Large Fierce Mammal

Dr. Michael Ryan is hereby granted an F in bedside manner. (Source: WHO)

March of 1994 came at the end of a bitterly cold winter practically devoid of snowfall. Every lake, still-water, and bog was frozen to a depth of 18 inches or more, and the bare ground in forest and field was stone hard.

When spring finally broke over the flood plain surrounding New Germany, Nova Scotia, it came with a week of warm temperatures and torrential rain. The frozen earth couldn’t absorb the water, sending it down every incline to fill the LaHave River and its tributaries to overflowing. As water collected in nearby lakes, the thick surface ice lifted. So too did that covering streams running out of them. With the warming trend in full sway, the ice began to disintegrate into thick rafts ranging in dimension from a few feet square to that of a good sized refrigerator. Buoyed and pushed by the still rising waters, these began their inexorable grinding migration downstream until, arrested by shallows, narrows, and bridge abutments, they piled into impenetrable dams that left the water behind them nowhere to go but up and out.

At the time and place this played out, I was Director of Emergency Measures for the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg, and it fell to my authority to be Incident Commander for response efforts involving elements of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, several Fire Departments, Lunenburg County Ground Search and Rescue, Nova Scotia Department of Emergency Measures, and Nova Scotia Department of Natural resources air assets, as well as a few heavy equipment operators who, if they knew what fear was, never showed or mentioned it.

It took a week to first identify risks to life, property, and infrastructure, locate and relieve choke points, and follow up on bridges and roads that had been stressed and/or undermined to confirm if and when they could be returned to service. In the end, no lives or buildings were lost. A few bridges needed repairs, and a stretch of highway that had been free-floated by a sheet of water flowing across it under the pavement so it undulated like a recently vacated waterbed, had to be torn up, rebedded, and repaved. Beyond that, the biggest cause for concern was the persistent and steadily snowballing rumour that started on the second day of steadily rising waters — that I was secretly planning to dynamite the ice dams.

This came to my attention early on the second day in the form of a phone call from an irate citizen with whom I was both professionally and personally connected, and of whom I had never seen this wide eyed, desperate side. As it turned out, his house was located on the banks of the LaHave River many kilometers downstream nearer the Town of Bridgewater, where the water flowed wider, deeper, and therefore slower, than it did further north where the blockages were. He demanded to know if I was planning to blast the ice dams because that’s what people were saying. I assured him that I was not. He demanded to know if I was considering it, and again I assured him that I was not. In hope of easing his mind, I explained that while blasting an ice or log jam always works in movies, in reality what it does is put the life of whoever sets the charges at unnecessary risk, and at the end of it all, blows chunks of ice, or logs, up in the air after which they will land pretty much back where they were, albeit possibly more tightly packed than they were in the beginning.

“Then why are people saying it?” he asked, after a pause.

“People say a lot of things,” I replied, “I have no idea where this came from. It certainly hasn’t even come up in discussion with my people.”

“If you blast it, you’ll wash all the houses like mine into the river!”

“Even if it would work, that would be another good reason not to do it!” I said.

“You’ll let me know if you decide to though, right?” He asked.

“No need,” I said, “Because I’m not going to, but if it makes you feel better, I promise that if I change my mind, I’ll call you first.”

That satisfied him in the moment, but still didn’t stop him from calling me every day to make sure I didn’t forget.

I offer this anecdote to illustrate a long known similarity between emergency response operations that transcends size, scope, and threat level. That is, if the level of drama is sufficient to make the matter the main focus of conversation in and around the affected area, even the clearest release of information to the public will not silence the inevitable fear mongers, Monday morning quarterbacks, and conspiracy theorists. The hardest thing to combat in any of it is the definitive assertion that, if there wasn’t any truth to the rumour, then why would people be talking about it?

In my example, we closed some roads and bridges, and evacuated a half dozen houses out of fear an ice dam breaking on its own in the wrong place would take them off their foundations and effectively bulldoze their remains into the LaHave River (we temporarily lifted spring weight restrictions to move four D9 bulldozers into defensive positions to arrest such an onslaught if it did happen, and kept them in place until waters started to recede). Short of bad outcomes from acts of stupidity on the part of the citizenry, which were perpetrated absent consequence, but not for lack of trying, there was no real risk to life and limb for anyone who didn’t go looking for trouble. We issued twice daily press releases updating the public on situation, progress, and prognosis, and still the rumour mill had it that at any minute, The Dread Bastard Whynacht would show up overhead in the DNR helicopter, his finger on the trigger, and in one huge KABOOM would unleash a wall of water aimed at whimsically thinning the herd downstream.

