

It's large enough that its a reserve of the Navy, showing how it was originally conceived of at the time of its founding, but it isn't capable of really doing a coordinated national response to a health emergency on a rapid basis.

The Public Health Service is active, but it's not as if it's going to field a bunch of doctors and nurses into a hot zone, let alone as series of hot zones.  Indeed, in a bit of a reversal of its wartime organizational structure, if hospital beds, doctors and nurses are really needed in numbers on an emergency basis, they're going to come from the military with both active and reserve components responding to that call.  The Navy is already deploying hospital ships in connection with this and its undoubtedly the case that if you are in a Reserve or Guard medical unit you must be getting a pile of warning orders right now.

That might be enough, frankly.  But we lack a direct treatment system in the fashion that other countries do.

Having said that, Italy does have a system, and it can't be said that theirs really worked all that well.

Which gets to the next point.

People complaining about the lack of supplies, or the lack of response, particularly in the Press don't seem to realize that nobody has responded adequately.   That's because there's really no ability anywhere to respond.

Even the most spectacular response, that of the Chinese, didn't keep the pandemic from spreading. And the Chinese are capable of responding in a manner we are not.  It isn't as if the Italian National Healthcare Service kept it from spreading, now is it?  Nor did the much vaunted British National Health Service either.

Truth be known, no nation stockpiles medical supplies for infections on this rate.  But the US is capable of producing them and that will occur rapidly.

7.  Some people aren't going to grasp the risks no matter what.

There are those that in spite of everything are really not going to ever grasp the risk.

I'd absolutely guarantee you that if you work in any sizable office that, within a couple of weeks, some parent is going to come in and report how they were awake all night with a sick kid, or how they just visited their sick parent or friend and they'll have no idea whatsoever that they're exposing somebody to something.  Even more likely, some mother or father is going to come in with a kid who's running snot from his shoelaces to his nose and you'll hear how it's a shame that little Johnny just wasn't accepted at the day care today.  Likewise, plenty of people in the "boss" category are going to come into work deathly ill and simply say "don't get near me" and expect that their position justifies their self made exceptions to the rules.

I guarantee it.

8.  Some people are going to overestimate the risk no matter what.

By the same token, there's going to be those who insist that it's pretty much the end of the world, either because they're prone to panic anyhow or they enjoy them.

That may sound odd, but it's true in both cases.  People who particularly  have no deep foundation in anything panic.  If all you have is your thin self and that's it, anything that threatens it is pretty scary.  I suppose that's why people who  are deeply the opposite, such as the Orthodox Priest we discussed the other day, are seemingly not afraid.

As noted, there's also a lot of people in the US who have enjoyed planning for a self imagined end of the world now for about a decade or so.  It's really odd.  "Preppers" have been enjoying the heck out of imagining surviving in their very own Mad Max movie or whatever for some time now, and something like this, because of the press coverage, is really firing them up. 

And then most people just don't grasp risks or statistics anyhow.  With a national press that also doesn't, and a televised news media that is focusing on nothing else, it's pretty easy to get a panic rolling.

9.  There's something really messed up in the economy and in our social behavior that impacts children

One of the things a big crisis does is expose where we aren't doing well, where we've failed to do well, or where we have major issues we need to address.  This has done that in regard to several things, and one of them is the massive decline in attention to children that has taken place over the past fifty years.

More than one school district has had to wring their hands in agony over shutting down as those districts contain large numbers of children who eat breakfast and lunch at schools.  That they have to depend upon that is absolutely criminal.

It's the responsibility of parents, or at least it should be, to feed, cloathe and rear their children.  But over a fifty year period we've attacked that as a society and have made schools wards of children in a plethora of ways that should not have occured, should not be occurring, and should cease as soon as they humanely can.

This started, in a way, with an entire series of events that were well meaning, demonstrating in brutal form the maxim that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."  Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" series of programs instituted a massive public involvement with providing for children with the concept that this would life them up out of the poor families they were born into, into the middle class.  At the same time divorce laws were reformed to make it increasingly easier for married couples, including ones, with children, to divorce.  The introduction of the pill, combined with the polluted influence of Playboy, also arrived more or less at the same time such that sex outside of marriage went from universally disapproved of, even if it occured, to approved of for men, to simply approved of.

The combined effect of all of this was to create a situation in which at first children with divorced parents became common, to one in which fathers simply abandoned children entirely.  Current its not at all common for young women to have children with the father completely out of the picture, and most particularly out of the picture economically.

