~a column by Colleen O’Brien
When I was in junior high – 1957-58 — the Asian flu, an avian influenza believed to have come from geese in China infecting humans, hopped across the world to, among many places, a little farm town in the center of the United States, a county seat called Jefferson in the rolling north central Iowa prairie.
I was a kid – 13, 14 years old – and knew what they called it, the Asian flu, but it meant little to me other than I had to go to school because I did not contract it.
School never shut down. There were a few students in each room, a teacher in charge. The duration was a relaxed form of the rigidness of the Jefferson school system’s general classroom mentality; so relaxed as to be fun. The classes were small, so the atmosphere was less problematic: the teachers had to deal with only a handful of us. There was almost a picnic feeling to those minimal classes, some of them held in the basement of the high school for reasons I can’t remember – overcrowding elsewhere?
Our teachers were married men and single women. The men were tough enough – they didn’t allow shenanigans, but they did joke now and then and never talked about the pandemic.
The female teachers were not funny. They were widows from WWII or born spinsters, and they had a vocation aura to them – this was what they were born to do with their lives: drill into us by whatever means their subject of instruction demanded.
They were merciless, especially to the bad actors. One kid called our English teacher Kathleen Fields “Canary Legs,” which I didn’t dare laugh at but thought at the moment, “How perfect!” They were bony little legs sticking out of those black, lace-up old lady shoes. I have a recollection of her taking the miscreant by the ear and leading him next door to the principal’s office.
As I look back, it was those no-nonsense females who taught me best.
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The Asian flu of the late ‘50s killed 116,000 Americans.
I compare the Asian flu of the late 1950s to the current Time of Coronavirus, and in addition to a slow defense to it from those in charge, I think the main difference is our 24-7 media.
We have such coverage now that some of us are in hiding, not just from the coronavirus itself. Many sequestering in place have shut it – the news — off completely and are watching bird videos. I, for one, am listening to opera, painting the floors to Little Richard tunes, writing my memoirs, sewing masks and learning how to tat to A Tale of Two Cities. One evening the news was so acrimonious and divergent from the other side’s lack of truth itself that I had to alter my intake of bad stuff; I reverted to intake of an entire freshly baked pan of cookies.
And we are the lucky ones. We do not live in Syria, Brazil, Iran. Although we have plenty of poor among us, and tragically getting poorer because they are out of work, health care and pretty soon housing, we do have food to hand out. Many places in the world do not. And we have doctors and nurses still healthy enough to work, unlike in many countries.
The media I listen to once a day is doing a good job. It is science-based rather than sourced off Facebook and videos such as “Plandemic. (Face masks do not give us back the virus.) It even taught me that there are millions of viruses, about 6,000 of them identified. Some are being studied for cancer treatments.
Because the coronavirus is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu (Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease), we need to stay up to date on some – not necessarily all — of the following: what we should be doing, what we shouldn’t be doing (as the scientists continue their research, they learn new things about the virus and how we need to deal with it); how many died and in what counties; live updates; how ethnic groups are handling it; how the wealthy are vacationing through it; maps across the world; how difficult it is to contain job and kids and spouse all in one house all of the time; how not to eat constantly; and the usual incessant whining from on high.
Oversaturation has turned us into news trivia junkies and cynics– we can watch it all day and into the night, we can turn it off. We are privileged to have open news coverage — not all countries do — but I keep in mind that quality trumps quantity.
We came through the late ‘50s flu epidemic with just a few thousand more deaths than we’re already at right now with our near-100,000 count in the U.S. after only three months. Our cases number 1, 635,836 (5-23-20), but because we so far have not had enough testing for accuracy in counting, the experts tell us that these numbers may be off by thousands. A good place to check for reliable information is the Vox guide, the latest of 5-19-20, by Brian Resnick. It’s clear.
Stay well.
