The most lurid accounts of the disease, which was unusually lethal and went on to kill 600,000 Americans, appeared in the Madrid press, so it became associated in the mind of the public with Spain. In fact, it may well have originated in the United States, where the first case was reported.
Likewise, the novel coronavirus may have originated in China, but the government there reports less than 5,000 deaths. Even if you think the Communist Party of China statistics suspiciously low, it is hard to hide tens of thousands of deaths in today’s world, and so the toll is likely fairly low. South Korea, a pretty transparent democracy, has tiny numbers in comparison, less than 300 dead at the beginning of May. South Korea has done massive large scale testing and contact tracing, which allowed it to keep its economy open.
In contrast, this weekend the US death toll will hit 65,000, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory predict we could see 100,000 dead by the end of May, given the low rates of testing and the early reopening of many states. In fact, since many coronavirus patients die at home and are never diagnosed, we could be near 100,000 already, in reality.
The United States only has about 4 percent of the global population. But it has nearly a third of the known cases of covid-19 and has about 27% percent, over a fourth, of the reported deaths.
It overtook Italy in early April as the country with the largest number of cases in the world in absolute numbers.
In other words, the United States is the biggest coronavirus disaster in the world, with cases and deaths far out of proportion to its share of the global population and amazingly few tests performed per capita, and very little public health capacity for contact tracing (figuring out with whom the victim had been in contact and quarantining them, too).
If China suffered proportionally as badly as the US, that would be 260,000 dead people, since China is four times as populous as the US.
Even if the CPC has not reported all the deaths there, it certainly could not hide a catastrophe of those proportions.
In other words, the Chinese Communist Party has been a model of efficiency in dealing with the outbreak so far, compared to the walking wounded that is Trumpian, plutocratic public health policy.
But the capitalist democracy, South Korea, has done better than both of them. In fact, it makes you wonder if the US should still be allowed in the G8.
Even the UK, the government of which is just as useless as Trump’s, has fewer deaths per capita than the US. Unhinged Prime Minister Boris Johnson diddled about talking of “herd immunity” (i.e. ‘let grandma die’) before he finally instituted social distancing and then nearly died of the disease himself (having forgotten that he is grandma’s age himself).
Given that the US is heading toward 166,000 deaths by this fall according to some models, it could end up with twice as many deaths, proportionally, as Italy, the worst-hit country per capita.
There is therefore only one moniker for this novel coronavirus as appropriate as “Spanish Flu” was to the 2018 influenza pandemic. It is the Trump virus, folks.
Trump did not, unlike South Korea, swing into action in February to arrange for massive Federal testing, helping local authorities increase their contract tracing ability. The first death from the coronavirus occurred in South Korea the same day as the first person died of it in the US. Trump lackadaisically ignored his intel briefings and the contract to make the first test was given to a company in which Jared Kushner’s brother has a big stake. The first test they made, delivered substantially into February, did not even work. Centers for Disease Control doctors looked at the calendar then back at the failed tests, and said, yikes, we’re f*cked.
Without large scale testing and contact tracing, Trump had to institute social distancing. But he did not do that in good time, either, so, for instance, New York is still just plateauing and hasn’t begun declining. With many states opening too soon, there will be more spikes ahead.
Trump also did not procure the number of face masks, gowns and other personal protective equipment (PPE) that US physicians and nurses would need. Hundreds have died unnecessarily because Trump pissed away his two-month lead (the intel was clear in early January).
Trump’s administration is still refusing to provide the millions of tests needed safely to reopen the country, with the outcome that the country will be opened dangerously. In fact, he is letting Jared Kushner have the Department of Homeland Security essentially steal tests and PPE from governors and mayors. The Republican governor of Maryland had to put his, brought in through personal contacts from China, under the care of the state National Guard. Trump wants to confiscate this equipment so as to be able to give it back out as a political favor to his cronies, in a bid to strengthen his reelection prospects. Meanwhile, 65,000 Americans have died. That is twenty-one 9/11s.
Trumpie governors like Kemp in Georgia and DeSantis in Florida are guaranteeing a fall-winter “Second Wave” of the virus by reopening their states too soon, well before social distancing could reduce the transmission rate of the disease to something manageable.
This is the Trump Virus. It doesn’t matter where it came from. It matters how it was handled. Trump handled it badly. The awful thing is that he is not improving in his handling of it over time.
