Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Do You Want to Be President the Day the Country Falls Apart?
The latest distraction is the idea that that we should just let people die from the coronavirus. The argument is that most of the people who will die are old, and the thought - not always explicit - is that we would be better off without them anyway.
As I said, this proposal is a distraction. Lots of people are going to die in this pandemic, whether it is well managed or not. This is an extremely contagious, highly lethal disease. We currently have no vaccine and no effective therapeutic drugs.
The purpose of lockdowns is to prevent the collapse of the medical system. If the medical system does collapse, people will not receive proper care, and mortality will be much higher than it otherwise would have been.
In addition, once the medical system fails, the larger society will soon start to break down. We have seen this already in Italy. We have not seen it in China because we're not seeing very much in China.
This is only one of a number of distractions in the air right now. Let me try to vacuum some of the other chaff that's trying to clog the system.
Coronavirus deaths are currently lower than seasonal flu deaths. Many people have noted that the issue is not how many deaths we have now, but how many we could have in the near future. And we can bend that curve. But to come back to seasonal flu deaths - yes, they are too high, and that is because only half of Americans typically get a flu shot. This is not a scandal, but it should be. Unnecessary death should always be a scandal.
People are also pointing to the figure for traffic deaths, and saying that we all take that in stride. Nobody in the White Houses has apparently heard of the Vision Zero movement, which holds that all traffic fatalities are avoidable. Vision Zero plans to reduce crash deaths to zero, the only acceptable number.
It strikes me that the people in the White House are astonishingly ignorant, and in some cases stupid as well. They think of themselves as masters of the universe, classical Machiavellians, but they have no idea what a real disaster looks like.
I hearken back to an early meeting where the military brass tried to explain that a big part of their job was preventing World War III. The president's response was querulous and dismissive. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, Trump can't handle the truth.
See also Coronavirus, Travesty, The Cost of Delay, Dithering.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Dithering
There's something called the OODA loop. It was developed in the 1950's by John Boyd, who had served as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. It breaks down aerial combat into four pieces: observation, orientation, decision, and action.
In a dogfight, observation is when the pilot sees another aircraft. Orientation then follows: Is the aircraft a friend or a foe? If a foe, how far away? And so forth. Then, in the decision phase, the pilot writes his combat plan in his head. In the action phase he maneuvers and fires.
This template has been widely and successfully applied to a vast range of human activity.
For me, the most important part of the OODA loop is orientation. This is where people tend to get mired. There's a lot of data available to mull in the orientation box, ranging from a quick check of the fuel gauge to asking whether you're actually a pacifist, or maybe a Buddhist.
And while you dither, your enemy kills you.
I think that, in politics, ideology can be a prime source of dithering. Most recently, Democrats have been pressing the president to use the Defense Production Act, and he has waffled. There are those who have his ear who think we should wait for industry to do the right thing on its own.
You can claim that this is a principled position, but it is also a pretext to dither.
And ideology and dithering together camouflage a deeper issue - the lack of competent administrators in the White House. Trump has surrounded himself with people who are no better at actually governing than he is.
To borrow again from the military: We need to look at capabilities as well as intentions.
The upshot of all this is terrible.
"'We're talking about a president who is basically doing what Herbert Hoover did at the beginning of the Depression and minimizing the danger and refusing to use available federal action,' Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said Friday in an interview with the radio station WNYC. 'And people are going to die, and they shouldn't, they don't have to, if we could get the support that we're asking for.'" (New York Times, March 21, 2020. p. A7)
People tend to forget that Hoover was in office for more than three years after the 1929 crash. Roosevelt did not arrive in a day.
The only piece of good news that I have is this: There's an election in November. Until then, God help us.
In a dogfight, observation is when the pilot sees another aircraft. Orientation then follows: Is the aircraft a friend or a foe? If a foe, how far away? And so forth. Then, in the decision phase, the pilot writes his combat plan in his head. In the action phase he maneuvers and fires.
This template has been widely and successfully applied to a vast range of human activity.
For me, the most important part of the OODA loop is orientation. This is where people tend to get mired. There's a lot of data available to mull in the orientation box, ranging from a quick check of the fuel gauge to asking whether you're actually a pacifist, or maybe a Buddhist.
And while you dither, your enemy kills you.
