Bad information vomited across social media is so prevalent that it’s even showing up in U.S. presidential addresses.

Newly-sworn President Joe Biden’s inaugural speech last week contained a bad piece of social media junk. Early in the speech he referred to the “once-in-a-century virus” stalking the country. He, of course, was talking about the Covid-19 pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people across North America, millions around the world.

There is no such thing as a “once-in-a-century” virus or pandemic. It’s nonsense perpetrated on Facebook and other platforms about pandemics occurring every 100 years – 1720 plague, 1820 cholera, 1920 Spanish Flu, 1920 Covid-19.

It’s petty of me to criticize Biden for referring to “once-in-a-century”. We all know what he meant: comparison between two horrid pandemics 100 years apart – the 1918 Spanish Flu and Covid-19 in 2020.

But there is more at issue here. The 100-year references perpetrate beliefs that these killer pandemics are rare. Many expect that once Covid-19 goes away, it will be many decades before we see another.

Pandemics no longer are rare. Thinking that way sets us up for another disaster of weak leadership and unpreparedness like the one we are suffering through.

There have been half a dozen pandemics in the last century – Spanish Flu 1918-20, Asian flu 1956-58, Hong Kong flu 1968, HIV-AIDS 2005-2012, SARS 2003, Swine Flu 2009. Plus, dozens of serious epidemics.

(Pandemics are epidemics that spread across many countries or continents. Epidemics are serious disease outbreaks that affect large numbers of people in a community or a region).

There are plenty of warnings that more pandemics are on the way. There were numerous warnings that the current pandemic was coming.

The Ontario SARS report gave warnings and recommendations roughly 15 years ago. The book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic gave the warnings in 2012.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates warned of it in 2015. Various research studies warned of it over the past few years.

Political leaders around the world shrugged and ignored the warnings, then responded with Milquetoast actions when they saw it had arrived.

Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who has trouble finding his hairbrush in the morning, bounced about like a ping pong ball in his responses to Covid. The result has been disaster; British cases closing in on four million, with close to 100,000 dead.

Little needs to be said about our neighbour to the south, a world-leading nation reduced to a garbage dump fire. Its former president, now known as Trumpinocchio, or Igor Trumpinov, simply ignored it, or called it fake news.

The Canadian response has consisted mainly of the prime minister daily standing in front of a microphone telling us the federal government has ordered tens of millions of Covid vaccine doses.

Canada ranks No. 1 in the world in amounts of vaccine doses ordered, but is far behind other countries in the number of doses administered.

Canada’s situation will get worse. Pfizer-BioNTech, currently the main supplier of Covid vaccine, has cut Canadian deliveries by 50 per cent for the next month or so. At the start of this week fewer than 90,000 of 38 million Canadians had been fully vaccinated and many of us will not feel the needle until summer or fall or perhaps even next year.

What has happened, and continues to happen, is a disaster caused by unprepared, unfocussed leadership. There’s little we can do about it now, except to wait for our turn to be vaccinated while following the advice of our medical experts.

We need to turn our attention to being properly prepared for the otic pandemic. We all need to become better informed about deadly viruses, what causes them and encouraging intelligent pandemic planning and stockpiling of equipment and supplies.

Most of all we need to ensure that medical experts are front and centre during the next pandemic while politicians are kept in the background, where they cannot muddle the communication so vital in serious disease outbreaks.

When this is all over don’t push it to the rear of your thoughts, because the next zoonotic outbreak is out there waiting to be spilled into the human population by some bat, monkey or other animal host.

#

 

 There is a story behind every published story, and a really interesting one behind Treasures of the Deep, a new children’s book by Minden-area author Irene Davidson Fisher.

Treasures of the Deep is the story of Ashanti, a young girl who wants to buy her grandmother a birthday present but she has only 75 cents. Grandma loves sea shells, and when Ashanti spots Grandma’s book about shells, she sets off on an adventure to find Grandma’s favourites.

The story behind the story is how Irene, who came to Canada from Scotland as a child, became a writer of children’s stories. She spent most of her adult life in business, forming her own consulting company.

Her business life included writing event scripts for conferences, speaking notes for members of boards and speeches for a number of politicians. But writing children’s stories was a dream – something for maybe off in the future.

About five years before she retired, Irene was flipping through an old magazine when she noticed one of those postcard advertising inserts. It was for the Institute of Children’s Literature, which offers correspondence courses on writing for children and teenagers. She set it aside, but didn’t do anything with it.

Some years later, after she retired from her business career, a good friend handed her an envelope. It contained the Institute of Children’s Literature postcard and a note saying: “Promise me you will fill this out and follow your dreams.”

She sent in the application and a sample story and was accepted into the Institute’s basic program, later graduating from the advanced program.

The story behind the story became even more interesting in 2011 when she and her husband lost everything in a house fire. Her computer, containing Institute assignments and stories, was burned but the Institute still had some of her work on file, and some of her saved ideas and work later became children’s books.