Trump’s campaign manager, son-in-law, senior adviser, and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel got together to tell him one thing: he’s losing.
Trump rejected both internal polls showing him losing to Biden in swing states, instead of swearing out his campaign manager and threatening to sue him.
But somehow, 45% of the country still approves of Trump -- and his supporters have shown they can beat bad polls with their enthusiasm alone.
Matt Taibbi | The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis Is Here
Matt Taibbi, Matt Taibbi's Substack Taibbi writes: "Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine - fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type - ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era."
EXCERPT:
As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right” audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’ claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades,” and YouTube and Google have “officially banned dissent.”
Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s monologue:
There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus trutherism.
Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the flu.”
He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up some pork.”
The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new “Utopia of Scolding”:
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.
Trump Expresses Support for Angry Anti-Shutdown Protesters as More States Lift Coronavirus Lockdowns Anne Gearan and John Wagner, The Washington Post Excerpt: "President Trump expressed support Friday for armed protesters who had stormed the Michigan Capitol, demanding the state lift coronavirus restrictions, as researchers estimated that the coronavirus pandemic could stretch on for two more years."
Trump tweeted Friday that “these are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!”
Trump said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) “should give a little, and put out the fire.”
Hundreds of people, including a militia group armed with military-style rifles, rushed the State Capitol in Lansing on Thursday, with some forcing their way into the building and facing off with law enforcement. An angry mob screamed “Lock Her Up” and insults about Whitmer.
Trump’s “very good people” language recalled his wording nearly three years ago, when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” at a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“See them, talk to them, make a deal,” Trump wrote Friday.
It is not clear what kind of deal Trump had in mind, but he has rooted for states to lift many of the tightest restrictions on movement and commerce and allowed a national stay-at-home recommendation to expire Thursday night.
“Look, the president was referencing, generally, that in this country you have a First Amendment right to protest,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said when asked about the apparent presidential endorsement for the Michigan protest tactics.
“I think that’s something we all treasure here and we should, rightfully,” McEnany said. “You have a right to do that constitutionally, but you must protest within the bounds of the law. He encourages everyone to protest lawfully.”
Whitmer extended the statewide order to maintain social distancing, but Michiganders are now allowed limited travel, golf and boating. The state is not close to meeting White House recommendations that states see a 14-day decline in coronavirus cases before beginning to relax lockdowns. Trump recently criticized Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) for allowing some businesses to open before the state had met the federal guidelines.
Two of Trump’s golf courses — in Doral, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J. — are reopening after local lockdowns were relaxed.
More than half of the nation’s governors are relaxing pandemic restrictions in their states by the end of this week, but some health experts fear the virus will spike, setting off another round of closures. Millions of Americans will be able to return to stores, restaurants and movie theaters this weekend.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) on Friday unveiled a detailed framework for reopening the state, a step-by-step loosening of restrictions beginning Monday and continuing in the weeks ahead — with a goal of resuming normalcy by July 4.
But some state leaders are moving more cautiously in balancing the urgent need to reopen the economy with public health concerns over a virus that had killed nearly 65,000 people in the United States as of Friday.
Stay-at-home restrictions are being extended in Ohio, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Arizona and Washington. As many rural and suburban areas reopen, cities are staying firmly shut.
“It’s being done with tremendous gusto and vigor,” Trump said about the reopening process.
Trump spoke before he left the White House for the first time since March 28, for a weekend visit to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Western Maryland.
On Tuesday, Trump is scheduled to travel to Phoenix, where he plans to visit a Honeywell facility that is manufacturing N95 respirator masks at an existing aerospace facility to meet increased demand during the pandemic, according to the White House. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) recently extended a stay-at-home order in the state until May 15.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration is granting emergency authorization to remdesivir, a move that allows health-care providers to administer the drug intravenously to treat covid-19, the disease the virus causes, in adults and children hospitalized with severe cases.
Earlier this week, the nation’s top infectious-disease specialist, Anthony S. Fauci, announced that trial data showed the antiviral drug had a “clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”
Despite the promising news, a report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota warned of a dip in cases followed by a sharp resurgence this fall or winter that is even more severe than the current spike.
The outbreak could run for two more years, with recurring spikes until roughly two-thirds or more of the population is immune, researchers estimated.