As this was occuring, the societal programs we noted above operated such that there was a move to help feed, not feed but help feed, children who came to school hungry. That's an admirable goal but it wasn't really asked why they were coming to school hungry.  Since 1945 American wealth has increased massively overall, so it makes no sense whatsoever that children should be in that state. They are, largely, as their mother is left with a low paying job and the father isn't supporting his offspring at all.

Combined with that, the evolution in employment from 1945 on went such that by the 1980s women working in the workplace went from an option to a necessity.  Even now there's a lot of absolute blather about women and careers built on the previous blather about men and careers.  Most people find to their ultimate disappointment that careers turn out to be jobs and there's been a real loss of sense about what that was all about.  The entire "career" emphasis that applied to men early on was really aimed at first at trying to convince them to maximize their economic potential as breadwinners for their anticipated families, and even as recently as 20 or so years ago you would still hear the urging that you should "get a good career so you can support a family".  Right about the same time as women having careers went from an option to mandatory that changed to the nonsensical line that you should get a good career to "fulfill yourself", even though, with rare exception, that just won't be happening. At the end of the day, it's going to be a job.

What this has brought about is a perfect storm of a situation in which women with children must almost always work and there are a lot of single mothers left to rear children on their own with jobs that don't pay enough to get by on.  That in turn has depressed the wage market in general at its bottom end so that none of those jobs pay well enough to get by on and even couples that are married in which husband and wife are both so employed often can't get by, so the state has stepped in, in the form of school districts, to pick up the slack, which in turn ironically perpetuates the system and which converts it from essentially being emergency relief to being a societal norm.

All that is pretty bad for children and pretty bad for the adults they become later in a variety of ways, but it can't be immediately discontinued.  Indeed, threats to the system even in normal times usually bring howls of protests from individuals who now conceive of what amounts to assistance as a right, not all of whom are benefactors of the system by any means.

The point here is that an economic system, or a society, in which a governmental entity, which is what a school system is, is providing one of the most basic elements of life, food, for years and years for children has had something go pretty amiss.

10.  We really can't shut everything down very long.

As grim as it is to ponder, the way our economy works and our society works, we can't really shut everything down for long. Some things have to keep on keeping on.

And added to that, we can't shut most or even a lot of things down without hugely damaging the economy and we can't ignore that and have no way to adjust for it.

Even right now, it's clear that grocery stores have to remain open, making grocery store workers like infantrymen in the front line of the trenches.  But how long can anything really remain this shut down?

My guess isn't very long or it'll create a national economic disaster of epic proportions.  But then, at that point, you are balancing lives against the economy in some ways.  Nonetheless, huge sections of the economy can't really be closed forever.

Indeed, one thing that those comparing this against the 1918-19 Flu just don't get is that the 18-19 flu came about due to, and during, World War One. And World War One just kept on keeping on.

That made the economic impact of the 18-19 flu muted at best.  There was already a gigantic labor shortage caused by the war and the needs of the military in every sense, from troops to equipment, didn't pause one bit due to the war.  Indeed, at the height of the epidemic Gen. Pershing was informed that the government wished to stop troop transport to Europe due to the epidemic and Pershing refused the request.  Troops were loaded on board ships knowing that a lot of them would be sick by the time they got to Europe. Some would die. That didn't stop anything.

Factories kept running.  Oil refineries kept refining.  Sure, restaurants were closed and churches shut down for weeks at a time, but there was no shortage of employment.  If you were laid off from your job at the bar, there was one waiting for you at the arms plant.  If a worker got sick on the factory floor, he was sent home, but another one was put on the lathe in his place.

All that's grim, but it also means that the entire world simply kept rolling on in the 18-19 flu.  If that meant people died, and it did, they just did.  Lots of people were dying at the time in other ways that were deemed to take precedence.

That's not the case now. 

Indeed, we haven't had a global pandemic that took people out of work like this one since the Great Plague, but that's not analogous in any fashion.  For one thing, the mortality rate of that was gigantic.  Truth be known, simple viruses in the same era undoubtedly killed as many people as COVID 19 and no note was taken of them.  That was regular life (and truth be known, it was probably regular life in that fashion for much longer in most places than we realize).  Additionally, Europe had a feudal agrarian economy in which those who survived the plague simply returned to their prior occupations when they could with things unabated.  In other words, if your occupation is plowing Lord Ungaforth's field, a job you share with Ethelred, when you come back, even if Ethelred doesn't, things haven't really changed in any fashion.  It'd be a human tragedy, but not an economic one.

