Essay by Keith Rankin, 20 February 2026.
Imagine if the Olympic Games were currently being held in Wuhan, China. There would be widespread mentionings of it having been the starting place of the Covid19 pandemic, in December 2019.
But pandemics (not ‘global pandemics’; pandemics are global by definition, as are world wars) have two places of origin, though those two places could be the one-and-the-same. For Covid19, Wuhan was certainly the first place; the root source, to use a tree analogy. The second source is the base of the stem, the place from where a pandemic fans out and becomes almost unstoppable.
In the case of Covid19, the events in February 2020 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo – the jewel of the Italian Alps – were the origins of the pandemic. Without their role, Covid19 might have been a contained epidemic such as SARS (2003).
Since the near-run-disaster that was the SARS-Cov1 panic in 2003, the amount of useful epidemiological work on coronaviruses has been minimal. There was clearly research work being done, including in Wuhan. But that was mainly on the zoonotic origins of coronaviruses, and not on the administration of outbreaks. SARS-Cov1 was a severe novel coronavirus. Novel respiratory viruses – such as the 1918 influenza pandemic – are lethal, spread fast, and are hard to contain. More lethal than Sars-Cov1 was MERS which emerged around 2012. Yet preparations for a respiratory-illness pandemic were focussed almost entirely on a new strain of influenza. No prep for a new novel coronavirus. SARS-Cov2 was ‘tricky’, in that – less lethal but more transmissible than SARS-Cov1 – it fell on the cusp between being dangerously lethal and dangerously transmissible.
Geographic Analysis
The pandemic events of 2020 were not – at least not in any popular awareness – subjected to a proper geographical analysis. Most of the initial outbreaks of the SARS-Cov2 virus which escaped China were largely contained. There were relatively small outbreaks in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Seattle in the United States’ northwest; in some cases transmitted by passengers from a few cruise ships. And larger but still largely contained outbreaks in South Korea and in Iran. These outbreaks came directly from China. The containment of the Iran outbreak was facilitated by the West’s generally hostile attitude towards that country as a geopolitical ‘bad guy’; Iran was easier than most countries for the West to quarantine.
More problematic were the outbreaks in Spain and Italy, which can also be traced back to January 2020. In Spain the initial outbreak, direct from China, was more in the south; most likely linked to escapees from China. There was relatively little subsequent movement across the land border into France, though Andorra experienced a separate outbreak. The main risk from the south of Spain was the United Kingdom, given that, for many British people, southern Spain is either their first or second home. It would have been relatively easy to quarantine British arrivals from Spain; the British authorities ‘dropped a ball’ by being tardy here.
The main blind spot was that Spain is a western country, and westerners had become ingrained in the supposition that pandemics (and all things bad) come from other countries; or, more accurately phrased, ‘countries of others’. Guard rails that were up for China or Iran or even Japan and South Korea, were not there for ‘threats’ from West European countries.
The notion came about that the pandemic radiated out of southern China, rather than having flowed out of all of the places which had experienced outbreaks. When eyes should have been watching Spain and Italy, they were still firmly focused on China, and in a finger-pointing way.
The West could have learned much from China’s data about the impact of the new virus in terms of the demographics of victims and non-victims, and the extent and duration of their exposures and their symptoms. However, the western countries were more predisposed to put up the shutters with respect to that amazing country.
A large part of the problem in the 1918 influenza pandemic was the high numbers of younger adults who caught it and died from it. Covid19 was never like that. Data from China showed that few younger people had died from Covid19; unless, that is, they had had sustained exposures. For younger people, and for society as a whole, it was better for otherwise healthy non-allergic people to have early and tentative exposures to Covid than to be on tenterhooks awaiting what became the inevitable, and would become worse the longer the wait.
