The P Word

PANDEMIC! Doesn’t that sound awful, like WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE? It’s just one of those words whose definitions we think we understand, but don’t. The dictionary says pandemic means “occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally large proportion of the population.”

There’s nothing in there about severity. In other words, if hangnails were contagious, and all of North America got them at the same time, that would qualify as a pandemic.

Did the authorities and the media panic the population? In the beginning, they did not know what they were dealing with in swine flu, and it was the fear generated by the uncertainty that caused the problem. Many media outlets that I watched bent over backwards to avoid blowing this out of proportion, but the little P word kept coming up.

A couple of years ago, my wife had a business trip to Miami, and I went with her. It was in August, and a tropical storm named Ernesto was bearing down on South Florida. The TV stations pre-empted all their programs and went into 24/7 disaster mode, as the storm was forecast for a direct hit on Miami at Category 3. Are you impressed that your local TV station has Doppler radar and neighborhood zoom graphics in its weather segment? You should live in Miami. You’d see each cloud bisected and trisected every way from Sunday. Their weather graphics would blow you away a lot faster than the hurricane.

At the Cuban restaurant Café Versailles, where we went for lunch, the whole building was boarded up, and we almost left until I saw a little sign saying “Abierto” (open) near the door. At our hotel, the staff took all the blades off the ceiling fans in the open-air bar. People scrambled into stores to buy water, batteries, etc. I have always been fascinated by hurricanes, and I was thrilled to be in Miami at that time (cheap adrenaline thrills at the expense of others, as described in an earlier post).

So along came Ernesto, but he miraculously fizzled to a weak tropical storm within the space of three hours. The TV stations no longer had anything to talk about, The NBC affiliate news staff said, “We’ll keep you updated on Ernesto, but now we return you to our regularly scheduled program: Fear Factor.”

As one local Miami ham radio operator put it on the weather net, “Well, they’re real good at tracking, but they suck at intensity.”

So were all these preparations and media warnings a waste of time? Ernesto could easily have intensified to a Cat 4 or 5 as quickly as it weakened. And that 3.2 earthquake that woke you up last week could have been a 6.9. The swine flu could just as easily have been 1918 all over again. Nothing wrong with a little fire drill now and then. And one of these days, we’ll just about get it right.

There, now I've said it.