Things are obviously different now.



11.  Custom is really hard to break.

I really hate shaking hands and I always have.  But in my line of work, I'm finding, I'm highly acclimated to it.

I had learned, when young, that shaking hands originated as a means of demonstrating to another person  that you weren't armed, but it turns out that the tradition is of uncertain origin and amazingly widespread.  Numerous cultures around the globe do it and even ancient Greek pieces of art show it being done.  There are some cultures that don't do it, but they are distinct for that reason. The Japanese, for example, don't do it and they don't like it.  That's somewhat unique to them, however.

Be that as it may, as I'm not Japanese, I do it, because I have to.  I frankly have never liked handshaking.  But it's such a custom that now that we're not supposed to, I find that a lot of people keep on heading towards it or even doing it.

There are a lot of things in this category, and that's going to be a real problem.

Just as the Chinese can't apparently imagine not having a heaping bowl of bat soup, it's hard to stop shaking hands.  And beyond that, other things that we're really accustomed to, such as even simply going to work, are really hard to stop doing depending upon how acclimated we are to them.  That may prove to be the biggest single reason for "self isolating".  You aren't tempted, unless what tempts you is not self isolating.

Pandemic Ponderings

The Tribune's Sunday edition ran a comment by the local, very good, infectious disease specialist suggesting that people spend the weekend outdoors.

It makes sense.  Lot of sun, fresh air, and "social distancing".  Just the sort of stuff a virus can't stand.

Just the sort of stuff, too, that perhaps would have kept this all from having gotten rolling in the first place.  Modern living, with everyone stuffed in boxes of one kind or another, all day, isn't good for anything.

Of course, virus epidemics, or simply viruses being endemic, isn't anything new.  In earlier eras, certain diseases were both deadly and routine in a way that we can't imagine now, smallpox perhaps being the best example.

Anyhow, I did go out fishing myself, but not because of the doctor's advice, but rather because I was planning on it anyhow.  I was really amazed by  how many people were out, however.  Maybe it was due to a collective common thought that, if I shouldn't go here or there in town, I'll go out in the country.  Or maybe it was just because it was a really nice day.

In my travels for fishing, and I didn't get a single bite, I listened to the weekend shows, as I usually do.  They were scary, and both of the ones I listed to featured Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institute of Health on them.  Fauci, who is 79 and therefore not new to the scene, is highly respected.

Dr. Fauci is of the view that what the country is now doing is correct, and he supported the view, now widely cited, that Italy really blew it in their reaction.  Fauci broadly hinted that he wants the entire country, everything, shut down for fourteen days.

By the time I got back to town in the afternoon that was starting to happen.  It'll be interesting to see how today goes, but it's pretty clear that a lot more things will be shutting down.  New York City was resisting shutting down its schools last week, on the basis that lots of children are fed there (which makes the children a type of ward of the school in some ways, which is disturbing) but when asked Fauci's reply was that it was better to worry about that later than spread the disease now.  By Sunday evening New York was closing its schools.  So did the local district, by way of extending its spring break.

That will, of course, have an immediate impact on the economy, which is already reeling. 

While the government, or governments, is now urging nobody to go to mass gatherings, my day started off with a mass gathering, going to Mass.  Mass attendance isn't an option for Catholics unless they have a good excuse and simply being worried about this isn't a good one.  However, the Bishop of Cheyenne had decided to suspend public Masses until further notice and therefore Sunday's Mass was the last Sunday Mass for awhile here, with today's daily Masses being the last ones, period, for awhile.

I don't know what I think about that.  Our Diocese didn't cancel other things, such as Confession, but I really don't know if I like the idea of Churches closing their doors in a time of crises.  Having said that, I'm informed that this was done during the 1918-19 Spanish Flu Pandemic and as that's one of the events that was discussed here in real time, century delayed, that should have occured to me.  Its' just so odd that it really didn't sink home.

Suspending the Masses has been causing me to think of Fr. Nicola Yanny, an Orthodox Priest, who may be canonized as a Saint soon.  The Syrian Antiochian Priest was a widower with four children with his community asked him to take holy orders, which he did.  His territory was vast, covering more than one state, and he continued on in his duties ministering to his congregation in spite of their coming down with the Spanish Flu.  He in turn contracted it and died of it.

This in turn calls to mind something I read last week, but I don't know if its still accurate.  Catholic Churches have been closing their doors in Italy due to the disaster there, which is apparently very severe, but the Orthodox, at least as of last week, were not, and they were not taking kindly suggestions that the Eastern method of communion ought to be changed.  Given as the Italian government is really clamping down on things there, this news may be old and changed.

