Pandemonium
Though we may tire of hearing the phrase, it nonetheless remains true: We have been living in unprecedented times. Not since the 1918 Spanish flu had there been such a disruption to societal life in the West like that which we have experienced with COVID-19. I can vividly recall when, on March 11, 2020, the National Basketball Association (NBA) suspended its season after one of its players tested positive for the virus. Though the Toronto Raptors’ time as reigning champions was extended – after all, who could challenge them if there was no basketball to play? – the alarming news of COVID-19’s arrival hit North American markets hard.[1] The National Hockey League (NHL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and several other high-profile sports leagues shortly followed suit.[2] In order to understand the significance of these big-league suspensions, fiscally, we are talking about a multi-million(billion?)-dollar loss in the sports industry, that is no insignificant number. And to think that these suspensions were only the beginning of COVID-19’s impact on North America. Stocks began to freefall, a global recession was accelerated, Canada and the United States closed its borders to non-essential travelers, Ottawa’s House of Commons suspended its operations, public schools across the country moved to online learning, university campuses shut down, workplaces sent their employees home, and grocery stores like Costco, NoFrills and Walmart were stripped bare in the first few weeks of the nation-wide lockdown. All this and more had developed in a short matter of time with COVID-19’s arrival. With all the panic and the hysteria that comes with the word “pandemic”, Western society had been thrown into utter pandemonium.
For those who had been following the news, the writing was on the wall. The impact of COVID-19 was first witnessed in Wuhan, China, eventually extending to the rest of the country, and then the rest of Asia. Iran soon followed, which was one of the hardest hit countries in the Middle East. Europe was neither spared from the pandemic, and was considered the epicenter for a time before shifting to the Americas. Countries like Italy and Brazil had struggled to deal with the virus’ breakout, and had even been forced to turn people away from hospitals due to the lack of space, beds, and resources. As per the words of Tedros A. Ghebreyesus in the early days of the pandemic, the Director-General of the WHO:
We expect[ed] to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher… We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus. This is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus.[3]
After some careful reflection, the panic and hysteria was not altogether unexpected, if anything, this was in part (and only in part) a healthy response to an alarming threat. In 1918 the pandemic of the Spanish flu ravaged most of the world, at the time one third of earth’s population was infected, and 20-50 million people are estimated to have died. In 1956 there was the Asian Flu by which, according to the WHO, 2 million people are estimated to have died. And in 1968, the Flu Pandemic killed little more than a million people. Pandemics are not new, they have occurred numerous times in the past.[4] The most recent scare in the West, prior to COVID-19, was SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which emerged in 2002 and 2003 as a species of the coronavirus. While SARS managed to cross oceans and devastated many, it never met the necessary conditions to be declared a “pandemic”, and given its mortality rate of 10%, we should all be thankful for that fact.[5] That was in large part thanks to the medical professionals who worked day and night to contain the virus and treat its patients, some of which gave their lives to the cause.
SARS was an “epidemic”, medically defined as an:
occurrence of more cases of a disease or illness than expected in a given community or region or among a specific group of people over a particular period of time; a wave of infections in a region by an organism with a short generation time; epidemics are usually heralded by an exponential rise in number of cases in time and a decline as susceptible persons are exhausted.[6]
COVID-19, or SARS Covid-2, was declared on March 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be a “pandemic.” What is a pandemic? Medically speaking, it is “an epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world due to a susceptible population.”[7] COVID-19 has demonstrated itself to be a global epidemic, a pandemic.
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[1] Sam Quinn, “Coronavirus: NBA commissioner Adam Silver says league will wait at least 30 days before continuing season”, CBS Sports. Accessed March 16, 2020, https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/coronavirus-nba-commissioner-adam-silver-says-league-will-wait-at-least-30-days-before-continuing-season/.
[2] Gabriel Fernandez, “Coronavirus live updates: NBA, MLB, other U.S. sports pause as CDC recommends 8 week stop for large gatherings”, CBS Sports. Accessed March 16, 2020, https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/coronavirus-live-updates-nba-mlb-other-u-s-sports-pause-as-cdc-recommends-8-week-stop-for-large-gatherings/live/.
[3] World Health Organization, “Rolling updates on coronavirus disease (COVID-19)”, WHO. Accessed March 16, 2020, https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/events-as-they-happen/.
[4] “Worst Pandemics in History”, MPHonline. Accessed March 16, 2020, https://www.mphonline.org/worst-pandemics-in-history/.
[5] Mark Abadi, Havovi Cooper and Meg Teckman-Fullard, “How the coronavirus compares to SARS, swine flu, Zika, and other epidemics”, Business Insider. Accessed March 16, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-sars-swine-flu-mers-zika-2020-3/.
[6] McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine (The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2002).
[7] William C. Shiel Jr., “Medical Definition of Pandemic”, MedicineNet. Accessed March 16, 2020, https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=4751/.