Downton Abbey, episode 2.8. [during dinner, several of the Grantham family have been stricken with Spanish flu]
Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham : “Wasn’t there a masked ball in Paris when cholera broke out? Half the guests were dead before they left the ballroom.”
Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham : [sarcastically] “Thank you, Mama. That’s cheered us up no end.”
A few decades ago I covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh. Forty thousand dead. The last time I thought about that trip was while watching the Downton Abbey episode quoted above.
Downton writer Julian Fellowes clearly knows nothing about cholera.
Nobody dies of cholera at masked balls because people shit themselves to death over several days.
Forty thousand dead in Bangladesh was a mountain of dead bodies covered in shit. The army dug a long trench to bury the dead in a communal grave. At first, they neatly laid the bodies side-by-side in the trench but, as the day heated up and the fear of further contagion increased, they switched to pushing bodies into the trench with a bulldozer. The dozer crushed limbs and skulls. Some of the bodies were burned, some just covered in lime. All were eventually sealed over with more lime and dirt. The stench was something I still visit in my dreams.
In the fall of 1979, I was writing a book and sharing a condo in Palo Alto with my friend Gwen, who was a secretary in my department at Stanford. Gwen was dying of cancer. Her husband and children had literally abandoned her — angry with her for dying. This happens more often than you’d guess. So I volunteered to care for Gwen for the end of her life, which was about another six weeks. I had no idea what I was offering to do. Gwen was 5-11 and fighting death, which came to mean fighting me — the guy who was sticking morphine suppositories up her butt every four hours. During those weeks I got no work done at all. Also during those weeks, no more than four or five of Gwen’s other friends came to visit. There were dozens at her memorial. Where were those people when she was dying?
Gwen was my first cancer death as the primary caretaker. My first wife was my second cancer death. And my mother was my third. With each experience, I learned more but I was still never ready for anything that happened. I won’t be ready the next time, either, which I’m hoping will be my death, not the death of another person close to me.
This is all just to say that we don’t know what’s coming with COVID-19. Maybe it will be better than we fear? Trump, after all, is a lucky SOB.
Nobody really knows the full extent of what is about to happen.
But what if it isn’t better than we fear? Will grandparents in Texas really voluntarily drown in their own blood (that’s how you go with COVID-19) so their grandchildren will have a lower debt load? That’s what the Lt. Governor Dan Patrick of Texas says and he’s a guy who I’m guessing doesn’t know his ass from his elbow when it comes to epidemics.
Before he gives his next speech, let Lt. Governor Patrick first spend a day in a COVID-19 ICU.
It’s unavoidable that there will be an economic tradeoff with COVID-19, but if things get really bad that tradeoff will be the one percent flying away to leave the 99 percent to take care of business.
It will be interesting to see if the Lt. Governor of Texas is on one of those planes.
Thank you. For Gwen, for the others you’ve cared for, for documenting the epidemic in Bangladesh. And for widening the scope of your writing.
Bob could you detail when the cholera epidemic occurred in Bangladesh? I’m having trouble finding anything, including statistics,about it.
Here is a good study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626162/
@ truerock thank you – but a read through that article doesn’t present anywhere near the number of fatalities that Bob had in the post – order of magnitude less.
It was the 1970 Bhola cyclone. I was 17 years old and it was my first big story. Five Hundred thousand people died in all. Here’s what you have to understand about Bangladesh (then East Pakistan, though only for a few more months): nearly the entire country is only a few feet above sea level. So when a huge cyclone or typhoon comes along high tides sweep over the country carrying sewage everywhere and contaminating local water supplies. It’s that contamination — not the storm — that ultimately kills most of the people. That contaminated water leads to cholera. This detail is often lost in stories of big tropical storms.
It has become common for me to note to family and friends in the aftermath of hurricane(s) in the Caribbean that cholera will not be far behind.
Yes, I have been contemplating my death quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. I’m old enough to be in the “more likely to die from covid-19” group.
My kids are in their 30’s and my wife is in the “more likely” group. I’ve been thinking about how covid-19 may impact my family.
I’ve lived enough years that I don’t fear death. I lived a lucky and fortunate life. If I die this year from covid-19 I can handle that without too much anxiety. I really wouldn’t want my family to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to keep my old body alive. I definitely wouldn’t spend millions of dollars.
But, it is very unlikely I will die in the next few years. And I’m very happy about that.
I’m delaying taking Social Security until I’m 70 years old. I’m an optimist.
Pandemic = Med Panic (anagram).
The only solid fact about the current situation is that we may know what’s happening in about 8-12 months. Right now all we are seeing is that nobody these days understands statistical measurements. Testing 1000 sick people and finding that half of them have the virus doesn’t mean that half of the entire population of a state is infected because you are only testing sick people with symptoms.
That’s a little harsh. I think there are lots of people who understand statistics – and, how they may relate to covid-19.