I think that, in politics, ideology can be a prime source of dithering. Most recently, Democrats have been pressing the president to use the Defense Production Act, and he has waffled. There are those who have his ear who think we should wait for industry to do the right thing on its own.
You can claim that this is a principled position, but it is also a pretext to dither.
And ideology and dithering together camouflage a deeper issue - the lack of competent administrators in the White House. Trump has surrounded himself with people who are no better at actually governing than he is.
To borrow again from the military: We need to look at capabilities as well as intentions.
The upshot of all this is terrible.
"'We're talking about a president who is basically doing what Herbert Hoover did at the beginning of the Depression and minimizing the danger and refusing to use available federal action,' Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said Friday in an interview with the radio station WNYC. 'And people are going to die, and they shouldn't, they don't have to, if we could get the support that we're asking for.'" (New York Times, March 21, 2020. p. A7)
People tend to forget that Hoover was in office for more than three years after the 1929 crash. Roosevelt did not arrive in a day.
The only piece of good news that I have is this: There's an election in November. Until then, God help us.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Jersey Homesteads
A Garden City via the Bauhaus
While researching photos for another story I stumbled across this little gem by Dorothea Lange from June 1936. It shows a play street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
The Resettlement Administration, an arm of the federal government, was moving 250 families from New York City to a new development on farmland near Hightstown, New Jersey. The new town, originally called the Hightstown Project, was soon named Jersey Homesteads; later, after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the town was renamed Roosevelt.
Lange's photo is intended to show the poor living conditions that the migrants were leaving. Arthur Rothstein had the same assignment, but in the Bronx. Here's one of his shots, from December 1936.
I'm not sure that the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration on September 1, 1937, entirely got what it wanted from these photographs. Certainly they're gritty. And horse-drawn wagons at the time were probably considered obsolescent rather than quaint. But Lange's play street is a nod to the many things that the city government was doing to try make the city's slums a bit nicer. (New York City's play streets date back to 1914. For a story, click here.)
Still, the government thought that a move to the country, with all that fresh air and greenery, would be a good alternative to tenement dwelling, and so it purchased approximately 1,200 acres of land in New Jersey's Monmouth County, about midway between New York and Philadelphia, and on August 5, 1935, work started on the project, which would in time have 200 homes (a reduction from the 250 figure in Lange's photo caption), a factory, a 500-acre farm, water supply and sewer systems, and other structures. The first families moved in on July 10, 1936. (For a description of Jersey Homesteads in its early days, see this typewritten, undated document from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)
The factory officially opened on August 2. It was a garment factory. To use real-estate lingo, the target market for Jersey Homesteads was Jewish needle workers in New York and Philadelphia. Russell Lee was one of the RA/FSA photographers who helped to document the new town in its early days. Here's a shot he took of one of the factory workers.
Jersey Homesteads was only one of many resettlement communities the government created around the country. Perhaps the most famous is Greenbelt, Maryland. In Pennsylvania there was Westmoreland Homesteads, now Norvelt, in Westmoreland County, southeast of Pittsburgh. (The name Norvelt was constructed from pieces of Eleanor Roosevelt's name.)
Jersey Homesteads was blessed to have two highly capable architects - Alfred Kastner as principal architect and Louis Kahn as his assistant. There is some conversation about who should receive the most credit for the remarkable buildings that went up. I don't have an opinion on this. (For more on the design and the designers, click here.)
Here's a shot of one of the houses.
Of course I have an opinion. Both designers were strongly influenced by the Bauhaus, and the buildings at Jersey Homesteads show the same influence - the large windows and flat roofs give the game away immediately. So it's possible that what we're seeing is the result of an effective collaboration - two good designers with the same approach, building on one another's ideas. (The University of Pennsylvania has a number of Kahn's sketches for the project. They don't settle the argument, but they're a lot of fun to look at.)
The layout of Jersey Homesteads was strongly influenced by the garden city movement. Ebenezer Howard developed the idea of the garden city in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the ills of the nineteenth century industrial city. The basic concept was to reverse the existing flow of population from the countryside to the city by building small, self-contained cities in agricultural areas. The cities would not be suburban bedroom communities. Rather, they would provide housing, employment, and food production in one organic, self-sufficient entity. The large green belt around the central city was to remain and not be used as a place to build new factories or housing. Several garden cities were built in England in the early twentieth century, and Jersey Homesteads, as built, should be seen as a little American cousin to these English originals.