The late-season spike is among three scenarios researchers predict for the Northern Hemisphere. The other two include smaller waves following the current spring 2020 peak and a “slow burn” of repeated, smaller waves for the next 18 to 24 months.
In all three scenarios, people will continue to die. A vaccine is not predicted to significantly change the projections because one will realistically not be available until after the worst of the outbreak, the report said.
Trump on Thursday touted a fast-track effort to develop a vaccine and distribute it nationally, and his medical experts agree that a vaccine is the best hope for sidelining the virus eventually.
Schools in New York will remain closed for the rest of the academic year, with students expected to continue distance learning for the final two months of the semester, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said Friday. The decision affects roughly 2.6 million children, including in the United States’ largest school district in New York City.
“We must protect our children. Every parent, every citizen feels that we must protect our students,” Cuomo said, noting it is not possible, given the challenges from the coronavirus pandemic, to bring students, teachers and staff back to school safely.
Cuomo said a decision on whether to hold summer school will be made by the end of May but noted it was too early to make a determination on plans for in-person classes resuming in the fall.
“The fall is a long time away,” Cuomo said.
Friday’s decision caps what had been at times a tense standoff between the governor and his longtime political rival, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D). The mayor said April 11 that New York City schools would close for the year, only to be contradicted by Cuomo hours later. The two spent days locked in a dispute over who had authority over the nation’s largest school district.
New York joins 43 states and the District in ordering schools closed for the remainder of the year.
Also Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said coronavirus cases were confirmed among thousands of workers in meat and poultry processing facilities across the country in April, affecting more than 100 plants in upward of a dozen states.
The CDC said it examined data from 115 meat or poultry facilities in 19 states. These plants employed more than 130,000 workers, more than 4,900 of whom had confirmed cases. At least 20 coronavirus deaths were reported.
These numbers are likely an undercount, because the CDC report says not all states with coronavirus cases in such facilities contributed data. The prevalence of testing also likely played a role, the CDC found, with more infections reported in places with more testing.
Trump earlier this week signed an executive order forcing meat plants to remain open to avoid food supply shortages. Industry analysts say pork and beef processing has fallen 25 percent because of outbreaks, while workers say companies are not doing enough to keep them safe.
A day after Trump said he had seen evidence that suggested the virus leaked from a virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization underscored its view that the virus is not man-made but that it is still working to understand how the virus jumped to humans.
“We have listened again and again to numerous scientists who have looked at the sequences and looked at this virus. We are assured that this virus is natural in origin,” said Mike Ryan, WHO emergencies chief.
How the coronavirus spread to humans is one of the most controversial questions of the pandemic. Some U.S. officials have promoted the idea that the outbreak may have been started inadvertently through a leak at a bioresearch facility in Wuhan, although researchers say this is unlikely and not supported by any public evidence.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has voiced support for an investigation of the origins of the virus, lending European Union backing to a suggestion that Chinese officials have opposed.
This week, Sweden’s health minister said her government plans to ask the E.U. for an international investigation of the source of the coronavirus.
“When the global situation of Covid-19 is under control, it is both reasonable and important that an international, independent investigation be conducted to gain knowledge about the origin and spread of the coronavirus,” Lena Hallengren wrote Wednesday to parliament.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also called for a global inquiry into the coronavirus outbreak, although he said Friday that he had no evidence to suggest the virus could have leaked from a laboratory.
Chinese officials have pushed back against calls for an inquiry. This week, Beijing’s ambassador to Australia hinted that Chinese consumers could boycott Australian products if Canberra continues to call for an investigation, which he described as “pandering” to Washington.
India will extend its nationwide lockdown for another two weeks, while also allowing significant relaxations in parts of the country less impacted by the coronavirus.
The lockdown — one of the harshest in the world — was due to end Sunday, and the government is still struggling to contain the growing outbreak. While coronavirus cases have steadily risen to over 35,000 with more than 1,100 deaths, the rate of doubling has slowed considerably, which officials attribute to the strict lockdown.
Some restrictions will continue nationwide. Travel by air, rail and rapid transit, and interstate movement on roads is still prohibited. Educational institutions, restaurants, hotels, cinema halls and gyms will continue to remain shut. All religious and social gatherings are banned.