On religion and the pandemic in general, it occurs to me that one thing that may be really different from the 18-19 Pandemic is the degree to which our society has become really selfish over the last century.  People hoarding toilet paper and buying up 9mm ammo is a sign of some sort of societal sickness.

I've written on this before, but I'm old enough to remember the tail end of the Vietnam War and the Cold War and all the of the controversial politics of the era.  But it's only been recently when some Americans seemed to be gleefully looking place to urban combat, or that partisans on both sides of the political aisle publish rants that are so hateful.  A trip through Facebook proclaims, on one side, that the pandemic isn't real and is just a conspiracy aimed at President Trump.  On the other side people blaming the President or an entire generation, proclaiming the virus to be the "Boomer Remover". 

This stupidity extends even to columnists and politicians certainly aren't exempt.  In two consecutive days in the paper I've read articles by left of center columnists who are almost gleeful in their screeds that the whole thing is the President's fault and the opposite from hard core defenders that nothing is his fault.  The two ancient Democratic candidates allowed to debate (with the one young one shut out) claim that they'd go better, but it's simply impossible to believe.

The whole panic is awful and part of it is that the nation has descended into both pure secularity and materialism and doesn't know much else.  At the point at which you're willing to defend your toilet paper with your 9mm, you really need to rethink your priorities.

Empty paper products aisle at a local grocery store.

This sickness was pretty evident on a Sunday morning trip to the grocery store right after Mass.  I went there for a couple of routine items I needed but you couldn't ignore the paper aisle.  The frozen foods isle was pretty bare as well.  A guy in front of me was buying enough meat to feed a regiment of Cossacks for a month and I suppose he could have been going to a giant barbecue (ti was all stuff that you could barbecue, I'd note) or he was filling his freezer in anticipation of riding out a long quarantine on pork and chicken.

One of the worst aspects of the whole thing is how weird it makes a person feel.  The economic turmoil and the unfamiliar "don't go anywhere" commands, at the same time that some people are losing it and others are going to early "pub crawls" makes things so off kilter that it feels really weird.  A person hopes this won't last long.

A person might also hope, although it might be hoping too much, that some rethinking on some things is inspired by these days.  The 18-19 flu remained in people's minds for a long time after that, although I don't know it improved people in any fashion.  There's some thinking that could clearly stand improving, however.  Maybe people will have time to do that with everything closed.

Oh great. I've now seen the first television doctor comparing COVID 19 with the Spanish Flu. . .

and claiming it's just as bad.

Well, at least there's not a giant global world war adding to things.

Pandemic

A plague doctor wearing the special costume of such doctors at the time. The costume was thought to protect the wearer against the plague.  If it seems weirdly creepy, it's probably just about as effective as wearing a surgical mask in a public place.

Pandemic:

A pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease.

World Health Organization.

An epidemic of disease, or other health condition, that occurs over a widespread area (multiple countries or continents) and usually affects a sizeable part of the population.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Pandemic refers to an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.

U.S. Center for Disease Control.

Pandemic: An epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world due to a susceptible population. By definition, a true pandemic causes a high degree of mortality (death) 

By contrast:  

• An epidemic affects more than the expected number of cases of disease occurring in a community or region during a given period of time. A sudden severe outbreak within a region or a group as, for example, AIDS in Africa or AIDS in intravenous drug users. 
• An endemic is present in a community at all times but in low frequency. An endemic is continuous as in the case of malaria in some areas of the world or as with illicit drugs in some neighborhoods. 

The word "pandemic" comes from the Greek "pan-", "all" + "demos," "people or population" = "pandemos" = "all the people." A pandemic affects all (nearly all) of the people. By contrast, "epi-" means "upon." An epidemic is visited upon the people. And "en-" means "in." An endemic is in the people.

Web MD*

Is there a Coronavirus epidemic and if there is, will it become a pandemic?

It's certainly creating havoc on the world economic scale, but a lot of that is due to human reaction rather than the disease itself.  Faced with a new disease that seemed to have a high incidence of fatality, the People's Republic of China struggled to get ahead of the disease and for a time, frankly, did badly, resorting to shutting information up, the usual reaction of a Communist state to any bad news of any kind whatsoever.  After that, exhibiting massive control of the population, it managed to shut things down.

