Why was the 1918 flu pandemic more frightening than COVID-19?

September 13, 2021 / COVID-19, global health / , , , , ,
The Spanish Influenza. Chart showing mortality from the 1918 influenza pandemic in the US and Europe. Wikipedia commons.

According to the CDC, as of September 10, 2021, 652,480 Americans had died of COVID-19. This is nearly as many as the perhaps 675,000 Americans who died in the 1918 flu pandemic. But there seems to be much less fear of COVID-19 now than there was of the influenza pandemic then, at least in some parts of the United States. Why?

Of course, the first point to make is that there was certainly denial and minimizing in the United States in 1918, which people used to justify holding everything from war-bond rallies to weddings. Still, after the terrible month of November 1918 this declined. Is the difference between then and now in part that we live in social media bubbles? I think that there is some truth to this, but there are a few factors that explain the different attitude that many people had towards influenza then.

In 1918, there was a “W” shaped mortality curve, as most people who died were infants, young adults and the elderly. Before the arrival of the delta variant, there was a perception that those people most at risk of COVID-19 were over 65, and perhaps their deaths were less shocking. In contrast, younger people felt relatively safe. In 1918 it was people in the prime of their life who were dying, as well as their children. This made people feel more vulnerable.

Today, people typically die in the hospital. In 1918, if you lived in a rural area -as did most of the population- a trip to the hospital would take time and might not be easy. More people were cared for –and died– at home. I think that this meant that people saw the results of outbreak much more directly. Today, the ill vanish into hospitals. Their suffering leaves nurses and doctors traumatized, but isn’t visible in the same way that the 1918 pandemic was, when family members and neighbors would see the bodies taken out the front door.

There were three distinct waves to the 1918 influenza pandemic. But the fall 1918 wave had a much higher peak in the death rate. Of course, the spring 1918 influenza outbreak was terrible in some places such as the military camps in Kansas. But by November 1918 the number of deaths was so crushing that denial was no longer an option in many communities. People were too busy taking care of their neighbors; everyone could watch the gravediggers. COVID-19 has been more spread out, which has changed how people have talked about it.

The US population was much smaller in 1918 than now, at just over 103 million people, versus 328.2 million. So although the total numbers of deaths are similar, the death rate was roughly three times higher a century ago. People saw much more death during the 1918 pandemic.

I also wonder if people didn’t have a different attitude towards medicine. The 1918 pandemic took place before most childhood vaccines, antibiotics, and modern therapies. People had more limited expectations for what a doctor might do. Now, it might be that many people expect that if they go to the hospital they will be saved, because they have often seen sick family members or friends healed in a hospital. I can’t prove this, but I suspect some COVID-19 patients are shocked when they find out that they will die. In 1918, people respected and valued doctors, but the life expectancy for men was 36.6 years, and 42.2 for women. People didn’t feel as invulnerable -and didn’t assume that the hospital would save them- because they were more familiar with death. In 1917 -the year before the pandemic- the second most common cause of death in the US was pneumonia and influenza.

Of course, in 1918 people relied heavily on newspapers and the government for information, whereas now people turn to social media. But I think that people were more familiar with infectious illness in 1918, and experienced the pandemic in a different way than with COVID-19. This difference perhaps helps to explain why in many states people seem to be much less afraid of COVID-19 than their great-grandparents were during the 1918 pandemic.

Shawn Smallman

Historical photo of the 1918 Spanish influenza ward at Camp Funston, Kansas, showing the many patients ill with the flu- U.S. Army photographer

New light on the mystery of COVID-19’s origins

September 9, 2021 / COVID-19, global health / , ,
Photo by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash

Over the last year and half there has been a bitter debate over the origins of COVID-19, specifically whether it began as a spill-over event from a wild animal to humans (the natural origins hypothesis) or because of an accident at a science facility (the lab leak hypothesis). We now have some new information to shed light on this debate. We’re all familiar with Freedom of Information Requests in the United States. These often don’t lead to the release of information, because in practice individuals or the media often have to take the government to court to get this information. That’s exactly what the Intercept did, and the results were worth it. The Intercept received 900 pages of documents regarding two grants, which they discuss in an article, written by Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl, “New Details Emerge about Coronavirus research at Chinese Lab.”