Bernie Lost Because America Doesn't Have a Strong Labor Movement Hamilton Nolan, In These Times Nolan writes: "I was in Las Vegas for the Nevada caucus in late February (ah, a different and simpler time!) and the reporters on the ground - including me - believed Bernie Sanders was poised to go forth and win the Democratic nomination. A few short weeks later, it was clear it was not to be." READ MORE
Attendees interacting with a facial recognition demonstration at this year's CES in Las Vegas. (photo: Joe Buglewicz/NYT)
San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology Kate Conger, Richard Fausset and Serge F. Kovaleski, The New York Times Excerpt: "San Francisco, long at the heart of the technology revolution, took a stand against potential abuse on Tuesday by banning the use of facial recognition software by the police and other agencies." READ MORE
Women with masks shout slogans during protests as part of International Women's Day on March 8, 2020, in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Claudio Santana/Getty Images)
Chile's Six Months of Struggle Pierina Ferretti, Jacobin Ferretti writes: "The feminist movement in Chile is one of the strongest in the world, last month bringing millions of women into the streets for International Women's Day." READ MORE
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, infecting almost 3 million people worldwide and killing over 200,000, public health officials, policymakers, and journalists are analyzing what went wrong. (photo: Thana Prasongsin/Getty Images)
These Scientists Saw a Pandemic Coming. Now They're Trying to Stop the Next One. Shannon Osaka, Grist Osaka writes: "It was late one night in January 2009, and Jonathan Epstein was standing on the roof of an abandoned storage depot near Khulna, Bangladesh, with the writer and journalist David Quammen along with a small team of veterinarians. The group was in Bangladesh on a strange errand: They were catching bats."
It had been more than a decade since the first outbreak of the Nipah virus in Malaysia. Nipah, named after the home village of one of its earliest victims, causes respiratory distress, inflammation of the brain, and seizures. Its mortality rate is staggeringly high — between 40 and 75 percent of those who contract the disease ultimately die. (The virus depicted in the now all-too-prescient 2011 film Contagion was based on Nipah.)
In Malaysia, the initial outbreak of Nipah in 1998 had infected 283 people and killed 109. Scientists eventually discovered that the virus had been passed from bats to local pig farms; the government slaughtered over 1 million pigs in an effort to stop the spread. But Nipah kept coming back, popping up in new places around the world, killing hundreds. Epstein and his colleagues were in that storage depot in Bangladesh trying to understand if the bats there were also carriers of the virus — and if they might pass it to humans again.
Epstein, a veterinarian and disease ecologist at the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, has been all over the world identifying and tracing viruses that could make a deadly jump from animals to humans, helped by sprawling cities, clear-cut forests, and other human encroachment into the natural world. He helped trace the first outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, in 2003 to horseshoe bats in China; the outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, in 2013 to camels and bats; and — when it’s safe to travel again — he will return to China to help pinpoint the source of the current coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Bats are, once again, the main suspects.
“There are always two pivotal questions,” Epstein said by phone from his home in Queens. “How did this happen? And could it happen again?”
Sixty percent of new infectious diseases — diseases that, like COVID-19, have never before reached humans — originate in domesticated animals and wildlife, often bats, rodents, or non-human primates. Scientists estimate that there are as many as 800,000 of these so-called zoonotic viruses lurking in the natural world that could infect humans. The animals carrying these viruses often don’t get sick; instead, they serve as “reservoirs,” amassing pathogens as they eat, sleep, and socialize. It’s a good deal for the viruses: They get a free ride, while they wait for a chance to make a cross-species leap.
The problem is that those deadly leaps are becoming more common. Population growth and environmental and habitat destruction are bringing humans into more frequent contact with certain species — and the viruses that they carry.
“Every future viral threat that people could get already exists and is circulating in those animals — always has been,” said Dennis Carroll, an expert on zoonotic infectious diseases and the former head of the emerging threats division of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. “It’s just that now we’re bumping into them with a frequency that enables spillover to occur.”
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, infecting almost 3 million people worldwide and killing over 200,000, public health officials, policymakers, and journalists are analyzing what went wrong. Why was the world so unprepared? Should countries have higher national stockpiles of ventilators, masks, ICU beds? Should stay-at-home orders have been issued earlier?
These are all measures for after an epidemic has begun, after an enterprising virus has leapt from an animal to a human (a phenomenon scientists call “spillover”). But a small group of ecologists, epidemiologists, and veterinarians have spent the last decade attacking pandemics from another angle. Epstein and other researchers have been out in the field, testing bats in Bangladesh and pigs in West Africa, trying to catalog a huge number of viruses in the hopes of preventing a spillover into human populations. Because there’s no outbreak if the virus never makes the jump.