It does seem to me that nobody likes to think about making macro-level decisions versus economic decisions and deciding how many people will die. So, a lot of the statistical analysis is not something most people want to discuss.
I think that the issue here is that governments have cut back on the agencies that employed scientists to determine the best courses of action to prepare for these events and then handle them when they happen. People are being appointed to positions based on politics (on all sides, not any specific party), not ability which has created the current situation. Yes, that’s a harsh comment but I think it’s the way our society is moving.
It’s true. The “panic” we see on the news (buying, masks, etc.) for the U.S. started in Silicon Valley a month ago. I don’t recall anyone complaining about TP in Europe or Australia then. My friends posting pictures from Northern California was odd at best. Then the following week the entire state was acting in a frenzy. This was well before any lockdowns were even mentioned. Trump was just beginning to tout the 15 U.S. cases “would be down to zero” shortly.
It was only then that people started to question the number crunchers from the lands of technology. Did they know something everyone outside of the San Jose bubble didn’t? It took over three weeks for the rest of the country to catch on. Even with the Internet. Just because the math is there doesn’t mean people can understand nor read it.
I agree with this comment.
The medical community is very well aware of how statistics work and are employing sophisticated social behaviour modelling and simulation software to track the spread. So far this has been remarkably successful, Johns Hopkins in the US and Imperial College in the UK in particular are doing fantastic work in this area.
It’s good to see that even Donald Trump has finally realised the seriousness of what is going on, although it appears to have taken a close friend of his with the virus going into a coma for that to happen.
“It will be interesting to see if the Lt. Governor of Texas is on one of those planes.”
You can bet he will be.
Geez, “Bob,” you’ve been through the wringer. Three cancer deaths with you as the primary caregiver? You should get a medal. That would be a full life’s work, even if you had never done anything else.
This is your strongest article ever and I’ve been reading you for twenty years.
Wash your hands. We need to keep you around a little longer.
It is amazing what power tragedy has to turn people into great writers. No wonder most of the great works of literature were tragic; it just somehow goes together with great writing in a way that comedy or other light writing doesn’t.
Bob, for goodness’ sake, if you’ve gone through *three* cancer deaths, why don’t you write a book about *that*?
I concur, that’d be a book I’d be interested in reading.
Same … but not a book I can remotely imagine anybody wanting to write.
The closest I can think of is William Horwood’s Skalagrigg, which is sufficiently harrowing to read I don’t want to even think about what it must’ve been like to write.
Yeah, some very stupid people in the US are now making very stupid statements about how people need to go back to work to “save the economy” and that the “cure is worse than the disease” and that old people just need to “sacrifice themselves” for the sake of the “economy” or some such garbage.
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Even 1% of people in the US dying is 3.5 million people. World War II killed 400,000 US soldiers by comparison.
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And it’s not just the direct deaths from COVID-19. It’s the total collapse of the health care system, which would cause uncounted more. The economic outcome after that happens is far more dire than that of everyone staying at home for a few months.
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Everyone, please take care of yourselves. Stay home, keep two meters away from other people when you go outside, and wash your hands.
World War II killed between 70 million and 85 million people. The U.S. got into the war late and came from a position of relative strength, which is why they didn’t have many deaths. To borrow a line from trashtalk, that’s your American-centric perspective talking. (Yes, I know that you’re Canadian, but you quoted an American statistic in a WORLD war.)
Well, in this case I was talking only about the US because it seems like it’s only the US (and maybe Brazil?) whose leadership is taking this dangerous and stupid “let’s sacrifice lives to save the economy” tack. Other countries are being more sensible.
You have no idea what the hell you are talking about.
This comment is reply to Jeremy’s post. Just announced that Federal Reserve will print 2 trillion $ – for what ?
To protect 80+ year old people who will be dead in 6 days months or 6 years any way.
This is not good planet to be born on. You come with expiration day.
Can’t edit comments.
Both previous comments were reply to Jeremy’s post.
So old people’s lives don’t matter? We shouldn’t try to save any of them? That’s a callous world view.
Not at any price. There is no money for decent education and affordable health care but there is unlimited money for people who will be dead in 6 days or 6 months and 90% of them won’t reach 6 years.
Stick to sci-fiction because you don’t understand non-fiction.
The “any price” is a straw man argument. We don’t know the economic cost of a couple of months of in-home lockdown. When everything finally reopens, you don’t think jobs will come back and stocks will recover? Why wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t people shut in for months be incredibly excited to go out and spend money?
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Not to mention, the “save the economy” folks aren’t even factoring the economic cost of a complete collapse of the health care system in their calculations.
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It’s too late to do what South Korea did, which was to get aggressive early on both testing and lockdowns, which ended up with them saving both their economy and lives. But it’s not an either-or situation.
Also, not to get political, but the same folks in the US who have been removing funding for education and healthcare for decades are now the ones who want to let all the old people die to “save the economy”. Something to think about.
