{"id":2457758,"date":"2020-04-27T22:48:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T04:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/john-colson-shall-we-all-play-pandemic-roulette\/"},"modified":"2020-04-27T22:48:00","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T04:48:00","slug":"john-colson-shall-we-all-play-pandemic-roulette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/john-colson-shall-we-all-play-pandemic-roulette\/","title":{"rendered":"John Colson: Shall we all play Pandemic Roulette?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Let\u2019s take a look at our newest global game-show, Pandemic Roulette, as dozens of states (including Colorado) and countries move to reopen their gasping economies despite warnings that doing so makes everyone more vulnerable to a second wave of infections of the novel coronavirus (aka COVID-19), which this week passed the unhappy milestones of nearly a million infections and more than 55,000 deaths in this country alone.<\/p>\n

The last time we played this kind of game was about a century ago, when the world was whipsawed by a similarly devastating and deadly viral infection known (erroneously, I must say) as the Spanish Flu of 1918-20.<\/p>\n

Back then, a virulent and deadly form of the seasonal flu virus infected some 500 million people, roughly a third of the population of the world at the time, and killed possibly 100 million, in three distinct waves. And while no one knows for sure where it got started (most experts doubt it started in Spain), the universally accepted fact is that the spread of the virus was accelerated by the packed masses of soldiers fighting throughout Europe in World War I.<\/p>\n

Today, thankfully, we don\u2019t have a named world war going on, though there are enough regional conflicts and wars underway that some believe we might as well call it a world war.<\/p>\n

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