Roy Speckhardt is the executive director of the American Humanist Association, and the author of Creating Change Through Humanism published by Humanist Press .

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As of this podcast, something over 2,000

people have died from Corona virus infections, all but six of them in China.

About 75 thousand people have been confirmed as infected, again, all but a

handful in China. Of the 29 countries that have reported at least one

infection, the majority have reported less than 10 infections, and as I say,

the 28 countries other than China with reported cases have reported a combined

total of six fatalities.

This is clearly serious. 2,000 people dead

is serious by any measure. We have the whole airline industry in chaos about an

apparently faulty aircraft that led to the deaths of a fraction of that number.

And the number of infections, along with the much smaller number of people dead

– the death rate would seem to be something around two or three per cent –

those numbers aren’t the whole story. Throughout what we know of human history,

there have been pandemics with terrible consequences.

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed

at least 40 million people, it could have been 100 million, we don’t really

know. To put that in context, World War 1, which had

just ended, which resonates through our culture, which is still taught in

detail in history classes, memorialized in thousands of locations across Europe

and beyond, World War 1 has inspired hundreds of novels, poems, TV shows, and

films not least the recent Oscar-winner 1917; World War 1 killed less than 20 million people over four

years. The Spanish flu, in just one year killed an absolute minimum of double

that.

So it’s worth paying attention to the

Corona virus not just because of the people already dead or infected, but