Jersey Homesteads was organized as a series of cooperatives - most notably the factory coop, the farm coop, and the consumer coop, where the main thing was a grocery store. As often happens with utopian experiments, the coops failed - pretty quickly, actually.
The original idea had been for people to live, work, shop, and socialize mainly within the town. And in the beginning, there were very few cars. This changed when people needed to commute daily to jobs in other towns. Personally, I think the cars would have come anyway. Jersey Homesteads was too small to support much retail beyond the equivalent of a rural general store. And so the town found itself joining the larger region of central New Jersey. After World War II, when the federal government put the construction of commuter bedroom communities on steroids, farmland was rapidly absorbed into the expanding suburban world, and the original garden city idea of a relatively self-contained community surrounded by green space became less and less tenable.
So, in addition to the push from the inside to be more connected to the outside world, Jersey Homesteads came under sustained pressure from the outside world to conform to the evolving suburban model.
But Jersey Homesteads did not become just another bedroom subdivision. Its early history as a homesteading community organized around a series of coops, coupled with a built environment that was not exactly a bunch of Cape Cods, certainly created an atmosphere conducive to a slightly different path.
A turning point came early, in the form Ben Shahn, who painted a mural for the combined community center and elementary school. Howard Greenfeld, on pages 140-142 of his Ben Shahn (1998), reports that, after a lengthy preparatory period, Shahn started work on the mural in November 1937 and completed work in May 1938. There is some disagreement on the dating, but Shahn spent much of the summer of 1937 working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, traveling to a number of eastern states. And during the summer of 1938 he was again photographing, this time in Ohio for the Farm Security Administration (pp. 145-148).
He also took pictures of preparatory work for the mural in Jersey Homesteads. Here is one of his shots.
The FSA archive dates these photos as 1935-1936, with a question mark. I think 1937-1938 would be a better dating. Arthur Rothstein photographed what appears to be the completed mural. These pictures are dated May 1938. (To see Shahn's and Rothstein's photographs, click here.)
Shahn had worked on a number of mural projects previously; Jersey Homesteads, however, was his first completed mural.
Shahn moved to Jersey Homesteads in 1939, and soon the settlement found itself home to a small artists' colony. Shahn himself was often away, traveling on work or for pleasure, but this was his home until he died in 1969. (For the date of Shahn's move to Jersey Homesteads, see Deborah Martin Kao et al., Ben Shahn's New York, 2000, pp. 15, 91.)
Among the artists and writers who came to Roosevelt was another FSA photographer, Edwin Rosskam, who moved there in the spring of 1953. In 1972 he published a combined memoir and oral history entitled Roosevelt, New Jersey: Big Dreams in a Small Town & What Time Did to Them. Looking back over decades of success and failure, and failure breeding success, he has this to say on page 31 about the science of town planning: "Our town can serve as a warning. Because here nothing developed as planned. The community found its own form and feeling, perversely, you might say, to become something nobody could possibly have foreseen."
For a good recent story on the town, click here.
Here's an interesting collection of materials about Roosevelt and Shahn's mural that Princeton University's library put online in 2018. See particularly the video at the very end, featuring interviews with a number of long-time residents.
See also I'm Haunted by Ben Shahn.
 |
| 6th Street and Avenue C, New York City. Dorothea Lange/FSA, June 1936. |
While researching photos for another story I stumbled across this little gem by Dorothea Lange from June 1936. It shows a play street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
The Resettlement Administration, an arm of the federal government, was moving 250 families from New York City to a new development on farmland near Hightstown, New Jersey. The new town, originally called the Hightstown Project, was soon named Jersey Homesteads; later, after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the town was renamed Roosevelt.
Lange's photo is intended to show the poor living conditions that the migrants were leaving. Arthur Rothstein had the same assignment, but in the Bronx. Here's one of his shots, from December 1936.
 |
| Shopping street in the Bronx. Arthur Rothstein/FSA, Dec. 1936. |
I'm not sure that the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration on September 1, 1937, entirely got what it wanted from these photographs. Certainly they're gritty. And horse-drawn wagons at the time were probably considered obsolescent rather than quaint. But Lange's play street is a nod to the many things that the city government was doing to try make the city's slums a bit nicer. (New York City's play streets date back to 1914. For a story, click here.)
