There is no reason to panic.
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Hey Extra-Historians, welcome to not a lies. It's sort of an extra-extra story. It's a bit of an editorial,
A lot of you have been revisiting our 1918 flu pandemic series lately, due to recent events with COVAD 19 aka Coronavirus.
I have too, because if you didn't know I live in Hong Kong. So,
we've been
kind of in the middle of this. Not,
really the middle, I mean we're fairly removed from mainland China.
There's a border and you know people who come in are quarantined for 14 days and things like that.
So, I just wanted to update you on me and kind of my
emerging thoughts about
the 1918 flu series which is one of my favorites I've, I've ever written.
We're fine huh huh
First of all, the
epidemic here seems relatively contained as of today February 18th, 2020. There are 57 cases.
There was not a big upswing in cases two weeks after Lunar New Year, which everyone worried about.
That people would travel and then bring it back with them. Didn't seem like that happened too much actually,
but you know everyone in Hong Kong has been kind of hunkering down,
working from home, self quarantining. The schools and public buildings are closed.
So, really the thing we were most at risk of at this point is boredom
and there been occasional rounds of panic buying of Toilet Paper, Hand Soap,
Hand Sanitizer which you don't see of here, because, I don't have any and can't buy any.
*laughs*
But, we're okay,
you know, things have almost gotten farcical at some point. Yesterday, like
three guys armed with a knife like jacked a bunch of toilet paper
you know in an armed robbery, but we're okay. Don't worry about us. We don't feel unsafe.
We're very careful.
We're washing our hands a lot
which is the best defense against it because you're probably not going to get it from being coughed on; you're probably going to get it
from touching something that someone's coughed on and then touching your face.
So, you know best thing you can do is basic hand hygiene. Wash your hands, 20 seconds the time it takes to sing
Happy birthday. Do your thumbs and fingernails and wrists, webs of your hands. All that kind of stuff.
But I do have some some thoughts about our 1918 flu series. You definitely
sympathize a lot with the people who don't know what's going on right, you imagine what's going on now,
except people don't have the medical knowledge to even realize what's happening to them.
This got cut out of the first episode.
But I at one point,
said that the 1918 flu in the the global response to it was kind of the closest
mankind has ever come to fighting an alien invasion.
You know this sort of invisible enemy nobody really understands and you know the panic and the alarm and the
conspiracy theories and superstitions that we all talk about in that series are really coming home, right? I think we're seeing some of that
How concerned you should be probably about medium concerned. I'd be careful, you know
It's not the apocalypse but
we absolutely want to stop it now, so it doesn't mutate into something even more deadly.
We
the risk to an individual
specially like the demographics of the people who watch our show. You folks are generally pretty young.
You personally are likely not going to die from COVAD 19. If you got sick you might get a little bit sick or even
possibly seriously ill but if you went into a hospital, they could probably nurse you through it, but there's no cure,
there's no vaccine to prevent it and
if a lot of people got sick like that at once it would completely
overwhelm ICUs and hospitals.
So that's the real danger to the developed world, is that the there's a
structural failure in the medical system because too many people are sick at once.
In the developing world, for example, we just taped the Haitian Revolution lives. If this gets to Haiti or
you know West Africa or you know parts of Southeast Asia, it could be absolutely devastating because people if left untreated
have a much lower survival rate.
So
Yeah, be careful, wash your hands.
I'm just going to talk a couple things about the 1918 flu pandemic. One is that we talked about the Chinese labor core.
I actually don't think that what they had was pandemic flu. I put that in because I thought it was an interesting
anecdote, but I think they most likely had pneumatic plague.
There was a disease going around the mountains in China
that missionaries reported.
There was a very severe pneumatic disease,
and one guy actually did try and take samples and test them and if those samples had survived we might have known whether this was
a pneumatic plague which could have been detected versus flu which which wouldn't have been at that point.
But he didn't describe his mission adequately to local people and they besieged and burned his
carriage full of supplies so and samples. So we're never gonna know.
But
one thing that I also wanted to point out was that we didn't put death rates and infection rates for China
which a lot of people brought up specifically after watching after coronavirus. This is because the numbers are very controversial and basically non-existent
for China.
A lot of people said that there were a lot of deaths and a lot of infections and others say that there were not.
And there's contradictory evidence.
I will tell you I looked
for what happened here in Hong Kong and I did not find any reports of like mass deaths and burials due to pandemic flu. So,
Who knows?
But because the evidence was so mixed, I had a difficult time like putting it on a chart so I didn't want to do that.
I also wanted to point out that we made a major mistake in Episode 6, which I've always wanted to mis...
wanted to correct. H1N1 is swine flu not avian flu. I was referencing a theory that it got
its genes reshuffled by traveling into birds or through birds,
But then in editing the script it got mangled and messed up and created an error.
And last I just want to tell you that the
edible ice cream cone actually comes from the flu pandemic because before that you would get this little
crystal stem with an ice cream ball on top and you would eat it.
It was called Penny Lick.
You would hand it back to the ice cream man
who would wipe it and
put another piece of ice cream on top of it and hand it to someone else. And
all that kind of stuff went away after the flu pandemic. Nobody wanted that.
So next time you crunch down an ice cream cone, Thank H1N1 for bringing you that delicious crunchy cone.
Yeah, but don't worry about us we're fine we're a little stir-crazy but we're okay.
We have plenty of toilet paper. So hope you all stay safe and healthy. We're fine here, don't worry about us.
But I'll see you next time with Ibn Battuta and dividing the Middle East and Ibn Battuta has the Black Plague in it. So,
Yeah,
more outbreaks!
Don't vote for another outbreak series for a while guys.
I just, I'm not, I'm not. Let's do something fun next time because I can't go outside that much. Alright, See you later. Bye
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