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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

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Treat Your S(h)elf: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

We’re going to survive - our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams - and in their worst nightmares too.

- Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“It’s always hard on women, when a city falls.” Briseis, former princess of the Trojan city of Lyrnessus, has been Achilles’s slave for several months when someone she knew in her old life says these words. From the ancient world to our modern world there is this ugly and unspoken line of rape as a weapon of war. History is replete with examples. In the 20th-century where Nazis raped Jewish women despite soldiers' concerns with "race defilement" and raped countless women in their path as they invaded the Soviet Union and then in Berlin 1945 Russians in turn went on a brutal raping spree to punish the Germans. In the bloody Balkan wars in the 1990s, Serbian forces tortured and summarily executed scores of Muslims and Croats. In the Iraq war and the many conflicts in Africa in the 21st Century, rape is systemically used to subdue a defeated enemy. History shows the ugly truth that women’s bodies have always been viewed as the spoils of conflicts waged primarily by men.

The issue of rape in war is something that has always sat uncomfortably with me ever since I did my stint as an army combat helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. From my high vantage point I felt a detachment from the electronic battlefield - for everything was viscerally seen from my helmeted eye patch visor lens and not the naked eye. I couldn’t look people in the eye as as soldier on for patrol would have. The fear and sweat is the same but the risk is different. Soldiers on patrol or on a mission risk the constant threat of ambush, sustained attack under mortar or fire fights as well as the ever present danger of being blown up by an IED by accident. Pilots risk being coming under attack too by being ambushed by RPG rocket fire or coming under fire from below. Worse, was to think if you got hit and you had to bail and you were all alone, survival and evasion from capture becomes fearfully paramount. Of course they train you for this until it hopefully becomes muscle memory in how to survive and take evasive action from being captured and resisting as long as you could under interrogation. But as a female pilot the unspoken fear that dare not speak its name was ever present: the fear of rape.

I’m not sure my brother officers - no matter how sincere and well intentioned they were because we were all fiercely protective of one another - really understood what the word ‘rape’ means for a woman. Indeed a male friend and ex-army colleague said to me in jest don’t ever kid a man about kicking him in the balls because it’s one thing every man can imagine feeling but would find it hard to explain the excruciating pain when a man does get his balls bashed in. I don’t think the two ‘experiences’ are the same obviously but I understand how hard it is to articulate what it might feel like. I never really allowed myself to be consumed by the fear of what might happen if I ever got shot down and was captured but instead I made sure to focus on my job. It never really became pressing issue for me throughout my time in on the battlefield. I was lucky I got out in one piece despite a few close scrapes along the way.

I did hear awful and terrible stories from my oldest brother who served in the Iraq War of the raping of Kurdish women by Iraqi forces. It sickened him and left him hollow the the things he witnessed first hand. Through the charitable work of ex-veterans I have come across refugee woman who shared their harrowing stories of how they were violently and systematically raped as war booty and as primal assertion of victor dominance and control.

I was thinking about all these things as I read Pat Barker’s novel about one of the most famous wars of all, telling the story of the siege of Troy from the point of view of the local Trojan women taken by the Greek forces. It’s The Iliad as seen through the eyes of 19-year-old Briseis, the Queen of Lyrnessus who’s taken as Achilles’s “bed-girl”, his “prize of honour” for mass slaughter.

Barker’s not the first to turn to the classics for inspiration. It’s popular practice these days. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Michael Hughes’ Country, for example, transpose classical stories onto contemporary settings. The Silence of the Girls is yet another much welcomed book to offer a fresh perspective on Homeric women, following Madeleine Miller’s brilliant Circe. But while Miller’s reinvention of literature’s first witch brilliantly evoked a world of ancient magic in retelling The Odyssey from the witch’s point of view, not that of the warrior she waylays on his journey home, Barker’s story has its feet very firmly on the ground. Yes, the gods are still there – you can’t tell the story of the Trojan wars without them, after all. The gods remain mostly off stage but they are present in the background, magically restoring the mutilated dead body of Hector. The sea goddess Thetis, Achilles’ mother, is a briny, frightening presence, as are the dark shore and the waves by which the whole horrible story takes place. Apollo still sends a plague, Achilles is the son of a sea goddess who brings him divinely forged armour and Hector’s body is magically restored to freshness after being pulled behind Achilles’s chariot.