Still, the government thought that a move to the country, with all that fresh air and greenery, would be a good alternative to tenement dwelling, and so it purchased approximately 1,200 acres of land in New Jersey's Monmouth County, about midway between New York and Philadelphia, and on August 5, 1935, work started on the project, which would in time have 200 homes (a reduction from the 250 figure in Lange's photo caption), a factory, a 500-acre farm, water supply and sewer systems, and other structures. The first families moved in on July 10, 1936. (For a description of Jersey Homesteads in its early days, see this typewritten, undated document from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)
The factory officially opened on August 2. It was a garment factory. To use real-estate lingo, the target market for Jersey Homesteads was Jewish needle workers in New York and Philadelphia. Russell Lee was one of the RA/FSA photographers who helped to document the new town in its early days. Here's a shot he took of one of the factory workers.
 |
| Barry Leving in the factory. Russell Lee/FSA, Nov. 1936. |
Jersey Homesteads was only one of many resettlement communities the government created around the country. Perhaps the most famous is Greenbelt, Maryland. In Pennsylvania there was Westmoreland Homesteads, now Norvelt, in Westmoreland County, southeast of Pittsburgh. (The name Norvelt was constructed from pieces of Eleanor Roosevelt's name.)
Jersey Homesteads was blessed to have two highly capable architects - Alfred Kastner as principal architect and Louis Kahn as his assistant. There is some conversation about who should receive the most credit for the remarkable buildings that went up. I don't have an opinion on this. (For more on the design and the designers, click here.)
Here's a shot of one of the houses.
 |
| Model house near completion. Dorothea Lange/FSA, June 1936. |
Of course I have an opinion. Both designers were strongly influenced by the Bauhaus, and the buildings at Jersey Homesteads show the same influence - the large windows and flat roofs give the game away immediately. So it's possible that what we're seeing is the result of an effective collaboration - two good designers with the same approach, building on one another's ideas. (The University of Pennsylvania has a number of Kahn's sketches for the project. They don't settle the argument, but they're a lot of fun to look at.)
The layout of Jersey Homesteads was strongly influenced by the garden city movement. Ebenezer Howard developed the idea of the garden city in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the ills of the nineteenth century industrial city. The basic concept was to reverse the existing flow of population from the countryside to the city by building small, self-contained cities in agricultural areas. The cities would not be suburban bedroom communities. Rather, they would provide housing, employment, and food production in one organic, self-sufficient entity. The large green belt around the central city was to remain and not be used as a place to build new factories or housing. Several garden cities were built in England in the early twentieth century, and Jersey Homesteads, as built, should be seen as a little American cousin to these English originals.
Jersey Homesteads was organized as a series of cooperatives - most notably the factory coop, the farm coop, and the consumer coop, where the main thing was a grocery store. As often happens with utopian experiments, the coops failed - pretty quickly, actually.
The original idea had been for people to live, work, shop, and socialize mainly within the town. And in the beginning, there were very few cars. This changed when people needed to commute daily to jobs in other towns. Personally, I think the cars would have come anyway. Jersey Homesteads was too small to support much retail beyond the equivalent of a rural general store. And so the town found itself joining the larger region of central New Jersey. After World War II, when the federal government put the construction of commuter bedroom communities on steroids, farmland was rapidly absorbed into the expanding suburban world, and the original garden city idea of a relatively self-contained community surrounded by green space became less and less tenable.
So, in addition to the push from the inside to be more connected to the outside world, Jersey Homesteads came under sustained pressure from the outside world to conform to the evolving suburban model.
But Jersey Homesteads did not become just another bedroom subdivision. Its early history as a homesteading community organized around a series of coops, coupled with a built environment that was not exactly a bunch of Cape Cods, certainly created an atmosphere conducive to a slightly different path.
