The pandemic which has just swept 'round
the earth is without precedent….never before
has there been a catastrophe at once so sud-
den, so devastating and so universal. The
most astonishing thing about the pandemic
was the complete mystery which surround-
ed it. Nobody seemed to know what the
disease was, where it came from or how to
stop it. —George Soper
I
n his 1919 article "The Lessons of the Pandemic," originally
published in the journal Science, George Soper looked back
at the still-fresh Spanish influenza plague that would claim
about 50 million lives worldwide. Soper offered advice but
was no run-of-the-mill finger wagger. As a sanitation engi-
neer with the New York City Department of Health in the
early 1900s, in one of history's celebrated cases of contact
tracing, he deduced that Mary Mallon, a 40-year-old Irish cook
whose job had taken her into the kitchens of some of the city's
wealthiest families, was an asymptomatic carrier of the bac-
terium Salmonella enterica typhi. And responsible for a series
of typhus outbreaks in the
NYC area.
b y G U Y S A D D Y p o r t r a i t b y J A C K I E D I V E S
BY TREATING BRITISH COLUMBIANS LIKE GROWNUPS
AND DELIVERING A CLEAR PUBLIC HEALTH MESSAGE,
THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT WON PRAISE FOR ITS
EARLY MANAGEMENT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.
WHAT LESSONS DOES THAT PERFORMANCE HOLD
FOR BUSINESS LEADERS FACING A CRISIS?
A D U L T S
I N T H E R O O M
38 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
L E A D E R
S H I P