But what really stands out are not heavenly allusions but the dirt and filth and disease and sheer brutal physicality of the Greek army marauding everything that stands in their way to Troy - there’s no magic here to ease the pain and trauma of rape or murder or even to help exact revenge. And while Achilles’ divine mother makes an appearance, and Apollo is beckoned by Briseis to bring about a plague, the gods remain on the peripheries of this story. If Circe, which chronicles the life of its titular character, is very much about the gods and their egos, then The Silence of the Girls, however, is very much about humans, their egos and their wars - both personal and political.

In all this Barker gives female characters such as Circe and Briseis the voice they’ve traditionally been denied, readers glean a different version of events behind the Trojan War epic myth. “Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up,” Briseis begins. “We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”

In The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of women are the objects through which men struggle with each other for status. The women are not entirely silent, and goddesses always have plenty to say, but mortal women speak primarily to lament. They grieve for their dead sons, dead fathers, dead husbands and dead protectors; for the city of Troy, soon to fall, and for their own freedom, taken by the victors of war. Andromache pleads with her Trojan husband Hector not to leave her and their infant son to go back to fight Achilles. She has already endured the sack of her home city by Achilles, and seen the slaughter of her father and seven brothers, and the enslavement of her mother. If Hector dies, their child will be hurled from the city walls, Troy will fall and Andromache will be made the concubine of the son of her husband’s killer. Hector knows this, but he insists that his own need to avoid social humiliation as a battle-shirker trumps it all: “I would be ashamed before the Trojan men and women,” he says. He hopes only to be dead before he has to hear her screams.

Barker’s absorbing prose puts the experience of women like Andromache at the heart of the story: the women who survive in slavery when men destroy their cities and kill their fathers, brothers and children. The central character is Briseis, the woman awarded to Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, after his army sacks one of the towns neighbouring Troy. Agamemnon, the most powerful, although not the bravest, of the Greek warriors – a character whose downright nastiness comes across beautifully in Barker’s telling – has lost his own most recent female acquisition and seizes Briseis from Achilles. Achilles’ vengeful rage against Agamemnon and his own comrades, and the subsequent vast death toll of the Greeks and Trojans, is the central theme of The Iliad.

Homer’s poem ends by foreshadowing the fall of Troy in the death of its greatest fighter, Hector. Barker’s novel begins with the fall of another town: Lyrnessus, Briseis’ home, destroyed by Achilles and his men. We then see that the fall of a city is the end of a story only for the male warriors: some leave triumphant and others lie there dead. For the women, it is the start of new horrors.

Barker’s subject has long been gender relations during conflict, along with the machinations of trauma and memory, so she’s in her element here. Her blood-drenched battle scenes are up there with the best of them, and she shows a keen understanding of the “never-ending cycle of hatred and revenge” fuelling the violence. Her focus, however, is that which takes place off the battlefield, inflicted on the women in the “rape camps.”

Barker keeps the main bones of the Homeric poem in place, supplementing Homer at the end of the story with Euripides. His heartbreaking play The Trojan Women is, like Barker’s novel, a version of the story that shifts our attention from the angry, destructive, quick-footed, short-lived boys to the raped, enslaved, widowed women, who watch their city burn and, if they are lucky, get a moment to bury their slaughtered children and grandchildren before they are taken far away.

One of Barker’s most tear-jerking sequences is lifted straight from Euripides: the teenage daughter of Priam and Hecuba is gagged and killed as a “sacrifice” on the dead Achilles’ tomb, and then Hecuba is presented with the tiny corpse of her dead grandson, a toddler with his skull cracked open. The girl’s gagged mouth and the child’s gaping brains conjure a gruesome twinned image for the silenced voices that should tell of the horror and pity suffered by the victims of war.

For most of Barker’s novel, Briseis is the first-person narrator, but in the final part, the narrative is intercut with third-person chapters told from the point of view of Achilles. We never get as close to Achilles as we do to Briseis, but he is a compelling figure in his fascinating combination of brutality and civility. Like Siegfried Sassoon in Barker’s 1991 novel Regeneration, this Achilles has the soul of a poet as well as of a killer and hunter: he is a man whose physical courage and compulsion to fight sit uneasily with his clear, articulate awareness of the futility of war.