One of the key issues with the lab leak hypothesis was whether work with bat coronaviruses was being done at a lab in Wuhan, including gain of function work. Yes, yes it was, although there is a significant debate about what constitutes gain of function work. And it turns out the documents that prove this come from a U.S. based health organization called Ecohealth Alliance, which used federal funds to finance this research. This has been suspected for some time, but we didn’t have much information to clarify the details of this work. Now we know that a US researcher, Peter Daszak, had a grant to screen bats for novel coronaviruses. This in and of itself might be valuable research, if undertaken under adequate safety conditions. The work was done at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, not The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has received the most attention in the press. And there are concerns about the kind of work researchers were doing with bat coronaviruses. According to Richard Ebright, they were doing more than just infecting ordinary mice with this virus: “The viruses that they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell(s)’.” According to this article, the grant to do this work ran from 2014 to 2019.

I was initially skeptical that the work of the Ecohealth Alliance could have contributed in any way to a lab leak. But there does seem to have been a contradiction of interests in the early investigation of COVID-19’s emergence. Peter Daszak was one of the scientists who signed a letter to the Lancet on February 19, 2020 in which scientists denounced as conspiracy theories the idea that a lab leak began the pandemic. He also was part of the WHO’s inquiry commission that went to China in January 2021 to try to uncover the origins of the virus. Since he was involved with work at question in China, his presence would seem to undermine the potential impartiality of this investigation. More recently, he has withdrawn from at least one effort to investigate the pandemic’s origins: “Dr Peter Daszak, president of the US-based EcoHealth Alliance, has “recused himself” from the inquiry by leading medical journal the Lancet after he failed to declare ties to the Wuhan Laboratory of Virology, which was conducting research into coronavirus in bats.” The point is that the early investigation of the lab leak theory may not have been fully impartial, and key evidence was missing.

Some scientists say that what these newly-revealed documents demonstrate is shocking. As Richard H. Ebright (Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University) has said, the “materials further reveal that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses –one not been (sic.) previously disclosed publicly– was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed. . .”

We need to have better information on multiple questions: did miners in southern China (specifically the Mojiang mine in Yunnan) suffer from an acute pneumonia similar to COVID-19 in 2012? Was this pneumonia caused by a coronavirus which was then brought to a laboratory in Wuhan for further research? Was gain of function work with coronaviruses done at one or more labs in Wuhan, and what -precisely- were the biosafety practices and procedures? Was there a major move at one of these labs in December 2019, and what were the safety practices at the lab during the move, particularly for bats and other animals, as well as coronavirus samples? Were any employees of these labs ill with a pneumonia-like illness in November/early December 2019? Is it true that one U.S. based scientist, Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, heard of the outbreak on December 15, 2019, well before China revealed the outbreak to the WHO? If so, does this mean that the Chinese authorities knew of the outbreak, but did not share this information in a timely fashion, so that the world could try to prevent the disease from escaping China? Increasingly, the answer to most of these questions would seem to be a plausible yes.

As Alina Chan (a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute) points out, COVID-19 wouldn’t be the only example of a leak at a facility in China causing a significant disease outbreak. Elizabeth Shim’s article on this outbreak, “Brucellosis cases in China exceed 10,000 after vaccine factory accident,” is well worth reading. So we know that such accidents happen, including in China, at the same moment that COVID-19 itself emerged.

While we cannot yet know the truth, as others have said, it seems a strange coincidence that the outbreak began in the same city in China where -as these documents from the Intercept show- work was being done on bat coronaviruses. And how can we trust any denials, when much of the information that we had was not originally released by EcoHealth Alliance or the Chinese government, but rather by a small band of digital detectives scouring the web, as well as journalists, such as those at the Intercept?