Fortunately, mine was the issue of but a week before the world, or my piece of it anyway, returned to the generally held definition of normal. While the game was afoot however, most of the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments arose from thoughts, words, and potential deeds that had never been considered or uttered by anyone who wasn’t simply spreading the fear.

Moving forward to the current era of The Pestilence, we naturally see the same mechanisms at work as the citizenry sits at home in digestive mode between daily briefings issued by their respective Provincial health authorities and the Federal Government. Except unlike my example, the citizenry hasn’t been ordered to stay off a bridge or roadway until further notice and use alternate routes — this time they are told, with few exceptions, to stay off ALL bridges and roadways, and there are no alternate routes. And best of all, this time the rumour mill has been the victim of one-upmanship by something that has actually been said by a recognized authority. One who, while he wields no power to directly make policy affecting the lives of Canadians, is highly placed in an organization that has the ear of those that do.

I speak of Dr. Michael Ryan,  Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, and his recent speech that was part of the WHO COVID-19 virtual press conference held on 30 March 2020. You can read the transcript in its entirety here, and relevant lead in to Dr. Ryan’s remarks is excerpted below.

“When we come to contacts it very much depends on the context and the intensity of any given moment. In low-incidence areas where there are sporadic cases or clusters, we advise that all contacts should be quarantined. Ideally that quarantine should occur in a place other than the home and for this reason, one, because if that person gets sick they may already have infected their family.But that’s not always possible so at least quarantining contacts at home with good health advice about not transmitting disease if they become sick and with regular monitoring of that individual is an option for countries. It is difficult to do that in the middle of intense transmission where you might have hundreds of thousands of contacts because you’re having thousands of cases a day.

“It is difficult to deal with that, so home quarantine of contacts is acceptable with appropriate information, education and more importantly a very rapid system of getting those people out of their homes if they become sick. I listened to the President of Singapore this morning as he had a conference call with the Director-General and the clarity of that in Singapore, that ability not only to isolate cases but to rapidly detect illness in the contacts and remove those contacts should they become sick was a central part of that.

“As he said, they’re using apps now to do that, a testing app but they didn’t do it with apps in Singapore. They did that with community workers, with public health workers visiting the houses, checking on people, checking their health status every day and saying, how are you, have you got a fever, have you got a cough? And if a contact had developed a cough or a fever they were taken immediately for testing.

“So yes, we need the information technology tools, they help. They’re not the solution. Right now we don’t have an alternative to what we would have considered in the old days boot-leather epidemiology; public health practitioners, doctors, nurses, community workers working with communities to detect cases at community level. The most likely person to become a case is someone who’s been a significant contact of another case and at the moment in most parts of the world due to lock-down most of the transmission that’s actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household at family level.

“In some senses transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner so that’s what I was saying previously; the transition from movement restrictions and shut-downs and stay-at-home orders can only be made if we have in place the means to be able to detect suspect cases, isolate confirmed cases, track contacts and follow up on the contacts’ health at all times and then isolate any of those people who become sick themselves.“ (emphasis added)

This last bit has been torn out of the larger context and taken to mean that the WHO is coming for your children, and that should come as no surprise. The rumour smiths of the world must stand in awe.

In point of fact, all involved in drafting and speaking the words, eminently qualified to do so as they are touted to be, should have had the basic common sense to hear them in their most unfortunate interpretation and make their meaning clear. Landing on the ears of people who already can’t believe how effectively and instantly the hand of government has shut down the world as they had previously known it, it might reasonably be assumed that the words, “Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner ….” might be viewed through a jaundiced lens. One that might find no comfort in the explicit assurance that people who “may be sick” must be removed from families and isolated in “a safe and dignified manner“.

In truth, the WHO has no authority to do anything, and while I did say above that it has the ear of people empowered to make policy affecting the lives of Canadians, I would posit that, “The WHO said it was a good idea!” won’t make it past Parliament, let alone the last nerve of the Canadian populace.

I won’t lose any sleep about any dark designs behind this admittedly ham fisted, inconsiderate, and frankly bumbling utterance, nor should you. That’s not the same as telling you to forget it, or the creative buzzwords it came packaged with.