That had an impact on the world's economy as it was.  China has become the manufacturing hub, unfortunately, for the globe, relying on cheap labor and a well educated population as it does.  So the virtual closing of a region of the giant country had an immediate ripple effect on the economy of the planet.  But only a ripple.

Which is temporarily beside the point in this post.

Humans retain an interesting memory, sort of, of historic pandemics.  In our collective memories, they occur, but our memory of them is quite flawed. Almost by definition we imagine all pandemics to be real killers, and we have been worrying that Coronavirus will break out as a killer pandemic.

Here on this site we're somewhat uniquely situated as we deal with, the past two years, the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic, which was a real killer that swept the globe to massive effect.  Millions died in that event, which had a 2.5% mortality rate.

Yes, 2.5%.

That doesn't sound that high, but a normal variant of the flu has a less than .1% mortality rate. The flu still kills thousands in the U.S. every year, but it didn't have the impact that the 1918-19 flu did.

The pandemic, however, that really remains vaguely in our memory was the Great Plague, which killed 30% to 60% of the European population and which is estimated to have reduced the human population by about 500,000,000 people globally.  Raging from 1347 to 1351, the pandemic actually trailed all the way into the 20th Century, contrary to popular understanding of it, and is actually within the vague life experience of quite a few living people.  Regions of the globe in some instances didn't recover until the 19th Century. 

Of course, we need to keep in mind a couple of things about both of these. First of all, living conditions contributed a lot to the Great Plague. It's flea borne disease, after all.  Today, the plague, which is still around, isn't nearly as deadly as we don't live in a sea of fleas.

In the 1340s, we did.

When you hear of somebody getting the plague and dying of it today, and you do if you pay careful attention, it's because they did something that put them in contact with fleas.  Hunters will occasionally get them from game, and I recall reading in a National Geographic about a rural hiker getting it just because of where he walked his dog.

In contrast, the most recent disease to clearly achieve the widespread dread level, AIDS, may or may not have ever been a pandemic, but because of its mode of transmission was actually fairly difficult to get.  The plague put the entire 14th Century human population at risk because of the way they lived and had to live.  AIDS actually only put a narrow demographic at risks due to a variety of things, all of which except for blood borne transfusions, had an element of human conduct involved to them.  I'm not cast aspersions of any kind here, but only noting the science of it.

The 1918 Flu, however, was an airborne disease that people simply couldn't avoid.  The conditions of World War One, including crowded troop conditions, massively contributed to its spread, as did the transportation of troops around the globe. But the disease itself was airborne.

So is the Coronavirus, and like the 1918 flu, it got started in crowed conditions (and in Asian conditions, like most flus do) and its being transported around the globe due to travel, the difference being that its getting around a lot quicker than the 1918 flu did.

The mortality rate of the Coronavirus isn't known yet.  Early reports in China placed it at 17%, which is massive.  If that was the rate, the globe would really be in for it as this would truthfully be an airborne disease the likes of which we haven't seen for a very long time.  More recent data, however, roughly came in at about 3%, and then 2%.  In comparison the the death rates for SARS is 9.6%, MERS 34% and the Swine Flu, which was a bad one, .02%

The disease is distinctly different than the flu in a lot of ways, which is important to note.  The flu takes a trip through ducks and pigs on its way to humans, for one thing, while the Coronavirus takes a trip through bats.  That's bad as bats have a titanic immune system and that means that the virus doesn't terminate there for that reason.

Additionally, the flu is a family of nasty diseases where as this Coronavirus is just one, COVID-19. 

Like the flu, however, people's reactions vary and apparently 81% of those who get Coronavirus get a mild form of it.  Some show hardly any reaction to it at all. That's good as chances are if you get it, it'll be mild.  It's hardest on the elderly, which is the case for the normal flu (but which was not the case for the 1918-19 flu which hit the young hardest).  And it may turn out to be that it's less deadly than it currently appears to be.  Frankly the fact that it was an unknown disease when it hit and that only the severely ill were reporting to hospitals made it initially appear worse than it was.

Having said that, even if its half as deadly as it currently appears, it'll still kill a lot of people who get infected.

And frankly, from a scientific prospective, my guess is you are going to get it. 

A recent Harvard report put the floor of the infection at 40% of the human population, and the ceiling at 60%, which is less than the 1918 flu ultimately infected.  I'd guess that to be right, no matter what.