Of course the lab leak hypothesis is not proven. Most epidemics begin with a natural cross-over event from animals to humans. But the irony is that if, indeed, the virus emerged from a lab leak, it not only did so unintentionally, but also because scientists were trying to study coronaviruses to avoid and prevent epidemics. If the lab leak hypothesis is correct, I can’t help but feel empathy for the scientists and funding agencies, which must have been horrified as they realized what they might have unleashed. But it is long past time for transparency, so that everyone can understand the data and evidence regarding whether a lab-leak in Wuhan, China began this pandemic.

If you want to see the documents (two grant applications) themselves, Mara Hvistendahl (@Mara Hvistendahl) has Tweeted the links, which you can for yourself here. The first one is the key document:

“Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence”
https://t.co/FrOP7tSs4D

“Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia”
https://t.co/YDmfbcHcoN https://twitter.com/marahvistendahl/status/1435180983754579973?s=27

I want to thank both Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl for their careful investigative reporting, and making these documents public.

Shawn Smallman, 2021

How to publish an academic book

August 25, 2021 / podcasts / ,

For over twenty years my editor has been Elaine Maisner at the University of North Carolina Press. I’ve worked with Elaine on three different book projects, including a co-authored textbook that is now in its third edition. So when I wanted to do a podcast interview with someone who could give advice to junior faculty members about how to publish their book, there was only one person to talk to. You can hear our conversation here at Dispatch 7.

Shawn Smallman

The strange, sad story of Ivermectin

August 25, 2021 / COVID-19 / , ,

Photo by Thomas M. Evans on Unsplash

Ivermectin is an old medicine used to treat parasitic infections in humans, for everything from river blindness to scabies. It is better known, perhaps, as a deworming medication that farmers and pet owners use to treat everything from cattle to dogs. The medicine has been used around the globe for 40 years. With the onset of COVID-19 -as people were desperate for some treatment, they have seized on different medications as a possible cure-all. The first was hydroxychloroquine, a medication commonly used to treat malaria. I first heard about this medicine from a neighbor, who told me that her spouse was obsessed with it. This was in the spring of 2020, when people in Boston and Cambridge were watching a tent being set up outside of of Massachusetts General Hospital to treat COVID-19 patients. People were desperate for a treatment. After being trumpeted by the Presidents of the United States and Brazil, a series of well-designed scientific studies showed that the medicine had no clear advantages while holding significant risks. As it fell out favor, people then turned to Ivermectin.

Of course, Ivermectin has been shown to have some antiviral properties. But so have many other medications. The question was- what was the evidence that it was useful against COVID-19? Very quickly my timeline on Twitter was filled with people talking about Ivermectin. The most common comment was perhaps that big pharmaceutical companies were hiding their knowledge about Ivermectin because it was off-patent and cheap. Dr. John Campbell -who has an excellent YouTube channel with daily updates on the COVID-19 pandemic- began to highlight Ivermectin as a potential treatment. An Indian state encouraged its use. Desperate people began to go to farmer’s Co-ops to obtain medicine intended for cattle for their use. Countries put Ivermectin into their national guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19, especially in hard-hit Latin America. People with Long COVID reported remarkable recoveries after taking the medicine. But what is the evidence for Ivermectin? …

The strange, sad story of IvermectinRead More »

Did a strange lab leak cause the COVID-19 pandemic?

August 18, 2021 / China, COVID-19 / , , ,
Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

In November and December 2019 a novel corona virus began circulating in China. The world -and China’s citizens- first learned of this thanks to a group of Chinese whistle blowers , including Opthamologist Dr Li Wenliang, who would ultimately die of the virus. These whistle blowers were denounced by their administrators and some of them -such as Dr. Wenliang- received a police warning. After he died from COVID-19 on February 7, 2020 there was a wave of popular outrage, and sympathy for his pregnant widow, which caused authorities to censor Chinese social media platforms. So the Chinese state sought to conceal the COVID-19 outbreak in its early stages, much as it once did with SARS. But where did the virus come from? And what do we know about its origins?