But Achilles, however fascinating he may be, is not then at the centre of this story. Still, the novel does provide a moving, thought-provoking version of what is perhaps the most famous moment of The Iliad: when the old king Priam makes his way, alone and unarmed, through the enemy camp, to plead with Achilles to give back the mutilated body of his son, Hector. Barker twice quotes Priam’s Homeric words to Achilles: “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” Barker lets us feel the pathos and pity of this moment, as well as the pathos of all the many young men who die violent deaths far from home. We glimpse, too, Achilles’ alienation from his own “terrible, man-killing hands”, which have caused so many deaths.

Briseis has a powerful riposte to Priam’s words, weighing this unique encounter between men against the myriad unremembered horrors suffered by women in war. “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

Reduced to objects, they’re catalysts for conflict – Barker’s Helen inspires ribaldry not worship, “The eyes, the hair, the tits, the lips/ That launched a thousand battleships...” chant the soldiers – blamed for inciting hatred between men. Or they’re regarded as the victor’s spoils, claimed along with cattle and gold.

Briseis is both. Taken as a slave, Achilles and Agamemnon then feud over her: “It doesn’t belong to him; he hasn’t earnt it,” fumes the former. Men - Greek and Trojan alike – are afforded the privilege of vocalising their pain and loss, while women have to repress their suffering. “Silence becomes a woman,” they’re told, even when they’re free.

No longer an issue of decorum, now it’s about staying alive. “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son,” declares Priam when he prostrates himself before Achilles begging for Hector’s body. “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do, Briseis thinks bitterly, “I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

Barker has a very clear feminist message about the struggle for women to extricate themselves from male-dominated narratives. In the hands of a lesser writer, it could have felt preachy and woke but she masterfully avoids that. The attempt to provide Briseis with a happy ending is thin, and sometimes the female characters’ legitimate outrage seems a bit predictable, as when we hear Helen thinking: “I’m here. Me. A person, not just an object to be looked at and fought over.”

The novel has some annoying anachronisms, such as a “weekend market” (there were no weekends in antiquity), and a reference to “half a crown”, as if we were in the same period as Barker’s first world war novels. One wonders if any woman in archaic Greece, even a former queen, would have quite the self-assurance of Barker’s Briseis. But, of course, there is no way to be sure: no words from women in this period survive but Barker is surely right to paint them as thoughtful, diverse, rounded human beings, whose humanity hardly ever dawns on their captors, owners and husbands. This central historical insight feels entirely truthful.

Barker has a quasi-Homeric gift for similes: “that shining moment, when the din of battle fades and your body’s a rod connecting earth and sky”, or Achilles’ friend Patroclus dying, “thrashing like a fish in a pool that’s drying out”. There is a Homeric simplicity and drive in some of the sentences: “Blood, shit and brains – and there he is, the son of Peleus, half beast, half god, driving on to glory.” She is Homeric, too, in her attentiveness to what happens between people, and to the details of the physical world: the food, the wine, the clothes, the noise and the feel of skin, blood, bones, crackling wounds and screams. Barker, like Homer, understands grief and loss, and sees how alone people can be even when they are crying together. Loneliness in community is one of the major themes of this book, as it is of The Iliad.

Angry, thoughtful, sad, deeply humane and compulsively readable, The Silence of the Girls shows that Barker is a writer at the peak of her literary powers. You sense her only priority is to enlarge the story that we all know and she adds to it magnificently.

I have always enjoyed reading Pat Barker especially her enviable experience of writing about military life in her earlier novels and here in this book it shines through in the depiction of the Greek forces. The men are dehumanised by the wars they have created. This is primarily a book about what war does to women, but Barker examines what it does to men too. I was disturbed by the magnificently poignant final section which can’t help but make you reflect on the cultural underpinnings of male aggression, the women throughout history who have been told, by men, to forget their trauma. When Briseis is told to forget her past life, she immediately knows it is exactly what she must not, can not do: “So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as bowl of water: Remember.”

Briseis knows no one will want to record the reality of what went on during the war: “they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps?” But even so, Briseis, for all that she must bear, understands eventually that the women will leave behind a legacy, though not in the same vocal, violent way the men will.

“We’re going to survive,” she says, “our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams - and in their worst nightmares too.”