And that does mean that this is going to impact the economy.  It'll do it only temporarily.  Taking the 1918-1919 flu as the most analogous example is difficult, however, as World War War was raging during its worst months, which made its economic impact muted; people kept fighting and kept making munitions, etc., as they had to.  Having said that, the flu did basically take the Australian Army in Europe out of the war in the fall of 1918, which was towards the war's end, and it may have had an impact on the German 1918 spring offensive.  Had the war not been raging, the economic impact would have been notable, but then if the war hadn't been raging, the flu likely wouldn't have turned into a pandemic. So it turns out that it's not a very good analogy.  Indeed, one Federal researcher who studied it concluded:**

The influenza of 1918 was short-lived and “had a permanent influence not on the collectivities but on the atoms of human society – individuals.”31 Society as a whole recovered from the 1918 influenza quickly, but individuals who were affected by the influenza had their lives changed forever. Given our highly mobile and connected society, any future influenza pandemic is likely to be more severe in its reach, and perhaps in its virulence, than the 1918 influenza despite improvements in health care over the past 90 years. Perhaps lessons learned from the past can help mitigate the severity of any future pandemic

And so, this isn't a cheery post.  My guess is that this disease,  now that the evidence is in, will get around, and it will kill quite a few.  It won't be like the Great Plague, thank goodness, but it'll be a disaster for some, and it will be a damper on the global economy until the spring.

*FWIW, the best of these definitions is the Web MD one.
**Economic Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Implications for a Modern-day Pandemic Thomas A. Garrett Assistant Vice President and Economist Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

February 14, 1920. A Sober Valentine's Day.

Zintkala Nuni

Zintkala Nuni, who was found as an orphaned infant on the bloody grounds of Wounded Knee died of the flu contracted from her husband on this day in 1920.

Her story is uniformly tragic.

She was found by an Army burial detail still tied to the back of her dead mother.  She was raised at first by members of her tribe, who named her "Lost Bird", but was soon taken into the home of Gen. Leonard Wright Colby who referred to her, at first, as a "curio" of the massacre.  Colby and his wife Clara Bewick Cody adopted her in 1891, with Clara, a suffragette and publisher of Women's Tribune principally raising her.

When she was five, her adoptive father abandoned Clara and Zintkala and married Zintkala's nanny, thereafter moving to Beatrice, Nebraska.  Her childhood was rough as an Indian child raised among the white privileged.  Like many Indian she was educated in Indian boarding schools for part of the time, in part because Clara was so busy.  At age 17 the rebellious Zintkala was sent to live with Gen. Colby and became pregnant soon thereafter.  The father of her child is unknown but some historians suspect Colby of sexual abuse of her.  After she became pregnant Colby committed her to a reformatory for unwed mothers, where the child was born stillborn.

She then returned to Clara's home and married, leaving her husband after a few weeks of marriage and after having contracted syphilis from her husband.  The Spanish Flu ultimately brought about her death.

On the same day Konstantin Konstantinovich Mamontov, former Imperial Russian General and then serving as a White Russian General, a Don Cossack, died of typhus at age 50.

Konstantin Mamontov

And in Chicago, the League of Women's Voters was founded.

Risk. Coronavirus, Influenza, and Other Scary and Not Scary Things.

Gasoline Alley, February 9, 1920.  In 1920 there was a great deal of concern about the revival of the prior two years horrific flu epidemic.

Let me by start off by noting that I'm not saying that the Corona Virus is just a bogus scare.  It might turn into a true human disaster.

We don't know that yet.

It might, but it might not.  It probably actually won't.

None of which is a comfort to you if you are dying from it.

According to some statistics that are probably now completely obsolete as they change every day, there have been 37,592 confirmed cases in the Coronavirus, almost all of them in China.  814 people have died (more than that as the death toll reached 100 in one day this past week, and these figures are from January).  2,920 people have recovered from the virus after having it. Add that up and it tells us that most of the people who have been infected are infected right now.

Scary?

Well, last flu season 45,000,000 Americans were infected by the flu virus, of which 61,000 died.  Over 800,000 were hospitalized. Last year was a really bad year for the flu, we'd note, and the number of Americans who died from it were about double the norm.  So far, this year, between 21,000,000 and 30,000,000 Americans have come down with the flu, of which about 30,000 have died.

This, we would note, places the current flu season in the category of being a bad one. February is the worst month for the flu, normally, and we already have seen a year which would be more or less average for infection and death.

Which brings me to my point.

Yes, people worry about the flu, but not like they do strange new exotic viruses.  

But the flu is a real killer.