Her first children’s book, Robbie Raccoon and the Big Black Blog, was followed by the Best Present Ever and now Treasures from the Deep.

Each story has a message for children. Robbie the Raccoon is about listening to your mom; The Best Present tells how the best part of Christmas is about giving. Treasures is a lesson about money not being necessary for a special gift and never giving up when faced with a problem.

Irene donates $1 from each book sale to Autism Canada, which she describes as a charity “near and dear to my heart.” 

She also recently published online a flipbook poem titled Achoo, which gives positive messages to children about Covid-19. It is illustrated by her granddaughter.

She is working on a new book titled Percival Penguin, based on an idea she has had tucked away for some time.

Talking to Irene about her journey into writing and her books reminded me of a valuable lesson: the importance of getting children into the habit of reading.

Albert Einstein, a brilliant mind and a man considered by many to be greatest scientist of all time, is reported to have told someone:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Reading storybooks is a critical part of the growth and development of children. Children’s books are the homes of characters that young readers get to know and become like friends.

Books are doors to discovery, magic portals through which children walk into other worlds and meet other characters with different lives and different ideas. In practical terms, reading helps children exercise their brains, sharpen their imaginations, develop critical thinking, and of course improve language skills.

Just as important, reading helps to improve concentration, something much needed in a world of digital games and other distractions.

Most importantly, reading helps children develop empathy, which is the ability to experience and understand the feelings of others and to learn how to be helpful.

Empathy is something humans are not born with. It is developed. And, if you want to see what happens when it is not developed, watch the Jan. 6 insurrection videos of all the boneheads pulling apart the once United States of America.                                                                                   

                                              #

 So many people are dying in California. 

Almost 30,00 people in the state have died from Covid-19. Three dozen or more perished last year in the state’s 9,000-plus wildfires. Then there’s the roughly 3,000 deaths a year from gun violence. 

Tens of thousands of tragic deaths that are of no remarkable interest to people living in distant places.

However, three recent California deaths grabbed my interest, reminding me dramatically just how fickle life is, and how our lives are connected. 

A family of four was walking the Pacific Ocean shoreline when a rogue wave slammed into the beach. The dad and his two young children were carried off and drowned. The mom survived. 

My daughter and her family live in the San Francisco area and took some interest in reports of the tragedy because they go to the beaches. They probably had walked the scene of the tragedy, a beach at Goat Rock State Park in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. 

My daughter says rogue waves seem to be increasing and this is backed by a variety of scientific studies. But the Goat Park drownings were just another beach tragedy and a warning to be cautious about ocean beach visits. 

Just another, until I saw an unusual obituary notice in the Toronto Globe and Mail. 

The obituary was about Michael Wyman and his children, Anna, 7, and John, 4, who were caught by a rogue wave and drowned at Goat State Park on January 3rd. Why would the Globe and Mail publish the obituary for three Sonoma County people drowned while walking a California beach? 

Then it struck me. Michael Wyman was a Canadian I knew when he was a child. 

The Wymans lived in Ottawa not far from us when my family lived there many years ago. In fact, my daughter Marcella babysat Michael and his older sister Katrina. 

More importantly, a neighbour and very close friend of ours was Michael’s caregiver while his parents worked. Over the years he became like a member of her family, a third son and little brother. They remained close over the years. 

Time moved on and people went their separate ways. Michael was a bright young man, nurtured by a well-educated mom and dad and what had become his second family, our friends up the street. 

He got a terrific education, including degrees from Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto and Oxford. He earned a law degree, plus a Chartered Financial Analyst designation. 

He practised corporate law in New York City and was involved in promoting solar power projects. It was in New York that he met and married Sarah Brennan, a scientist who studies cancer biology. They moved from New York in 2017 to fulfill a dream of living in California. 

Michael drowned while holding onto his son and trying to reach his daughter. It was a scene described later as a horrid tragedy, but one marked with love and heroism. 

His wife and bystanders pulled him from the surf but paramedics were unable to revive him. The bodies of the two children were swept out to sea. 

Three days later, on the other side of the United States, there was another tragic scene – an American version of Kristallnacht, the 1938 violent attacks against Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, in a mindless smashing and looting spree that ended with five people dead. 

On one side of the country terrible misfortune marked with courage, intelligence and love. On the other side, tragedy marked by stupidity and hatred. 

When I think about those two deadly incidents I want to stand up and scream: Why? Why do decent, intelligent people get taken away? People with brains, training and positive attitudes that help make our flawed world a better place. 

Why do the stupid ones, whose only contributions to society are negative thoughts, negative actions and hatred, get to hang around trying to pull the rest of us down to their level? 

They are no use in building a better society. They are like the twisted timbers and broken bricks that carpenters and masons toss aside when building the best of homes. 

Why? There doesn’t seem to be an answer.