A turning point came early, in the form Ben Shahn, who painted a mural for the combined community center and elementary school. Howard Greenfeld, on pages 140-142 of his Ben Shahn (1998), reports that, after a lengthy preparatory period, Shahn started work on the mural in November 1937 and completed work in May 1938. There is some disagreement on the dating, but Shahn spent much of the summer of 1937 working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, traveling to a number of eastern states. And during the summer of 1938 he was again photographing, this time in Ohio for the Farm Security Administration (pp. 145-148).
He also took pictures of preparatory work for the mural in Jersey Homesteads. Here is one of his shots.
 |
| Preparing mortar for the fresco. Ben Shahn/FSA. |
The FSA archive dates these photos as 1935-1936, with a question mark. I think 1937-1938 would be a better dating. Arthur Rothstein photographed what appears to be the completed mural. These pictures are dated May 1938. (To see Shahn's and Rothstein's photographs, click here.)
Shahn had worked on a number of mural projects previously; Jersey Homesteads, however, was his first completed mural.
Shahn moved to Jersey Homesteads in 1939, and soon the settlement found itself home to a small artists' colony. Shahn himself was often away, traveling on work or for pleasure, but this was his home until he died in 1969. (For the date of Shahn's move to Jersey Homesteads, see Deborah Martin Kao et al., Ben Shahn's New York, 2000, pp. 15, 91.)
Among the artists and writers who came to Roosevelt was another FSA photographer, Edwin Rosskam, who moved there in the spring of 1953. In 1972 he published a combined memoir and oral history entitled Roosevelt, New Jersey: Big Dreams in a Small Town & What Time Did to Them. Looking back over decades of success and failure, and failure breeding success, he has this to say on page 31 about the science of town planning: "Our town can serve as a warning. Because here nothing developed as planned. The community found its own form and feeling, perversely, you might say, to become something nobody could possibly have foreseen."
For a good recent story on the town, click here.
Here's an interesting collection of materials about Roosevelt and Shahn's mural that Princeton University's library put online in 2018. See particularly the video at the very end, featuring interviews with a number of long-time residents.
See also I'm Haunted by Ben Shahn.
Friday, March 13, 2020
The Cost of Delay
Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow
"The weather was so fine and the temperature so mild that even the natives were amazed. It seemed as if even the seasons were conspiring to deceive the Emperor. Every day His Majesty remarked very pointedly, when I was present, that the autumn at Moscow was finer and even warmer than at Fontainebleau. He rode horseback every day, and I do not think he once went out without ironically comparing the weather and the temperature with that of France, or without adding, as he hummed one of the old airs to which he adapted catch-phrases or apt verses: "A traveller lies with the greatest of ease" - A beau mentir qui vient de loin. Then, for fear that this allusion was not sufficiently pointed, he would sometimes add, remarking on the bright sunshine, "So this is the terrible Russian winter that Monsieur de Caulaincourt frightens children with."
- Armand de Caulaincourt, With Napoleon in Russia (1935) pp. 139-140.
For more on the ensuing debacle, click here.
"The weather was so fine and the temperature so mild that even the natives were amazed. It seemed as if even the seasons were conspiring to deceive the Emperor. Every day His Majesty remarked very pointedly, when I was present, that the autumn at Moscow was finer and even warmer than at Fontainebleau. He rode horseback every day, and I do not think he once went out without ironically comparing the weather and the temperature with that of France, or without adding, as he hummed one of the old airs to which he adapted catch-phrases or apt verses: "A traveller lies with the greatest of ease" - A beau mentir qui vient de loin. Then, for fear that this allusion was not sufficiently pointed, he would sometimes add, remarking on the bright sunshine, "So this is the terrible Russian winter that Monsieur de Caulaincourt frightens children with."
- Armand de Caulaincourt, With Napoleon in Russia (1935) pp. 139-140.
For more on the ensuing debacle, click here.
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Travesty
Years ago I was in Charleston, South Carolina, on business, and one night a colleague and I went to the local baseball park to watch two minor league teams play. After several innings of relatively uneventful play, we got to see something that I had never seen before, and have not seen since. On the third strike the catcher dropped the ball, the batter ran for first, the catcher threw wild, the right fielder had trouble with the ball, the runner rounded first and headed to second, the throw to second was wild, and the runner headed for third. At this point, as I recall, the runner found himself in a rundown situation. The third baseman, however, was impatient and made a wild throw to second, and the runner went home. A batter had just stolen four bases.