Wet markets have often been associated with the start of earlier outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as avian influenza and SARS. This makes sense because these environments bring together a diversity of wild animals that may carry unknown pathogens. Packed into cages in poorly ventilated areas, viruses can passage across the species barrier in a way that would be difficult to achieve in the wild. When the outbreak first appeared in China, many people first looked at cases that appeared to be associated with a local wet market. But as earlier cases became known, the tie to the wet market lacked strong support in the data, although a recent study perhaps strengthens this case.

Attention turned to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which reportedly had collected novel bat viruses, including some from a cave in Yunnan. Lab leaks have caused pandemics before. For example, in 1977 an influenza pandemic swept the world. Because the virus was nearly identical to historical samples from an earlier outbreak, there have been suspicions that it began as a result of a lab leak in the Soviet Union. Gain of function experiments -in which scientists deliberately increase either the transmissibility or infectiousness of an infectious agent have been controversial for many years for this reason. Accidents have happened.

Nearly a decade ago I was attending an influenza conference in Oxford, and happened to have breakfast with three well-known figures in the field of influenza virology. One of the people at the table was an outspoken advocate for gain of function research. This person’s work had attracted international controversy on this issue. He/she was an outspoken, confident person, who was more than willing to talk about the gain of function debate, and appeared to enjoy both the attention and the controversy. I thought that this person was eloquent, informed and generous in sharing their thoughts with a complete nobody like me. I was enjoying the conversation immensely. But as the discussion went on, another person at the table -a legend in influenza virology- became increasingly glum looking as he or she picked at their eggs. I felt increasingly awkward, and noticed that my charming colleague didn’t seem to be noticing their colleagues’ withdrawal from the conversation.

Finally, the gain of function researcher turned to another person -a German colleague- and said words to the effect: “You understand how these constraints are maddening.” And this German researcher said (as best as I can recall): “Yes, but I don’t do anything nearly as dangerous as you do.” One thing that I loved when I used to lecture in Germany (actually, I loved everything about Germany) was how frank my students were in giving feedback, and this response was true to form. What I took from the debate was the extent to which gain of function research worried even those people with the best practical knowledge of laboratory work with influenza viruses. As time has passed, there has been increasingly skepticism that gain of function research will produce knowledge at all worthy of the risks. But did the Wuhan Institute of Virology in fact have novel corona virus sequences, and -if so- what kind of research was being done with these strains? …

Did a strange lab leak cause the COVID-19 pandemic?Read More »

The strange decline of history

August 11, 2021 / academia, history /

I’ve written before about the long, slow decline of history as a profession, and what historians might do to reverse the trend. I graduate from Yale University with a degree in history in 1995. At that time, graduates perceived that we were launching into a difficult job market. We also believed that history was a foundational discipline in the humanities, and that the job market should get better. We had no idea what was coming.

My conversations with my colleagues in the humanities are often tinged with bitterness, as colleagues wonder: “how did the humanities become so utterly devalued.” These colleagues share a sense that the world has changed and things that mattered in another era –being well-read, the value of a liberal education, and research skills– have been tossed aside. These conversations often end with my colleagues condemning the neoliberal model in education, the reliance on student credit hours (SCH) in university budgeting, and the lack of respect that others have for the profession. But there are few innovative solutions offered. The conversations seem to end with people wondering how historians can help the provost to see the value of the humanities.

The shared theme in these discussions is that the problem is not caused by us; we just need to make others understand why the field is important. This is a dispiriting approach. Even the title of some of AHA’s data reports have a whiff of despair: “History Is Not a Useless Major: Fighting Myths with Data.” If you need convincing, please take a look at the titles of these reports highlighted by the American Historical Association.