“Even 1% of people in the US dying is 3.5 million people. World War II killed 400,000 US soldiers by comparison.”
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That’s not really apples to apples. Had New York been firebombed it would have been a totally different story. (The Tokyo Firebombings apparently killed as many as 100,000 alone.) Soviet losses in Stalingrad alone exceeded 400,000. There were 20 million dead Chinese, in a part of the war that histories focused on Hitler, Churchill and Stalin don’t really cover. 8 to 9 million USSR citizens were killed just by famine and disease. I mean WWII was Golgotha if it happened in your neighborhood.
Those soldiers that died in WW2 were guys in their prime time too that would contribute next 50 years to the country.
But, he only referred to stupid things Americans said. He politely refrained from bringing up any other stupidities on our planet. That’s not so bad, is it?
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The ‘challenge’ and ‘polarizing approach’ stems from a (strange and non-intuitive) project, undertaken by the EPA since Cold-War-1980-ish, attempting to “quantify the monetary value of an American life” — put more plainly, the Ford Pinto “cheaper to do a recall, or to pay X hundred lawsuits” calculus.
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That current “value of an American life” hovers somewhere around 7.7 to 9 million USD — please don’t (mis)read this as my agreeing with said estimate, because I don’t, not even remotely — but, assuming this outlandish figure to be ‘correct,’ it does explain much of the “close all business, doing 1.5 trillion dollars’ economic damage, because that’s preferable to 300,000 or 500,000 American deaths with preposterous 2.5 to 4 trillion dollars’ estimated loss.”
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I believe the policy/mindset reversal we are now seeing reflects a second (dissenting) look at said estimates — to wit, “What the @!#% were we thinking, 300,000 lives aren’t worth 3 trillion dollars, nor can the two phenomena be meaningfully linked or compared in quantitative terms.” Certainly matches my own view(s).
People die and it’s a terrible thing. I went through cancer with both of my parents. I’ve lost friends to a host of diseases.
The “cure is worse than the disease” is a valid debate. The world does not have unlimited resources and money. What could be left after crippling the economy could be worse than making the hard decision on what lives can be saved. It is a fair debate.
I won’t pretend to have all of the answers. The data is incomplete at best. We quickly forget how many people in nursing homes die each year of a variety of bacterial and viral infections. None of us were around for the Great Depression. On one side we are talking about death toll and the other side we are talking about mental health, increases in crimes, and financial disaster for many (already happening). The debate is fair and needed.
Back to my Dad. His last six months cost the medical system over $300K and he knew that the odds of any treatment saving him were re one at best. His last six months were miserable. I’ve said ever since that it was $300K wasted as much as I cared for him.
I’m not a lefty or righty. Just someone who is concerned about what may happen to the planet that I hope to live on for a long time. As of now, debates about the value of life are off limits. That will need to change.
The real challenge in all this is that rich old people will be able to have treatment, but poor people – young or old – do not even have the choice.
Of the world has unlimited money. The Treasury Dept can run their printing presses 24 hours a day 7 days a week if they need to!
You’re confusing money, which needs to be a store of value, with currency, which only needs to have value at the moment of exchange, and thus can be debased or otherwise devalued (for example through inflation of the monetay supply). The Fed’s printing presses, and all the magic numbers that appear on ledgers, are the latter, not the former.
Dying for Wall Street is one of the noblest acts a poor person can endeavor to accomplish.
THE SPICE MUST FLOW
Yesterday I heard a right wing economist bemoaning the damage to the global economy “just to save a few lives”.
I think the Countess is misremembering Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death.
In completely misreading one sentence Cringely displays be knows nothing about drama or philosophy. It is extremely clear Fellowes meant when writing Violets line. I find it insulting that Cringely would pull a Trump not only to destroy meaning but place a burden on his own readers to explain why he is wrong.
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The promised part two “business issues” article has been overtaken by events if was ever relevant at all.
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More self-aggrandising sob stories.
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More US-centric worldview.
trashtalk:
And the people from Andorra have an Andorran-centric world view. So what else is new?
That is more completely tone-deaf than you’re accusing Cringely of being.
I think trashtalk is correct, in that the line “Half the guests were dead before they left the ballroom” implies that those people were dead, then they left the ballroom, ie, they were destined to die at that moment but weren’t dead yet. It’s subtle, like a lot of British writing. But given the seriousness of the current situation, it’s probably not worth focusing on this point right now.
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Everyone knows that I’ve had my beefs with Bob. But we’re all anxious and on edge, and it’s not the time for bickering. Hopefully in a few months we can get back to normal.
I’m surprised I need to say this, but the Downton writer wasn’t saying that people literally died at the masked ball, but that were as good as dead after having contracted the disease at the masked ball.
Exactly, the point was they left carrying a death sentence with them.
Yes, and I think the Downton writer was making the comment for effect. He knew it wasn’t literally correct, but it was something the Dowager might have read or interpreted as such.