Before the outbreak, there was a drama series that was very similar to the American show “24” called “Designated Survivor”. At the beginning of the series, the President of the United States, his cabinet, and all members of Congress were killed in a bombing at Capitol Hill.
Jack Bauer has leapt from being the Minister of Housing to becoming the President of the United States, while the sexy middle-aged woman Maggie Q portrays the detective who exposes the conspiracy.
In the drama, the American President was trapped by Russia and Ukraine who did not want to stop the war; several states experienced a very high death rate from avian influenza, and then the President was deceived by a pharmaceutical company.
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In China, there are many people who believe that the origin of COVID-19 is from the United States.
Because there are numerous conspiracy theories concerning the United States, and biological weapons are already an area of expertise for the American imperialists.
In fact, American laboratories have indeed created a virus, and it is the terrifying 1918 Spanish flu virus. This is an official admission by the United States.
Now the development of the COVID-19 epidemic is becoming more and more like that of the 1918 Spanish flu. This is bad news, but also good news.
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The 1918 influenza virus was extremely lethal, causing the death of an estimated 50 million people, chiefly young adults succumbing to pneumonia (SARS).
This flu miraculously disappeared after the major outbreak in 1919 and the minor outbreak in 1920.
Even fools know that influenza viruses will never disappear; the only reasonable explanation is that this virus has mutated into a less severe form of the “flu”.
Back then, DNA had not yet been discovered, and of course, there was no nucleic acid testing, so everyone thought the virus had disappeared.
But, what is the evidence?
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In the winter of 1918, in a small town called Brevig Mission near the Arctic Circle in Alaska, 72 out of 80 adults died. Obviously, the isolated Inuit indigenous people had little resistance to the virus. They were then buried in permanent permafrost, which served as a perfect morgue.
In 1951, 33 years later, a 25-year-old doctoral student named Johan Hultin heard about the story of this small town and applied to excavate the bodies. These corpses were well preserved in natural ice, and Hultin obtained lung tissue. However, at the time, DNA technology did not exist, and Hultin actually gained nothing.
After 46 years, it was finally 1997 when Taubenberger’s team published their sequencing paper on the 1918 virus that affected World War I veterans. Hultin, at more than 70 years of age, flew once again to the town of Brevig to collect body samples and submit them to Taubenberger’s laboratory. This led to the revelation of the true nature of the 1918 virus.
Preliminary sequencing results indicate that this virus is very similar to the oldest known swine flu virus, likely originating from birds or poultry infecting pigs.
In 2005, the complete sequencing of the virus genome was completed. The American government approved the reconstruction of the 1918 virus.
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Human technology has become somewhat frightening. Scientists have successfully cloned the deadly 1918 virus in less than a year and infected mice with a tremendously high mortality rate. The virus is closely related to today’s H1N1 virus but is one hundred times more lethal.
Perhaps, the current H1N1 flu virus is the descendant of the variant from years ago.
In 2009, H1N1 made a comeback and had a major outbreak again, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to issue a pandemic alert as the virus quickly spread worldwide. Fortunately, the mortality rate of the virus that year was not very high, perhaps due to the fact that many humans who survived the 1918 pandemic had developed immunity to H1N1.
It is said that one of the reasons why most of the deaths between 1918 and 1920 were young adults may be attributed to the fact that many elderly people had previously contracted H1N1 influenza.
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I read an interesting article about the situation in Taiwan during the 1918 pandemic outbreak under Japanese rule.
At that time, Taiwan had relatively complete population and mortality statistics. According to excess mortality calculation, the death rate of the 1918 virus was approximately 6-7 per thousand, which appeared to be much better than the situation in the West.
I don’t know if it’s because we love eating chicken or not, but we’ve been through avian and swine flu earlier, so we were able to prevent severe illness when faced with the 1918 pandemic.
Nevertheless, the shortage of medicine, overcrowded hospital rooms, and various news of celebrities falling ill continue to greatly enhance the panic among the Taiwanese people, leading to the widespread use of folk remedies and the fervent practice of praying to gods for miraculous intervention.
The author mentions a consensus in modern epidemic prevention: fear is more terrifying than the virus, and rumors require more prevention and treatment than the flu.
The symbol of the end of the epidemic is the subsiding of fear, even if the virus remains.
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This novel coronavirus is a new species to humankind.
We do not know how long it will take for it to mutate and coexist with us in the long term like the flu. If the experience of 1918 can be replicated, it may take 3 to 4 years.
Therefore, at least, Omicron has begun to show us the light of dawn.
Suddenly, I had a wild idea - why not make use of the current norm of nucleic acid testing and test for both flu DNA and COVID-19 in one go?
In that case, even the flu could be dynamically cleared, which would be a great achievement for society.