Milano-Cortina
More problematic than Spain was the coronavirus outbreak around and to the east of Milan – the ‘tech’ centre of Italy, and the fashion centre – and the connection of Milan to the ski resorts during the peak of the ski season; indeed during the February school holidays in Europe. Milan is the most monied city in Italy. It is an important entry-point for affluent techies on business, and for sundry one-percenters. Once the epidemic began in Wuhan, many of the monied of and around Wuhan (many were foreign nationals) had the nous to ‘escape’ – including to Macao and Hong Kong – before the Chinese central government closed the ‘stable doors’.
Milan and environs became a hotspot for witting and unwitting coronavirus refugees – affluent exiteers – just at the time Europe’s ten-percenters were heading to and from the ski resorts.
Further, there was the World Economic Forum, at Davos, Switzerland; a one-percenter retreat. A few of the delegates may have, unknowingly, arrived with Covid. Following the Forum, many delegates – coming straight from a transmissible environment – will have visited the other hotspots for the rich and famous; the other alpine resorts, and the principalities Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra. And San Marino, which is a centre for the world’s semi-licit arms trade. All of these places had significant outbreaks of Covid19 during February and March 2020. These were perfect environments for the rapid spread of SARS-like coronaviruses. While coronaviruses are not winter viruses as such – compared to other cold and influenza viruses – they nevertheless thrive in winter when not obstructed by those other winter pathogens.
Essentially the most significant locations for amplifying Covid19 were greater-Milan, the Italian skifields centred on Cortina and Livigno; though Torino in the northwest – host of the 2006 Games – probably experienced its share of the unchecked Italian Covid19 flow. From these places it spread to neighbouring countries: Austria, Switzerland, France, and Bavaria in Germany.
Who else was there at those resorts? The managerial class – the bureaucrat and technocrat nine-percenters of the most affluent cities of northwest Europe, especially those cities hosting international (Geneva, Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg) and national (eg Stockholm for one; and Paris and Berlin of course) governance organisations – were there with their older children. Fly-in, fly-out; a week’s break from the office with the family. In many cases parents on their own with the children while their spouses and ex-spouses enjoyed time apart from their children; elite parents and teenagers who would take the opportunities to socialise during the long après-ski evenings. They would mostly be back in their home countries by the first week of March.
Visitors from the Americas – from those same socio-business milieux – would have also been in these resorts at that time, and also in the capital cities of western Europe.
Covid19 didn’t stream into New York from China or from Seattle. It streamed in from the affluent centres of and close to alpine Europe, and from the business and political capitals of northwest Europe. Covid19 came into the Americas directly or indirectly from Italy to a much greater extent than it came from anywhere else.
Missing Maps
What was needed was good flow maps, much like those devised by John Snow, in London around 1850, to chart the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. Instead, the statistics most available were nationally-compiled accumulations of cases and deaths; not international flow maps showing the sequences as Covid19 moved from some places and then on to other places. Individual countries were making their own imperfect maps, with their own make-believe boundary walls. In reality these European borders were for administrative purposes only. Herein lay the problem of visualising the flows of infection; unjoined maps. Further, these case-maps were often unadjusted for the population sizes of each country or province; many maps simply showed that there were cases where there were more people.
For flow maps, you must remove the dots which represent cases resolved by time or, for a small minority of cases, by death. And you must provide per capita data.
These administrators literally failed to join the dots between their own patches and their neighbours’ patches. A glance at any Europe-wide case-map would have shown, by April 2020, a large cluster of cases from Geneva north towards Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and then west towards Maastricht and Brussels; this cluster straddled six separate national borders. (Seven countries if you include Italy, which is close to Geneva.) The conclusions from such a map would have been as obvious as those revealed by John Snow’s case-map of Soho (London) during the 1854 cholera outbreak there.
In early 2020, it was senior public servants, their families including their elderly parents, their staff, and the people they had meetings (and eatings) with who had been most effectively spreading and succumbing to the virus.