I felt disconcerted reading this and also very moved. As much as I love the Classics and firmly believe in it providing the foundational building blocks of our Western civilisation I also have to pause and remind myself that heroic behaviour, something the greatest of the Greeks are known for, isn’t anything admirable when viewed from the lens of the women they abuse. Heroism can be tainted by the dark side of one’s nature. However pure one soldier’s sacrifice for another can be, so there is the bestial side of us where the chains of civilised moral behaviour are unshackled and left to satiate our primal instinct for cruelty, conflict, and domination. Indeed what Barker does is be a much needed corrective because just as you think her perspective of the Greek heroes may be softening, she pulls back to remind you of Odysseus tossing Hector’s baby from the battlements, or Achilles’s casual butchery. “It’s the girls I remember most,” Briseis says. This then is a story about the very real cost of wars waged by men: “the brutal reality of conquest and slavery”.

In seeing a legend differently, Barker makes us rethink who gets to write history but also to remind us of our tainted human condition. There is no god in the machine to sort out most violent conflicts and situations with a thunderbolt here. There are only mortals, with all their flaws and ferocity and foolishness. And we all have to live with that but not I hope in silence.

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starcityhq · 5 years

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The streets are dark and empty. No one goes outside anymore. Everyone is afraid. NOVA agents prowl the streets at night—people say they abduct innocent citizens for information or leverage. People say they shoot first and ask questions later. The jackboots on the street is a familiar sound for everyone. Helicopters fly overhead with their spotlights, waiting to catch someone. People have been going to prison and disappearing. Everyone is afraid. Mutants and metahumans are being hunted. Heroes and vigilantes are being forced underground. No one is safe.

At last, it’s here! The plot drop we’ve all been waiting for—the announcement of season 2! There are going to be a few new things under the cut so we want to make sure that you guys are aware of some cool stuff we’re introducing!

Under the cut you will find a timeline of major events, starting with events that happened in game over the past two years and going through the two month time-skip. With the two-month time skip, a lot of new IC rules have been put in place and with some of them, there are ways for admins to get characters in trouble for breaking them! Any IC consequences are completely optional and will always be plotted out with the players before anything happens. This is just a fun way for the characters to get more interaction with the world at large in the game!

Thank you all for being so supportive all this time—this wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing members!

Now, without further ado, SEASON 2!

[ APRIL 8, 2017 ] — In honor of the ban’s success, the mayor invited every citizen to attend Star City’s annual masquerade, where there would be burning of vigilante, mutant, and metahuman memorabilia. During a power outage, the mayor was assassinated, rounds were fired, and the memorabilia was stolen.

[ JULY 15, 2017 ] — David Booth, mutant and victim of a suspected hate crime, passes away in the hospital after being attacked outside his apartment.

[ JULY 16, 2017 ] — News Channel 7′s broadcast signal is hijacked by the Joker. Magneto makes a speech to all mutants in Star City, encouraging them to stand up and fight alongside him. Mass riots follow the speech.

[ JULY 17, 2017 ] — Malcolm Brown, mutant activist and lawyer, is shot to death minutes before giving a speech against a mutant registry. Demonstrations continue throughout the city and many arrests are made. The interim mayor declares martial law and the National Guard arrives. Protests grow more violent and teargas is deployed. The National Guard is eventually able to disperse rioters and take back control of the streets.

[ SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 ] — The interim mayor arranges a charity ball and a silent auction, where all proceeds will be donated to mutant rights, in order to quell recent tensions. Citizens are encouraged to adopt a peaceful approach to change. While the charity ball is a success, many attendees return home to find their homes destroyed with inhuman force and hateful, threatening messages telling them to leave the city.

[ JANUARY 19, 2018 ] — The villains take advantage of the city’s recent vulnerability by choosing one night to wreck havoc. The interim mayor has taken a decisive stand against mutants since the break-in and is assassinated - presumably by Magneto - in front of a crowd. Joker and Harley abduct dozens of school buses and hold Barbara Gordon hostage to lure Batman to them. Star City thieves, including Selina Kyle and Dani Moreno, end up taking hostages during a high stakes robbery, and Harvey Dent and June Moone’s highly publicized and glamorous wedding is interrupted by the literal walking dead.

[ APRIL 18, 2018 ] — The seventh anniversary of the ban is celebrated in the historic Apollo Ballroom. When the new interim mayor declares the intention to move forward with a mandatory mutant/vigilante/metahuman registry, the protest outside intensifies. Just when it seems the situation has reached its peak, the ballroom doors slam shut and lock. Joker venom pours through the vents and the toxin takes effect. Some people become violent, others are unable to stop laughing, and the interim mayor is swiftly killed. Outside, Harley Quinn releases her hyenas and they attack. She is arrested, but Joker escapes. As people recover, Harvey Dent takes the stage and announces his candidacy for mayor, pledging to do what he can to stop the formation of a registry.