My colleague, who was also a friend, and I found this both amusing and unsettling. Certainly we had a story to tell. After a little while we decided to leave; there was no way anything could top what we had just seen, and watching the game continue was actually becoming a bit painful.
I hadn't thought of this evening in years, but watching Messrs. Trump and Pence attempt to deal with the coronavirus brought that balmy evening in Charleston forcefully back to mind.
I'm not going to list all the mistakes I think our leaders have made. Instead, I want to focus on two thoughts that I think are not getting enough attention. Both are based on my impression that this virus is different from anything we have seen before, and my further impression that we really don't have a good understanding yet of how it is different.
First, I think the emphasis on death rates is at this point essentially a distraction. Death total, yes, I think we should be watching those numbers carefully. But a death rate is a fraction: number of deaths over number of infections. And we simply have no idea how many infections there are. Frankly, we don't even seem to be trying very hard to find out.
There are a large number of infected people who have no symptoms. Others have very mild symptoms, and the president seems to think it's just fine for these people to go to work.
I think the various measures taken to contain the virus are good as far as they go, but I also think we need to be clear-eyed about what we can reasonably expect them to do. We can slow the wave, and this is very important. If too many people get sick all at once, the medical system will collapse, and shortly after that, society itself will start to collapse. We know this from the history of epidemics, which is quite grim. I'm not going to go into details here.
But, as things now stand, I don't see how we are going to stop the coronavirus until we have a vaccine. The asymptomatics and the mildly ill will be going about their daily rounds, and they will be continuing to infect others. And some of the newly infected will die.
Make the denominator big enough, and the numerator can look relatively low, even when a great many people are dying.
Second, what happens if some of the asymptomatic carriers continue to harbor the virus in their bodies for long periods of time? There seems to be an assumption that, in all cases, the virus will run its course in a relatively brief period, and the surviving patient will then be disease-free and not contagious.
Many bugs can hide out in the human body for years. This is where shingles comes from. And I've mentioned Typhoid Mary to a number of people. Over the course of her career as a cook she infected at least 122 people, of whom five died. (For a story on Typhoid Mary, click here.)
My colleague, who was also a friend, and I found this both amusing and unsettling. Certainly we had a story to tell. After a little while we decided to leave; there was no way anything could top what we had just seen, and watching the game continue was actually becoming a bit painful.
I hadn't thought of this evening in years, but watching Messrs. Trump and Pence attempt to deal with the coronavirus brought that balmy evening in Charleston forcefully back to mind.
I'm not going to list all the mistakes I think our leaders have made. Instead, I want to focus on two thoughts that I think are not getting enough attention. Both are based on my impression that this virus is different from anything we have seen before, and my further impression that we really don't have a good understanding yet of how it is different.
First, I think the emphasis on death rates is at this point essentially a distraction. Death total, yes, I think we should be watching those numbers carefully. But a death rate is a fraction: number of deaths over number of infections. And we simply have no idea how many infections there are. Frankly, we don't even seem to be trying very hard to find out.
There are a large number of infected people who have no symptoms. Others have very mild symptoms, and the president seems to think it's just fine for these people to go to work.
I think the various measures taken to contain the virus are good as far as they go, but I also think we need to be clear-eyed about what we can reasonably expect them to do. We can slow the wave, and this is very important. If too many people get sick all at once, the medical system will collapse, and shortly after that, society itself will start to collapse. We know this from the history of epidemics, which is quite grim. I'm not going to go into details here.
But, as things now stand, I don't see how we are going to stop the coronavirus until we have a vaccine. The asymptomatics and the mildly ill will be going about their daily rounds, and they will be continuing to infect others. And some of the newly infected will die.
Make the denominator big enough, and the numerator can look relatively low, even when a great many people are dying.
Second, what happens if some of the asymptomatic carriers continue to harbor the virus in their bodies for long periods of time? There seems to be an assumption that, in all cases, the virus will run its course in a relatively brief period, and the surviving patient will then be disease-free and not contagious.
Many bugs can hide out in the human body for years. This is where shingles comes from. And I've mentioned Typhoid Mary to a number of people. Over the course of her career as a cook she infected at least 122 people, of whom five died. (For a story on Typhoid Mary, click here.)
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