First and Second Waves
By July 2020, the Covid19 outbreak was largely contained in Europe. But at a cost, not only in terms of disrupted income-earning opportunities to the small-medium businesses personnel who contracted the virus from the holidaying returnees and who were most disrupted by stay-at-home orders. And also, the latent cost of the first wave included the loss of those many natural immunisations that commuters in large cities experience most days of their working lives; especially cities with international airports.
Thus, the countries which had experienced multi-month shutdowns rebuffed the pandemic virus at a significant hidden cost; a weakening of the immunity of the population, increasing the susceptibility of the so-far uninfected to a new wave of respiratory contagion. Populations in urban centres – historically, and especially immigrants to those cities from the provinces – have always been vulnerable to transmissible diseases. By August 2020 this was especially so, especially in those countries in Eastern Europe (with older and poorer populations) which had been minimally exposed to both the first wave of Covid19 and the other pathogens they would normally have come into frequent contact with.
While the pandemic was contained in Europe by July 2020, it was far from contained in the United States. In the United States, the covid curve was flattened, but at a high plateau. The downside of flattening-the-curve is that you get an extended curve, creating a pathogen reservoir for a second wave of infections.
The Grand Tour and the second wave of Covid19
In the eighteenth century, a time of very high economic inequality in the British Isles and other parts of Europe, a tradition developed among the sons of the then one-percenters to do a Grand Tour. For a few, that tour was somewhat intrepid; Joseph Banks did his grand tour on the Endeavour with James Cook. Lord Byron was another, whose tour was somewhat intrepid and was never completed.
For the majority of these entitled young men, there was a tourist trail that developed; the grand tour became a kind of hedonist pilgrimage. Principal stops included Paris, the Rhine lands (including Heidelburg) and Switzerland. Some of these early bohemian tourists headed directly from Switzerland to Italy; others ventured into Austria (especially Vienna) and the Bohemian capital of Prague.
In Italy there were several must-visit cities, including Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. The homeward journey likely included Sicily, southern France and places in Spain and Portugal.
Some grand tourists would also visit the ‘Near East’, the areas – including the Holy Land – defined by the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Seas.
The twenty-first (and late twentieth century) version of the grand tour is undertaken by the sons and daughters of American ten-percenters. In the United States in particular, working-life career-building requirements and surprisingly little annual leave strongly encourage this somewhat-elitist comparator to New Zealand’s OE. Young Americans have much less time than young Europeans to travel as tourists during their working lives.
In the modern Grand Tour, which lasts from mid-July to mid-September, young university-educated Americans with both left-elite (nine-percenter) and right-elite (one-percenter) backgrounds descend upon Europe. In 2020, this timing coincided with the re-opening of Europe after what the Europeans optimistically presumed was the end of the Covid19 pandemic. Further, European tourist hotspots were keen to welcome new waves of spending visitors, to help with their economic recoveries.
The second wave of the Covid19 pandemic began in August 2020, though this was not fully apparent until late September. The second wave was much more lethal than the first, and especially in Eastern Europe, where the (generally older) populations had largely escaped the first wave, but were particularly immunity-compromised as a result of the stay-at-home orders during the pandemic’s first wave.
The second wave began in places like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Switzerland, Czechia (especially Prague). And in Israel, another popular destination for American grand tourists. It was the American Grand Tour which brought the pandemic back to Europe, and with a vengeance; and which in turn instigated the further lethal waves of Covid19 around the world in 2021.
Unfortunately, thanks to inadequate specific-location-mapping and flow-mapping of the abundant Covid19 statistics, this flow of infections was only apparent to those who looked under the bonnet. By then, the national Wikipedia sites for Covid19 had lost their energy, showing increasingly outdated maps, and misplaced emphases on first-entry cases during the first wave. The accessible information was either too technical or too stale.
Popular Lore
In popular lore, the Covid19 pandemic was essentially a 2020 phenomenon. TV dramas and documentaries still emphasise that early period of the global crisis.
It was from the lethal second wave that the nasty new variants evolved, in 2021; and spread into and then from India, as the most spectacular example. Remember the Greek Alphabet soup, with the (British) Alpha and (Indian) Delta variants having been especially problematic.