In 2005, a strain of avian influenza called the H5N1 virus began spreading across Southeast Asia towards Eastern Europe. The disease was rare, but it could be fatal: Roughly 60 percent of those infected died. Experts were concerned that they could be looking at a “potentially historic event.”
At the time, Carroll was at USAID as a senior infectious disease specialist working on the organization’s response. His focus was on malaria and tuberculosis, diseases that are well-known — if not well-managed — everywhere in the world. Luckily, H5N1 did not turn into a global pandemic, but the experience changed Carroll’s perspective on the risks. In the 1960s, there were a few hundred million poultry produced in China; by the 2000s, when the country’s population had nearly doubled, China was producing billions of chickens, ducks, and turkeys every year. Carroll realized that as the human population grew, so would the odds of a deadly pandemic. “It was really a profound eye-opener for me,” he said.
Carroll suspected that there were many more viruses like the avian flu lying in wait, looking for a chance to make the jump to humans. But at the time, there was little understanding of how many dangerous viral illnesses existed. “It was an open question of what the ‘viral dark matter’ circulating in wildlife was,” he said. “Are we talking about a hundred viruses? Or something different?”
That question became the basis of PREDICT, a kind of catch-and-release project for viruses that Carroll championed from within USAID. The program, launched in 2009, included scientists and researchers from the University of California, Davis and EcoHealth Alliance — all with the singular goal of discovering new viruses before they spill over into people.
It was an enormous undertaking. With an annual budget of around $20 million, researchers identified potential viral “hotspots” around the world, contacted local governments, and surveyed key species that could be carrying novel diseases. They also began training locals in more than 30 countries around the world, including in Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Bangladesh. On-the-ground experts like Epstein, the wildlife veterinarian, taught locals to capture animals, take blood samples to test for novel viruses, and release them back into the wild.
“It’s really grunt work,” Carroll said. “This is not a technological challenge. You go out and capture bats, you go out and capture rodents.”
Based on PREDICT’s early work, Carroll and other researchers estimated that there are around 1.67 million yet-undiscovered viruses circulating in mammals and birds, the animals most likely to transmit disease to humans. Of those, between 631,000 and 827,000 have the potential to make the leap to humans.
The good news is that the proportion of those 600,000-plus viruses that could cause serious illness is very small. “Most microbial infections in people are inconsequential,” Carroll said. “They don’t have adverse effects.” So researchers don’t need to worry about all potentially zoonotic viruses — just the ones that could turn deadly.
Jonna Mazet, the organization’s global director from its inception until last year, said that PREDICT and its collaborators collected 168,000 samples from people and animals and identified more than 900 new viruses. Of those, 160 were coronaviruses — in the same family as SARS-CoV-2.
But sampling animals by climbing through trees, setting up nets on warehouse roofs, and crawling into bat-infested caves was only part of the challenge. There are about as many pathways for transmission as there are viruses. And so the group wasn’t only cataloging potential diseases. They were also searching for hidden patterns, looking for the unexpected risky behaviors that could allow a virus to spill over into humans.
The first case of the global Ebola outbreak in 2013 was traced to a toddler in the West African country of Guinea, who had been playing under a tree housing a family of bats, likely displaced by the destruction of surrounding forests by foreign mining and timber companies. (Scientists still aren’t sure exactly how close contact with those bats led to the child getting infected). In Malaysia, the first outbreak of Nipah was linked to pigs that had eaten pieces of fruit dropped by nearby bats and then spread the disease throughout industrial pig farms.
But some types of spillover are known, common, and preventable. “Let’s take, for example, live animal markets,” Epstein said. “People are still bringing wild animals, particularly bats, rodents, and non-human primates, from their natural environment into urban settings. These species not only have contact with each other, under very stressful and unhygienic conditions where there’s opportunity to trade viruses, but they’re also being handled and butchered by people.”
That close contact provides an opportunity for people to become exposed. The SARS outbreak in 2003 likely originated from a wildlife market in the Chinese province of Guangdong. And the suspected source of the novel coronavirus currently gripping the planet is a market in Wuhan.