[ JULY 6, 2018 ] — There is a massive security breach at Star City Asylum and Tarasov Penitentiary, resulting in dozens of escaped prisoners. The newly formed Justice League and Teen Titans are the first to respond and contain the situation, but not before the escapees wreck havoc throughout the city. Despite efforts, some prisoners remain unaccounted for - most notably Harley Quinn and Jonny Frost.

[ SEPTEMBER 14, 2018 ] — While the most powerful mutants have left the city to eliminate a branch of HIVE, Star City has received a bomb threat. Evacuations are ordered immediately and citizens race to the bridge, not realizing that the bridge is the target. Casualties rise into the hundreds.

[ OCTOBER 16, 2018 ] — The time has come for the city to choose its new mayor and Harvey Dent is the victor by a landslide.

[ NOVEMBER 13, 2018 ] — Newspaper offices, including the Gazette, are set on fire during business hours, leaving some trapped inside. The arsonists have not been found.

[ NOVEMBER 14, 2018 ] — Local mutant shelter and clinic is raided and there are four arrests, including mutants Josh Foley and Laura Kinney.

[ NOVEMBER 15, 2018 ] — Star City Children’s Hospitals that will not admit mutants report a mysterious illness rapidly spreading throughout the wards. That same day, the National Oversight and Validation Association (NOVA) is formed. The purpose of the organization is to oversee and validate all mutant, metahuman, hero and vigilante actions in the country through patrol groups.

[ NOVEMBER 16, 2018 ] — A curfew is established in Star City. Residents must be indoors by 10 PM unless proper documentation is provided for a resident to be out after 10.

OOC RULE: The admins will be watching threads to see which ones are taking place after curfew—make sure to label the time of day somewhere in your thread!—and we will use a randomizer to select a thread for the characters to get caught. Consequences after that will be plotted with the players!

[ NOVEMBER 22, 2018 ] — A blanket ban on weapons (including guns, knives, swords, batons, nunchucks, and others) has been imposed in Star City. The only people allowed to carry weapons are members of law enforcement.

OOC RULE: The admins will keep track of threads where a character is in possession of a weapon. Simply having the weapon will result in a single strike added to the character’s record. If the character uses the weapon, they get two. Once a character gets to ten strikes, the character gets caught.

[ NOVEMBER 25, 2018 ] — A city ordinance allows any business to refuse service to any mutant or metahuman at their discretion.

[ NOVEMBER 30, 2018 ] — Anyone can be stopped and searched without probably cause in Star City. All law enforcement officials now carry power-dampening devices.

[ DECEMBER 2, 2018 ] — A new law allows for wiretaps on normal citizens. All online and phone activity can be monitored.

OOC RULE: The admins will keep track of any phone threads on the dash. If the characters are speaking about something illegal in game, the characters get a strike. Once a character gets ten strikes, they get caught.

[ DECEMBER 5, 2018 ] — The printing of pro-mutant, -metahuman, -vigilante or -hero materials is strictly forbidden.

[ DECEMBER 12, 2018 ] — NOVA agents have been authorized to use deadly force against anyone who resists.

[ DECEMBER 15, 2018 ] — Leaving the Star City limits requires special permission. Road blocks have been set up at the main points of egress.

OOC RULE: There are a number of secret ways to get out of Star City, but many of these are monitored. Any threads the admins see with characters leaving the city limits could potentially result in those characters being caught.

[ DECEMBER 20, 2018 ] — Mutants and metahumans are required to relocate to appropriate neighborhoods. Any powered individual found residing outside of these neighborhoods will be fined heavily and potentially arrested unless they find suitable arrangements.

[ DECEMBER 25, 2018 ] — Starting on January 1st, there is a mandatory broadcast by the president every night at 6 pm. Residents are expected to watch. After this broadcast every night, all TV channels and streaming services are shut down for the night.

[ JANUARY 1, 2019 ] — In-game date at the time of this posting. NOTE: Star City HQ is set in real time.

#starccountdown #starcevent #starcadmin #starcstarter #starcstartercall #[ save ]

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gordonwilliamsweb · 3 years

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Many US Health Experts Underestimated the Coronavirus … Until It Was Too Late

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A year ago, while many Americans were finishing their holiday shopping and finalizing travel plans, doctors in Wuhan, China, were battling a mysterious outbreak of pneumonia with no known cause.