The flu killed millions in a pandemic that we've discussed here, which raged across the globe killing tens of millions just a century ago. That pandemic still isn't understood very well, and it may never be.  But if you are reading this today, you have DNA from that flu virus in you.  Every living human being, save perhaps those who live in truly remote regions where it never touched, does.  Today, in fact, the same strain still exists, in closely mutated form, and will make you sick. But it won't kill you.

Sooner or later there will be something like the 1918-19 Flu again, most probably.  Perhaps we've developed our medical technology so far that this won't occur, but it probably will.  And with the larger human population of today, it'll be every bit as bad, probably, as the 1918-19 Pandemic was.  Maybe worse.

But if you were a betting medical man, the bet would be that it will be the flu. . . not Coronavirus, SARS or Ebola or any of the other viruses that the news media and the general public like to freak out about.

Indeed, while the scientific memory of the 18-19 Flu remains very strong, and causes the annual focus on the developing strain in the medical community, the scientific knowledge of the American public has bizarrely declined in recent decades to the point where while we now have vaccines that  can address it, people will forgo having themselves or their children vaccinated or even treated because they are ignorant of science.  Just this past week a four year old child died because his ignorant mother took advice from an Anti Vaccination Facebook group about treating him with Tamilflu.  She's a moron.  They're idiots.  They are culpable in his death. But such things are now common in the US now, while also running around like chickens with our heads cut off about new viruses also is.

Sailor and Red Cross nurse at the site of a munitions plant explosion, October 5, 1918, wearing mask for protection against the flu.

Indeed, the ability to calculate risk is a really interesting topic, and the topic of infectious disease, and health in general, gives many such examples.

Humans, in their long history, have battled with many killer diseases.  Interestingly, in earlier eras, while these diseases did scare us, rightfully, we often carried on carrying on in the face of a massive death toll anyhow.  This is so much the case than modern historians now like to assert, falsely, that the news of an outbreak was suppressed.

This is very much the case with the 18-19 flu.  It was bad, and communities did end up closing schools and churches, but for the most part people carried on to a remarkable degree.  Now you hear all the time that the news was suppressed in the press.  It most definitely wasn't.  It was front page news the entire time, including the daily death toll in the community.  People very much knew what was going on and just how bad it was.

Diseases like smallpox provide another example.  Smallpox plagued humans for centuries and people worried greatly about it, but for the most part they carried on enduring risks we would not if faced with a similar disease today.  In really desperate situations people would inoculate themselves or have themselves inoculated, risky as it involved a live vaccine, but that's because they were living and working in conditions where they couldn't avoid the disease.

American with smallpox, 1912.

The only disease that's really been like that in modern times has been the flu.  It visits us every year, and some years its really bad.  We know what we can do about it, but we don't worry all that much about it really, even though it remains a first rate killer.

Instead we worry about the exotic.

In recent years the first disease we really freaked out about was AIDS.  AIDS is a horrific disease, but it's also largely behaviorally based.  During the height of the freaking out about it there were suggestions that it was going to become airborne or the like.  There was never any chance of that. Rather, it was always a sexually transmitted disease, of more than one strain.  In the Western world the overwhelming majority of individuals who contracted it and still do, do so through homosexual sex.  In Africa, where the strain is different, the overwhelming majority of people who contract it do so through heterosexual sex.  There are definitely other ways it has been transmitted, but the key to it was sex.  It's a sexually transmitted disease. As a sexually transmitted disease, it's one whose mode of transmission is an automatic limiter and it was never going to be as deadly as the flu in any one year or even close to being.

This is the case, we'd note, with all sexually transmitted diseases, all of which have increased in recent years as sexual conduct has become less and less governed by common sense, morality and science.  People are bad at calculating risk.

Indeed, diseases provide interesting examples about the miscalculation of risks of all sorts.  During the height of the AIDS epidemic the common advice for members of the demographic most threatened with it was to employ condoms, which given the failure rate of the same is really a poor calculation of risk.  The obvious recommendation that could be made that would have completely avoided the risk was rarely given.  "Avoid sex" or at least "avoid sex with people you know with certainty not to be infected" wasn't the common advice.

The flip-side of this is provided by the decades running advice on avoiding "red meat" out of cancer and other health concerns.  In reality, the danger posed by red meat is very small, statistically.  Abstaining from meat of all types is, on the other hand, universally dangerous to people who practice it, requiring that such persons go to great lengths to find artificial substitutes for the things they would have acquired from meat.  And yet, because of this marginal risk, people abstain from meat and chose instead to incur greater health risks in the exchange.