Epstein explained that certain interventions — making wildlife markets more hygienic, or preventing wild animals from being sold at all — could dramatically lower the possibility of spillover. But he emphasized that the work has to be done in a culturally sensitive way, by building local partnerships. “This isn’t about a group of Westerners imposing their idea of what’s safe on cultures that have been doing something for generations,” he said.
Some have taken a harder line. The World Conservation Society has called for a global ban on the trade of wildlife, citing pandemic risks. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infectious disease specialist, told Fox News that the Chinese government should immediately ban so-called “wet markets.” “It boggles my mind how, when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we just don’t shut it down,” he said.
Trading wildlife is only one of many human behaviors that can set off a spillover. When Epstein and colleagues were on the roof of that storage depot in Bangladesh, they were studying another outbreak of Nipah, one that appeared to be passed to humans when they ate sap from date palm trees. Locals collected the sap in small clay pots, tapped to the palms and left open to the air — and to any fruit bats that might want to take a sip.
That was the immediate cause of the outbreak: sap contaminated by bat urine and feces. But for Epstein and other scientists, the lesson was much larger. Mowing down forests for large-scale agriculture, harvesting timber, and sprawling cities — all these activities were forcing bats into close quarters with people. “It’s not the animals’ fault for carrying these diseases,” he said. “These are things that we do to the environment around us.”
Over the past century, the human population has exploded. At the height of the 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic, the global population was around 1.8 billion, less than a quarter of what it is today. In the past century, millions of humans have spent years slaughtering wildlife; cutting down trees; placing cows, chickens, and pigs in close contact with wild animals — providing ample opportunity for viruses to make a deadly leap.
Even in the face of enormous environmental changes, Epstein and other scientists are convinced that it wouldn’t take much to make a big difference, whether it’s shuttering wildlife markets or bat-proofing pots for date-palm sap with a small screen. “These are wholly human-made, human-driven events, and knowing that is hopeful, because we can actually focus on changing the way we do things,” Epstein said. “These pandemics are preventable.”
Last September, the PREDICT program ran out of money. It had passed through two five-year funding cycles but wasn’t renewed by USAID.
Some of those involved were deeply disappointed. “It was a genius, visionary program that USAID took a big risk to fund, and it’s a crying shame it was canceled,” Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, told the Guardian.
Contrary to reports from the Los Angeles Times and other outlets, however, there’s no evidence that the decision to end PREDICT was political. Though the White House has previously proposed decreasing funding for USAID and other global health programs, Carroll said that it’s unlikely anyone high up in the Trump administration even knew the program existed. (They might now. On April 1, PREDICT was granted a $2.6 million temporary funding extension, so the project and its partners can help identify the animal hosts of SARS-CoV-2.)
The scientists involved in PREDICT recently launched the Global Virome Project, which they hope will operate at a much larger scale. It aims to identify and assess all major viral threats within 10 years — at a cost of around $1.6 billion.
“It’s expensive,” said Mazet, the former director of PREDICT. “But it’s much less expensive than even 10 percent of big epidemics in the past, and it’s going to be minuscule compared to this one.”
For perspective, the U.S. government spent more than $2 billion trying to tamp down Ebola epidemics between 2014 and 2016 — and the CARES Act, passed last month to support an economy in freefall, costs around $2 trillion. In comparison, the cost of warding off viral outbreaks is “pennies on the dollar,” Epstein said.
It’s hard to say whether the project would have been able to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. Although PREDICT identified 160 new coronaviruses in its decade of operations, none of them was SARS-CoV-2. Mazet said that PREDICT had partnered with a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the region just wasn’t a top priority for USAID, which was more focused on funding research into disease outbreaks in Southeast Asia. For her, this doesn’t suggest that the approach was wrong — just that any new effort needs to widen the area under surveillance.
Carroll thinks that the Global Virome Project and the foundation laid by PREDICT provide at least a place to start: a way to tackle the “viral dark matter” running through our planet, a potentially life-saving (and economy-saving) stopgap against future pandemics.
For now, those who have spent their careers warning of zoonotic diseases are sheltered in place like the rest of us. Many said that the pandemic should not be considered a “black swan event” — something random and unpredictable. The fact is, it was started by exactly the kind of spillover they had been warning about for decades. But that doesn’t make watching their fears play out any easier.
Before COVID-19, the team was struggling to get policymakers’ attention, fighting against competing funding priorities and short-term thinking. “We were raising the flag and waving it — to our own exhaustion,” Mazet said. “We hope the world is listening now.”