Chinese doctors began to fear they were witnessing the return of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, a coronavirus that emerged in China in late 2002 and spread to 8,000 people worldwide, killing almost 800.

The disease never gained a foothold in the U.S. and disappeared by 2004.

Although the disease hasn’t been seen in 16 years, SARS cast a long shadow that colored how many nations — and U.S. scientists — reacted to its far more dangerous cousin, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

When Chinese officials revealed that their pneumonia outbreak was caused by another new coronavirus, Asian countries hit hard by SARS knew what they had to do, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Taiwan and South Korea had already learned the importance of a rapid response that included widespread testing, contact tracing and isolating infected people.

The U.S., by contrast, learned all the wrong lessons.

This country’s 20-year run of good luck with emerging pathogens —including not just SARS, but also the relatively mild H1N1 pandemic, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Ebola, Zika virus and two strains of bird flu — gave us a “false sense of security,” Adalja said.

KHN’s in-depth examination of the year-long pandemic shows that many leading infectious disease specialists underestimated the fast-moving outbreak in its first weeks and months, assuming that the United States would again emerge largely unscathed. American hubris prevented the country from reacting as quickly and effectively as Asian nations, Adalja said.

During the first two decades of this century, “there were a lot of fire alarms with no fire, so people tended to ignore this one,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, who acknowledges he underestimated the virus in its first few weeks.

In a Jan. 24 story, Dr. William Schaffner told KHN the real danger to Americans was the common flu, which can kill up to 61,000 Americans a year.

“Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison,” said Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The risk is trivial.”

The same day, The Washington Post published a column by Dr. Howard Markel, who questioned China’s lockdown of millions of people. “It’s possible that this coronavirus may not be highly contagious, and it may not be all that deadly,” wrote Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.

JAMA, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, published a podcast Feb. 18 titled, “The 2020 Influenza Epidemic — More Serious Than Coronavirus in the US.” A week later, JAMA published a large infographic illustrating the dangers of flu and minimizing the risks from the novel virus.

Dr. Paul Offit, who led development of a rotavirus vaccine, predicted that the coronavirus, like most respiratory bugs, would fade in the summer.

“I can’t imagine, frankly, that it would cause even one-tenth of the damage that influenza causes every year in the United States,” Offit told Christiane Amanpour in a March 2 appearance on PBS.

President Donald Trump picked up on many of these remarks, predicting that the coronavirus would disappear by April and that it was no worse than the flu. Trump later said the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic, even as the number of deaths exploded to record levels.

Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, worried — and tweeted — about the novel coronavirus from the beginning. But she said public health officials try to balance those fears with the reality that most small outbreaks in other countries typically don’t become global threats.

New sitrep out from Wuhan pneumonia outbreak. 59 cases between 12/12 and 12/29. SARS ruled out, but no other etiology identified. Still no evidence of H2H. https://t.co/b8ZdEGIzyJ

— Caitlin Rivers, PhD (@cmyeaton) January 5, 2020

“If you cry wolf too often, people will never pay attention,” said epidemiologist Mark Wilson, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Experts were hesitant to predict the novel coronavirus was the big pandemic they had long anticipated “for fear of seeming alarmist,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist advising President-elect Joe Biden.

Many experts fell victim to wishful thinking or denial, said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response during the Obama administration.

“It’s hard to think about the unthinkable,” Lurie said. “For people whose focus and fear was bioterrorism, they had a world view that Mother Nature could never be such a bad actor. If it wasn’t bioterrorism, then it couldn’t be so bad.”

Had more experts realized what was coming, the nation could have been far better prepared. The U.S. could have gotten a head start on manufacturing personal protective equipment, ventilators and other supplies, said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, author of “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.”

“Why did we waste two months that the Chinese essentially bought for us?” Christakis asked. “We could have gotten billions of dollars into testing. We could have had better public messaging that we were about to be invaded. … But we were not prepared.”

Dr. Fauci Doesn’t Cast Blame

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, isn’t so critical. In an interview, he said there was no way for scientists to predict how dangerous the coronavirus would become, given the limited information available in January.

“I wouldn’t criticize people who said there’s a pretty good chance that it’s going to turn out to be like SARS or MERS,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noting this was “a reasonable assumption.”

It’s so easy to go back with the retrospect-o-scope and say ‘You coulda, shoulda, woulda.’

