Unknown

As 2021 draws to a close, no one knows the answers to the how and when for ending coronavirus pandemic, least of all the WHO and CDC. Now you dont't see it, now you do. It's an "unknown unknown."

All these questions whetted my curiosity. After delving into Mark Honigsbaum’s lively account of the epidemiological mysteries, I have learned a great deal from his book The Pandemic Century.

To his credit, we know no one can say for sure when there will be new plagues or new pandemics. And we are more often wrong than right. His narration of the last century's struggling against disease outbreaks speaks how we make downright mistakes, one in 1976 and another in 2003, one at Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, Philadelphia, and one at the Metropole, a mid priced hotel in Hong Kong. In both instances, scientists thought the world was on the brink of a new influenza pandemic, only to realise that’s false alarm and that the real danger lurked elsewhere.

Next comes one baby after another born with unusually small heads, with virtually no foreheads, when Zika virus hit Brazil. Unbeknownst to the public, the exceptionally high rate of birth defects has been triggered by a frightening mosquito-borne virus outbreak. Unfortunately rumours abounded that it’s all due to insecticides or vaccines. It's an all too common story. Similar conspiracy theory keeps repeating itself in history.

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world," Albert Camus had already warned us, "yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky."