The Patient Equation

16And Then, a Pandemic

The most astonishing thing about the pandemic was the complete mystery which surrounded it. Nobody seemed to know what the disease was, where it came from or how to stop it. Anxious minds are inquiring to-day whether another wave of it will come again…¹

While it sounds like that could have been written in 2020, as COVID-19 outbreaks spread around the world, it was actually written more than a hundred years ago, in the wake of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. It's from an article in the journal Science that was sent to me for some historical perspective by a friend and kindred spirit in biology and statistics, Dr. Rebecca Doerge, dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The piece was written by civil engineer George Soper, who initially gained fame by identifying “Typhoid Mary” as the source of the typhoid fever epidemic in New York City in 1906. “Until [the mass of statistical data is studied],” Soper wrote, “it will be impossible to give the number of persons attacked, their age, sex, condition and race, the complications and sequelae of the disease, much less the relations which these facts bear to the preventive measures.”²

Alas, in the setting of COVID-19, it appears that not much has changed—or at least not changed enough—when it comes to our ability to understand and prevent this kind of pandemic. Of course our medical knowledge has increased dramatically over the past hundred years, as have the tools available for diagnoses and ...