I’ve not only become tired of this conversation, but also convinced that many of our fields’ failings are self-inflicted wounds. I’m not the only one to think this. I want to recommend Hal Brand and Francis Gavin’s article, “The historical profession is committing slow motion suicide.” In the United States, we need to ensure that our foreign affairs are shaped by a knowledge of diplomatic and military history, as well as grand strategy, which ties the field to key global issues. Yet as Brand and Gavin note these aren’t areas that most departments prioritize, even though these classes often still draw students well.

The field isn’t rushing to embrace online curriculum, and its aversion to technology is a long-standing problem. Historians perhaps even were slower than other fields to adopt email. An April 2006 report by Robert Townsend in Perspectives found that while “many faculty in the field report that e-mail is a mixed blessing as a means of staying in contact with students, the vast majority in the discipline now do so, as 82.4 percent said they use e-mail to stay in touch with their students.” Again, that was in 2006.

When I look at syllabi in Brazilian history shared online, most of them could have been written in the 1980s, in terms of their format, assignments, and content. How could so much time have passed, and so little have changed in the field pedagogically? Sometimes I feel that the focus on how others perceive history has left the entire field paralyzed. I don’t see historians leading the move to Universal Design in their courses, or the Negotiated Syllabus. But to be clear I also don’t feel that any of these weaknesses themselves account for the decline of history.

Yes, we as historians can do better. But that’s not the base issue. And the examples above omit the amazing work and trends that I see being done in the field, particularly by some of my junior colleagues. There is a larger trend apart from these failings.

History is fundamental. One only has to look at the political discourse in the United States over the last several years -issues of race, colonialism and imperialism- to understand why. Even in the world of finance, if you don’t understand Argentina’s financial history over the last few decades, will you make good assumptions when investing there or buying financial instruments? And how can one make informed decisions about foreign policy as a citizen without some understanding of history?

I recently received an email asking me to enroll in the American Historical Association. My membership has lapsed. The opening line had words to the effect “I know that our historical profession now is not what it was ten years ago. . .” What struck me in that sentence was the phrase “the last ten years.” It assumed that we all had a common understanding of what had happened in the last ten years, and that the change had been dramatic. Or even catastrophic.

I’ve spent a quarter century in an International and Global Studies department, and am more of a social scientist now. So I feel that I’ve escaped much of this sad saga, apart from hallway conversations. But when I read this email I wondered- what has happened with the discipline in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, South Africa and the United Kingdom? Is the decline of history a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, or part of a global trend? Would anyone in other countries start such an email with the words (as best as I can recall), “the history profession is not what it was ten years ago?” And if this trend is mainly in the United States, why is that? For all of our field’s failings, this has been a long and dangerous decline, which leaves me heartsick.

Shawn Smallman

The sticky intermediate language trap

August 21, 2021 / China, language /

I am a Chinese and Portuguese language learner, which is one of the great joys of my life. I’m currently somewhere at the lower intermediate level in Chinese. I’m studying around HSK 4 level material (old level), although since my tutors are Taiwanese my curriculum doesn’t match the mainland’s well. I love Chinese study, and typically spend at least an hour a day at it. But I also find -as most language learners do- that the intermediate language level has some challenges. I want to talk about those in the context of Chinese, and some advantages too:

  1. I sometimes have enough vocabulary to ask a question or tell a story, but not enough vocabulary to understand the response. It’s like playing ping pong, and I can hit the ball over the net, but sometimes I just stand there when the ball comes back.
  2. It’s difficult to see consistent improvement in your language ability. At the basic level, your language skills can improve significantly in a month. Those days are gone.
  3. Worse, your language ability can seem to fluctuate widely from day to day. I had a rough language class last summer. My teacher told something to the effect: “Sometimes you speak at the HSK 3 level or even higher. And sometimes it’s like you’re at the beginner level.” It was true, and I was struggling to understand it. I talked to me friend Kim in Applied Linguistics, who said that linguistic ability depends so much on context. Are you tired? Is it a topic that you’re not fully comfortable with? For some reason, are you and your tutor not having the best day? Your language level is not fixed but fluctuates, which we need to learn to accept.
  4. Yes, it helps if you’ve already learned another language. But that can also be a trap. I truly learned Portuguese living in an apartment in Brazil with my student roommates and their friends. My first four months living on my own in Brazil my language learning was painfully slow. But then in the next five -when I started living with my room-mates- my learning sky-rocketed, and felt nearly effortless. At this point, I’m not sure COVID-19 is going to allow me to travel to Taibei for my Taiwan Fellowship this fall. So I may have to continue learning Chinese outside of an immersion environment. Of course, that’s likely how most people in the world learn a language. So we need to keep learning strategies to stay motivated. But my main point is it’s not good to compare your ability or path in one language with another, which can be demotivating. In Portuguese my focus is currently on learning European vocabulary, slang and structures. But I want to stay with a standard south-eastern Brazilian dialect in my own speaking. These kinds of language choices are so far in the future with my Chinese that there is no point comparing the two languages. Don’t compare. What worked with one language won’t always translate to another one.

Of course there are some advantages at the intermediate level:

  1. With Chinese, it’s much easier to learn new characters, because most of them build on older characters. Oftentimes I can guess how to say an HSK 4 level word based on the characters, even if I have no idea of its meaning.
  2. I can begin to read stories. I’ve begun graded readers with “Journey to the West.” The first month trying to read was painfully difficult. Over the last few months it’s become dramatically easier. Even though my overall Chinese doesn’t improve in short periods, it’s possible to make major progress on sub-areas of your language ability in a time period that still feels meaningful. I’m not yet at a good enough level with my listening to follow Chinese-language podcasts, but I hope to reach that point in the next year or two. I feel that point -when you can really read and listen on your own- is when you start to make rapid progress.
  3. It’s possible to be more independent. I am beginning to think that I don’t need a teacher as much as a conversational partner. I can study textbooks, grammar and vocabulary on my own. What I need is someone who can help me to use what I’ve learned. I think that this takes some pressure off learning, because you can be more self-directed. Of course, for many people a more formal curriculum is motivating. I really needed that for my first few years studying Chinese. But I’m finding that I’m at the point that I don’t want to do any more homework with numbered exercises. I’d much rather discover a new grammar point while talking, and then go read about it on my own at the Chinese grammar wiki. This makes language learning more flexible and fun.

How do we as language learners deal with these challenges? I really respect Steve Kaufmann, a polyglot, who speaks Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and many other languages. One point that he makes is that it’s about spending time with the language, and not focusing on small victories or defeats. If you do, you’ll become dispirited. You won’t likely see much progress in the space of a month any more. But you will over a year. Kaufmann also argues that you need to vary your input method. If you keep focusing on just one approach -a tutor, a software platform, graded readers- you’ll burn out. I find this to have been really great advice, and try to consistently switch how I study, often more than once in a day. Lastly, Kaufmann says that you have to make language learning fun. Or you won’t do it. I actually think that’s the most important advice.

I always say the same thing about language learning. There are no short-cuts. You have to put in the time. Find a way that gives you joy; spend time with it regularly; and don’t take it too seriously. Just don’t give up.

Shawn Smallman, 2021

For language nerds- -if you are interested in how people learn a language -and the language acquisition model that many polyglots follow- I recommend Matt in Japan’s channel. You can see a brief video about Matt’s learning journey and experience here.

No Strategic Kangaroos: Postdoc opportunity in Australia

July 16, 2021 / careers, security / ,

If you’re looking for the next opportunity after graduate school, and you are researching either Asian Security or Strategy and statecraft, then perhaps you’re interested in a postdoc at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Bell School, which is housed at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. You can view the jobs call here. The salary is good, ANU is an outstanding university, and it looks like you’d make interesting connections. Be warned though, Canberra is inland so there are no beaches. It does have the National Museum, the Canberra Deep Space Research center and lots of other cultural centers, since it’s the capital. Canberra is also a real college town. You should do this.