Interesting examples of poor calculation of risks are provided by smoking and drinking as well.  Drinking, as it has an interesting mixed history, is one we'll look at first.

Alcohol poses very real risks to those who consume it, which has been known for a long time. Alcohol itself is a poison.  Simply drinking too much alcohol in a single setting will kill you.  However, we also know that human beings have a genetically developed tolerance for the poison up to a certain level, in most, but not all, populations.  That tells us, from an evolutionary biological prospective, that at some point human beings developed a tolerance for something that's a manufactured poison, for some reason.  That's downright odd.

The reason for it initially seems to be that primitive beer was a food source.  Liquid bread, basically.  As grains aren't capable of being harvested around the calendar, beer was a way to keep it.  Early beers were flat and probably heavy duty, sort of like Guinness Stout, basically.  Every grain growing cultures seems to have developed them.  Even early on, however, the intoxication aspect of it was known, which is reflected in graffiti in huts left by the builders of the pyramids.

Additionally, brewing beer provided a safer liquid to drink than water in many places, indeed darned near all places, that routinely brewed it.  In a very primitive world water was basically safe to drink, but as soon as there were sufficient people and sufficient domestic animals belonging to those people, that changed.  Water from early times up through the dawn of the 20th Century was often pretty darned dangerous.

People debate on this a bit, but basically the attention required to brew beer, or to vint wine, in and of itself, was sufficient to make it safe for consumption. So in a way, as some people like to argue, the process, rather than the alcohol, made it safe.  Others say, no, the alcohol did it.  No matter, which ever did it, it was safe to drink and was drank in many areas in gigantic quantities year around.  Medieval European farm workers, for examples, drank liters of beer per day.  Scandinavians in the Middle Ages started the day off with hot beer.

And while the Middle Ages were very full of beer and wine, European cultures continued a really heavy alcohol consumption up through the 1950s.  It's really only after that it started to drop off, and for much of the original safe drink water concern reason.

But that didn't mean that Middle Ages Brew was 100% good for you.  It meant the water was riskier.

In modern terms, now that the threat of the water is over, the risk calculation has really changed.  Physicians debate it but alcohol consumption is somewhere between 100% risky to some degree to okay if done very moderately.  Most drinkers who are more than casual drinkers exceed the recommended consumption rates routinely.  There are some known health benefits to drinking, as is often cited, but as often pointed out, they're marginal.  People make the risk calculation today, but frankly they probably, much like the condom example given above, err on the side of the risk, rather than the safe approach.

Alcohol isn't the only drug like this, by the way.  Opium poppies were first used to season bread by Medieval Italians specifically because their lives were so hard and painful it dulled their wits.  That's a hard thing to accept but it was the case.  So it was like alcohol in a way.  Having somewhat dulled wits is a bad deal, but the risk calculation to overcome the pain was deemed worth it.  Modern poppy seed bread isn't made with opium poppies today and the risks associated with opium in any form grossly exceed a casual use such as that.

Coca leaves in the Andes actually served a similar function for natives living at  high altitudes. While their physical morphology actually has evolved to endure high altitude living, it's still so problematic that adults at one time spent a lot of the day chewing on coca just to have dulled wits and therefore not endure the pain of daily living the same way.  In modern times, however, the drugs that stem from coca are far riskier to use for any purpose than any calculation of risk would support.

Tobacco use, and soon marijuana use, travel the same path. Tobacco was claimed to have benefits at one time but it never really did.  Marijuana use will prove to be the same.  They're risky and their users grossly underestimate the very well known risk associated with them.

Indeed, this takes us back to the vaccination topic. Are there any risks at all in being vaccinated for an infectious disease?  Well, yes, but not the ones that are promoted by people whose claim to fame is having been a Playboy Photographic Prostitute.  Some people do get sick from vaccinations, and indeed I'm one of them, having been put in the hospital due to an Army vaccination for yellow fever. It turned out that I was allergic to one of the constituents.  And I've actually seen a person come down with a mild case of smallpox due to an Army vaccination, which must have meant that there was a little live vaccine in the vaccine we received and he hadn't been previously inoculated.

But those are rare examples and the risk run that a person has a reaction of that type are much lower than the risk posed by not getting the vaccination.  Yellow Fever is really bad, and so is a full case of smallpox.

All which gets back to risk.  People are bad at calculating it.  Everyone runs risks every day, but people chose to freak out about the small risks such as coronavirus suddenly being everywhere or eating red meat, and forgo worrying about the ones they are seemingly acclimated to, like the flu.