Flu Year’s Eve

Los Alamos supercomputer simulation

Once the pandemic hits, scientists disagree on how fast it will spread around the world. The WHO expects it could hit every country on Earth in a matter of weeks.⁶³⁷ Others imagine it may take weeks just to break out of its presumed Asian country of origin.⁶³⁸ Once it does get moving, though, some authorities suspect it will hit Western shores within one week.⁶³⁹ Others argue one day.⁶⁴⁰ Or 12 hours.⁶⁴¹ Once in a country like the United States, supercomputer simulations at the Los Alamos weapons lab show the virus blanketing the country “with remarkable speed and efficiency.”⁶⁴²

In 1918, the entire Earth was engulfed within weeks—and that was before commercial airline travel.⁶⁴³ In an attempt to model the spread of the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak (had it gone pandemic), scientists calculated how many travelers had passed through Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport. During the two-month outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, more than four million people left that single airport.⁶⁴⁴ Viruses now travel at jet speed.

The pandemic is expected to come in multiple waves. Based on prior pandemics, two or three waves of infection have been predicted, spaced several months apart, with each global surge of infection expected to last perhaps six to eight weeks.⁶⁴⁵ The second wave may be deadlier than the first as the virus fine-tunes its killing power.⁶⁴⁶

Imagine this scenario: “A gentleman checks into a four star Hong Kong hotel to attend a wedding. He seems to have a bad cold—coughing and sneezing—but actually has something much worse. The wedding ends. Guests depart. The virus coughed by one man spreads to five countries within 24 hours.”⁶⁴⁷

This is actually the true story of SARS, the closest the world has come to a pandemic influenza-like scenario in recent years.⁶⁴⁸ Within months, the virus spread to 30 countries on six continents.⁶⁴⁹ The WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response team later marveled, “A global outbreak was thus seeded from a single person on a single day on a single floor of a Hong Kong hotel.”⁶⁵⁰

The transmission rate of SARS pales in comparison to influenza.⁶⁵¹ “The world was lucky with SARS,” a top expert explains. “It turned out to be a dachshund of a virus akin to smallpox, and not a sprinting greyhound like…influenza.”⁶⁵²