— Dr. Anthony Fauci

Fauci noted that solutions are always clearer in hindsight, adding that public health authorities lose credibility if they respond to every new germ as if it’s a national disaster. He has repeatedly said scientists need to be humble enough to recognize how little we still don’t know about this new threat.

“It’s so easy to go back with the retrospect-o-scope and say ‘You coulda, shoulda, woulda,’” Fauci said. “You can say we should have shut things down much earlier because of silent spread in the community. But what would the average man or woman on the street have done if we said, ‘You’ve got to close down the country because of three or four cases?’”

Scientists largely have been willing to admit their errors and update their assessments when new data becomes available.

“If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong in front of millions of people,” Offit joked about his PBS interview. “Make a complete ass of yourself.”

Scientists say their response to the novel coronavirus would have been more aggressive if people had realized how easily it spreads, even before infected people develop symptoms — and that many people remain asymptomatic. “For a virus to have pandemic potential, that is one of the greatest assets it can have,” Adalja said.

Although COVID-19 has a lower death rate than SARS and MERS, its ability to spread silently throughout a community makes it more dangerous, said Dr. Kathleen Neuzil, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

People infected with SARS and MERS are contagious only after they begin coughing and experiencing other symptoms; patients without symptoms don’t spread either disease.

With SARS and MERS, “when people got sick, they got sick pretty badly and went right to the hospital and weren’t walking around transmitting it,” Christakis said.

Because it’s possible to quarantine people with SARS and MERS before they begin spreading the virus, “it was easier to put a moat around them,” said Offit.

Based on their knowledge of SARS and MERS, doctors believed they could contain the novel coronavirus by telling sick people to stay home. In the first few months of the pandemic, there appeared to be no need for healthy people to wear masks. That led health officials, including U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, to admonish Americans not to buy up limited supplies of face masks, which were desperately needed by hospitals.

Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! https://t.co/UxZRwxxKL9

— U.S. Surgeon General (@Surgeon_General) February 29, 2020

“We are always fighting the last epidemic,” Markel said. “Our experiences with coronaviruses was that they kind of burn themselves out in warm weather and they didn’t have the capacity to spread as viciously as this one has.”

Many scientists were skeptical of early anecdotes of pre-symptomatic spread.

“It takes a lot to overturn established dogma,” Wilson said. “Jumping on an initial finding, without corroborating it, can be just as bad as missing a new finding.”

As evidence of pre-symptomatic spread accumulated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April changed its advice and urged Americans to mask up in public.

I continue to be baffled that we keep making the same mistakes. It’s almost like we’re doomed to repeat this cycle endlessly.

— Dr. Amesh Adalja

Adalja notes that the CDC’s earlier advice against wearing masks was based on research that found them to be ineffective against spreading influenza. New research, however, has shown masks reduce the transmission of the novel coronavirus, which spreads mainly through respiratory droplets but can travel in the air as tiny particles.

Adalja said the U.S. should have learned from its early stumbles. Yet in spite of abundant evidence, many communities still resist mandating masks or physical distancing.

“I continue to be baffled that we keep making the same mistakes,” Adalja said. “It’s almost like we’re doomed to repeat this cycle endlessly.”

Some Saw It Coming

There were scientists and journalists who immediately recognized the threat from the novel coronavirus.

“We had to immediately react as if this were going to hit every corner of the Earth,” said Adalja, who began blogging about the novel virus Jan. 20. It was clear “this was not a containable virus.”

Adalja led a 2018 project identifying the features that allow emerging viruses to become pandemic. In that prescient report, Adalja and his co-authors highlighted the threat of certain respiratory viruses that use RNA as their genetic material.

The more Adalja learned about the novel coronavirus, the more it seemed to embody the very type of threat he had warned about: one with “efficient human-to-human transmissibility, an appreciable case fatality rate, the absence of an effective or widely available medical countermeasure, an immunologically naïve population, virulence factors enabling immune system evasion, and respiratory mode of spread.”

Although the CDC set the wheels of its response in motion early, establishing an incident management structure on Jan. 7, the agency’s early missteps with testing are well known. The outbreak escalated rapidly, leading the World Health Organization to declare a health emergency on Jan. 30 and the U.S. to announce a public health emergency the next day.

Adalja and other experts dismissed some of the Trump administration’s early responses, such as quarantines and a travel ban on China, as “window dressing” that “squandered resources” and did little to contain the virus.

