Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Opinion Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
That’s an old saying about an old clock. Truth is, if your digital clock is broken, it’s almost certainly just dark, and as a result, never right. Jeff McIntosh / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES COVID-19 antigen rapid tests.
But the sentiments in the saying are clear: predict an outcome often enough, and you’re likely to be right once in a while, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. This is all a strange way, perhaps, to be talking about the threats of new viruses and the chances of another pandemic. Look back at the not-too-distant past, and you can find a number of viruses that looked like they could have caused pandemics, but didn’t go global: there was MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome, which first appeared in 2012.
SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus caused a flurry of preventative measures in 2002-04, and actually reached a global alert status from the World Health Organization in 2003. The H1N1 swine flu actually became a pandemic in 2009, creating a rush on vaccinations, and killed an estimated 284,000 worldwide before the pandemic was officially declared to have ended in 2010. Viruses are tricky, changing things, and all of the ones mentioned above .