Shawn Smallman

Photo of Canberra by Social Estate on Unsplash

Research and parenting in Haiti: a podcast interview

July 10, 2021 / food, pedagogy, podcasts / ,

I recently interviewed Prof. Marylynn Steckley about her experience researching food in Haiti for my podcast Dispatch 7. One experience that she talked about was being a mother in the field, and what it was like to give birth, to deal with inequality, and to address race while raising children. She also discussed how she had to deal emotionally with the fact that not only was she getting sick, but also her family was. I’ve long thought that one of the topics that we often avoid in International and Global Studies is personal health. If you go into the field in a relatively poor country for an extended period you are going to get sick. But graduate students are seldom warned of this, much less prepared for it, either practically or emotionally. Personally, I think that every graduate student leaving for a developing country should listen to the stories of someone like Dr. Steckley.

Marylynn’s son Jwasiys in Haiti

Although Marylynn works at Carleton University in Canada now, she was also my colleague for a year at Portland State University in the United States. During that year students flocked to her classes, in part because she had the ability to discuss complex and difficult issues with honesty and passion. In the interview she talked about her experience teaching a class on “Global Craft,” as an online course in experiential learning. In the course she brought together crafts people from around the world to talk about their expertise. Of course, most students at a public institution cannot pay many thousands of dollars for a carefully curated program abroad. As we also discuss in the podcast, some students have children, or disabilities, that limit their ability to travel abroad. But students can have an international experience that is still meaningful by learning from people in other countries. By the end of the interview I was envious that I hadn’t been able to take part in the class. Except for the Finnish showers. Hard no.

Marlynn’s daughter, Solette, with her friends Sarina and Fredjina

Want to hear more episodes from my podcast? You can find it here. The most popular episodes are Rosa David’s thoughts on how to apply to graduate school, Kim Brown’s discussion of tea, and Grace Dillon’s discussion of Indigenous Futurism. If you are interested in international careers, you might want to listen to this episode. Finally, for my Lusophone friends, you might like this Portuguese language episode.

Shawn Smallman

The warning signs in Hong Kong

July 7, 2021 / Asia, China, COVID-19, global health, Pandemics / , ,

In 2017 I traveled to Hong Kong to do research for a paper about the pandemic risks posed by wet markets (marketplaces which sold and slaughtered live animals). I traveled to wet markets large and small, and took notes on their practices and clientele. I also interviewed public health experts and doctors about the territories system to control avian influenza in poultry.

Card in a Shenzhen hotel, which explains China’s internet restrictions to guests. Sorry for the bad lighting. Photo by Shawn Smallman

While in Hong Kong, I also traveled to Macau and Shenzhen. When I crossed into mainland China, I was struck by the extent to which information was restricted. It’s one thing to know that China has a separate digital ecosystem. It’s another to no longer be able to use Google Maps, and to know that there’s no point in even trying to use a VPN to connect with websites at home. When I arrived in Shenzhen, I found this card in my hotel. You couldn’t access your files in Google Drive, check Twitter, watch a YouTube video, or see your kids’ posts on Instagram. The Great Firewall of China is  both pervasive and efficient.

While I was in Hong Kong, I also had an opportunity to talk to someone whom I greatly respected. At one point in our discussion they asked me “Do people see what is happening here in Hong Kong? Are they following what is happening here?” I said that no, in my opinion most Americans did not. In the United States people were focused on the new presidency of Donald Trump. She/he seemed very disappointed by my answer, and asked the same question again with slightly different wording. I gave the same answer. In 2017, I don’t think most Americans -and perhaps most Europeans- were carefully following what was happening in Hong Kong. That would change over the next year and a half. …

The warning signs in Hong KongRead More »

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