“There was political inertia about the public health actions that could have avoided lockdowns,” Adalja said. “We let this spill into hospitals … [and] if you give a virus a three-month head start, what do you expect?”

In a Jan. 7 post on a website of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Dr. Daniel Lucey labeled the pneumonia “Disease X,” using the WHO’s term for an emerging pathogen capable of causing a devastating epidemic, for which there are no tests, treatments or vaccines.

Lucey, adjunct professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown University Medical Center, notes that the international response was hampered by misinformation from Chinese officials. “The Chinese government said there was no person-to-person spread,” said Lucey, who traveled to China hoping to visit Wuhan. “That was a lie.”

When China revealed on Jan. 20 that 14 health workers had been infected, Lucey knew the virus would spread much farther. “To me, that was like Pandora’s box,” Lucey said. “I knew there would be more.”

When the number of infected health workers grew to 1,716 on Feb. 14, Lucey said, “I almost threw up.”

Although his blog is read by thousands of infectious disease specialists, Lucey emailed a special warning to journalists and a dozen doctors and public health officials, hoping to alert influential leaders.

“I put this heartfelt commentary in my email and just got silence,” Lucey said.

Succeeding With Vaccines

At the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, scientists had studied the protein structure of coronaviruses for years.

Researchers had developed a vaccine against SARS, Fauci said, although the epidemic ended before researchers could widely test it in humans.

“We showed it was safe and induced an immune response,” Fauci said. “The cases of SARS disappeared, so we couldn’t test it. … We put the vaccine in cold storage. If SARS comes back, we will do a phase 3 [clinical] trial.”

Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center, asked Chinese scientists to share the coronavirus’s genetic information. After the genome was published, Graham went immediately to work.

“We jumped all over it,” Fauci said. “We had a meeting on Jan. 10 and five days later they started [working on] a vaccine.”

Although scientists knew the COVID outbreak might end before a vaccine was needed, “we couldn’t take the chance,” Fauci said.

“We said, ‘We have no idea what is going to happen, so why don’t we just go ahead and proceed with a vaccine anyway?’”

Although his team worried about finding the money to pay for it all, Fauci told them, “‘Don’t worry about the money. I’ll find it, you do it, if we really need it, I’m sure we’ll get it.’”

Health experts hope the U.S. will learn from its mistakes and be better prepared for the next threat.

Given how many novel viruses have emerged in the past two decades, it’s likely that “pandemics are going to become more frequent,” Gounder said, making it critical to be ready for the next one.

Of all the lessons learned during the pandemic, the most important is that “we can’t be this unprepared again,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, who directed the CDC during the Obama administration.

“To me, this should be the most teachable moment of our lifetime, in terms of the need to strengthen public health in the United States and globally,” Frieden said.

But Gounder notes that U.S. public health funding tends to follow a cycle of crisis and neglect. The U.S. increased spending on public health and emergency preparedness after the 9/11 and anthrax attacks in 2001, but that funding has declined sharply over the years.

“We tend to invest a lot in that moment of crisis,” Gounder said. “When the crisis fades, we cut the budget. That leads us to be really vulnerable.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Many US Health Experts Underestimated the Coronavirus … Until It Was Too Late

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It can be republished for free.

A year ago, while many Americans were finishing their holiday shopping and finalizing travel plans, doctors in Wuhan, China, were battling a mysterious outbreak of pneumonia with no known cause.

The disease never gained a foothold in the U.S. and disappeared by 2004.

The U.S., by contrast, learned all the wrong lessons.

In a Jan. 24 story, Dr. William Schaffner told KHN the real danger to Americans was the common flu, which can kill up to 61,000 Americans a year.

“Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison,” said Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The risk is trivial.”

Dr. Paul Offit, who led development of a rotavirus vaccine, predicted that the coronavirus, like most respiratory bugs, would fade in the summer.

New sitrep out from Wuhan pneumonia outbreak. 59 cases between 12/12 and 12/29. SARS ruled out, but no other etiology identified. Still no evidence of H2H. https://t.co/b8ZdEGIzyJ

— Caitlin Rivers, PhD (@cmyeaton) January 5, 2020

“If you cry wolf too often, people will never pay attention,” said epidemiologist Mark Wilson, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Many experts fell victim to wishful thinking or denial, said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response during the Obama administration.

Dr. Fauci Doesn’t Cast Blame

It’s so easy to go back with the retrospect-o-scope and say ‘You coulda, shoulda, woulda.’

— Dr. Anthony Fauci