The older Swedish scientists who emphasised the need to take a path – a path which accentuated the need for natural immunity to facilitate an early and complete end to the pandemic’s most dangerous phase – were proved correct as the pandemic raged through its most serious phase in 2021. Though you wouldn’t know it, probably too many interests did not want to make comparisons. Sweden’s politicians had been too slow to address the Stockholm outbreak in early 2020, when that country had an especially vulnerable elderly population; so, it looked as if the world had little to learn from that country. (Sweden had had significantly less influenza than most other countries, in 2018 and 2019; meaning that Sweden had unusually low death rates in the winters of those two years; meaning that they had plenty of ‘fuel’ for a tragic pandemic ‘fire’ in the spring of 2020.)
2021 also became the year of the Covid19 vaccine race; whereas 2020 had been the year of the missing PPE. The public health industry tends to place too much emphasis on immunisation through intervention versus immunisation through monitored natural exposures. This emphasis is valid for the most lethal of infectious conditions; the conditions for which we routinely vaccinate today. But for the below the radar circumstances of categories of common respiratory viruses with high complexity and low lethality – including known circulating viruses such as RSV, coronaviruses (the descendants of previous lethal coronaviruses), rhinoviruses, and influenzas –medicalised immunisations came to be emphasised while, with little awareness, simultaneous processes were lessening immunity to these types of virus. It was like taking one step forward and two steps back.
In the end, the pandemic was resolved through a natural immunisation process. 2022 was the year of Omicron. In 2022 the non-lethal Covid-Omicron variant ‘ripped through’ New Zealand and other places with previous minimal coronavirus exposure. This was a direct result of the failure and subsequent redundancy of the border-quarantine and other barrier methods of protection which were still in force in January 2022. Most New Zealand residents were exposed to covid that year.
Omicron had evolved in southern Africa in late 2021, from the earliest strain of Sars-Cov2. It became a natural immunisation force. Omicron was the invisible cavalry coming to the rescue; favoured in evolutionary terms over the Delta nemesis because it was more highly transmissible while being much less lethal than the previous covid varieties. More like the familiar but under-studied ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. Omicron stopped Delta dead in its tracks; a more effective weapon than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Lessons
I don’t think that western society has learned very much from the Covid19 pandemic. The importance of good mapwork and monitored natural immunisation barely formed any part of the long but largely useless narrative. Sweden’s alternative scientific path was forgotten, or derided, rather than learned from.
The next pandemic will probably also catch us unawares. It will be as different from the contemporary preoccupations of epidemiology, as Covid19 was. It may already be ‘hiding in plain sight’, as the coronavirus threat was in the 2010s. Family doctors should be routinely testing for all the various ‘bugs’ out there, and passing-on data about the various pathogens and cross-immunities which keep us healthy in daily life. We could perhaps have knocked out Covid19 in its early stages, by facilitating natural exposures of healthy people to low doses of already-circulating non-covid coronaviruses.
I think that future government-overreach mandates around lockdowns and mask-wearing will be hard to enforce, given the huge rightwards shifts in western politics this decade. But there may be opportunities for short smart protective measures, undertaken at local levels and in places such as retirement villages and rest homes. In particular, making high-grade (ie the more expensive types of) facemasks available to the vulnerable, with the warning that these should be worn mainly in high-risk environments, and not everywhere all the time.
Meanwhile
It’s great that Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, still popular hangouts of the rich and the not-so-famous, have been able to host a magnificent sporting event. These places have not been tainted by their association with the still recent pandemic. Despite being the places from which an outbreak of a significant new coronavirus fanned out to create a three-year pandemic that changed the world. That outbreak was probably containable, if we had acted with more nous and more knowledge of the common pathogens of daily life.
But who was looking at the Italian Alps in those heady ski-holiday days of February 2020? We were transfixed by China.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
