Siren sounded in February
His superiors, in the end, decided it wasn’t Lt. Kermit Tyler’s fault. Lt. Tyler was an officer in the United States Army Air Forces, assigned to a fighter squadron in the Hawaiian islands. On a bright Sunday morning — Dec. 7, 1941, to be precise — he was pulling his second-ever four-hour shift in a command post for a series of radar stations. At around 0700 local time, as most of the night shift was packing up to head off for breakfast, Lt. Tyler received a call from one of the radar posts about a large blip on their scope. The radar site operators, a couple of privates, reported that it looked like a huge armada of planes was approaching Hawaii — like nothing they’d ever seen. Lt. Tyler, who’d received no training, no orders, no warning of any possible threats, and had never actually seen a radar scope, told them not to worry about it. A buddy of his had given him reason to believe some friendly planes were arriving from the U.S. that morning. He then went outside the command post and, from there, witnessed the beginning of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hearings were held, and it was concluded (probably fairly) that Lt. Tyler couldn’t have been expected to do any better. Radar was so new and so poorly understood that there were no procedures in place to take the information it could provide and get it quickly into the hands of leaders who could make a difference. Though he’d been the officer commanding that day, he told the inquiry board that he’d received no instructions on what his duties were, and viewed his own presence there as purely educational — a familiarization with a new technology.
But the incident is remembered by historians as an example of the limits of data — even if you see the enemy planes coming, if you haven’t practised what to do with that warning, that isn’t much good to you.
When the great pandemic of 2020 is brought under control, we will find out what data was missed, perhaps in plain sight. Indeed, some numbers out of the United States are already suggesting one possible new line of defence that could save lives in the future — if we can figure out how to use it.
The numbers are preliminary, and it will take months to properly analyze them and understand what, if anything, they were signalling. But in February, before COVID-19 was known to have established much of a toehold in North America, medical practitioners across the United States began noticing an unusual trend. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention operates a national influenza-tracking network. Medical officials across the country began reporting an unusual trend — reports of a flu-like illness were rising, but so was the percentage of influenza tests coming back as negative. In other words, doctors thought they were seeing more flu than usual, and were testing accordingly, but the patients didn’t have influenza. They had something else that was causing fevers, sore throats and respiratory distress. And the unusual reports were particularly prominent in the Pacific Northwest — home of Seattle, ground zero for North America’s COVID-19 crisis.
It’s important to stress again that this information is preliminary. There are other possible explanations for the anomalous surge in non-flu flu-like illnesses. Indeed, it might be nothing at all — just statistical noise. But when the dust settles, and experts are able to go back through the data, it’s possible that we’ll discover that we had a potentially useful early warning alarm flashing red at us weeks before COVID-19’S leap into communities in North America was apparent.
If that’s the case — if there was this unexpected source of warning coming from a system intended to watch for an entirely different disease — that will raise two fascinating questions. The first, obviously, is whether the existing CDC system could be improved upon and enhanced, potentially making it more useful next time. But the second, more existential question is whether it really would have mattered at all. Think again of Lt. Tyler. Even if he had immediately grasped what the weird radar anomaly was, what could he have done? The U.S. was unprepared for war. The Japanese planes found an entire fleet at anchor, and the attack was almost over, the U.S. battleships burning wrecks, before much resistance could be organized (and it was spotty and ineffective even then). Early warning is crucial to defence in any war, whether against the human enemy or a virus, but it’s just the first link in a necessary chain. Raising an alarm is essential, but that alarm has to lead to something.
It’s far from clear that the U.S. response, beset by political problems at the top, would have been materially improved by a few extra weeks of warning. It’s also not clear that any public health authority willing and able to take precautionary steps needed much more information than was already immediately available early last month simply based on what was happening already in Wuhan. The political reaction to COVID-19, in every country afflicted, is going to be subject of intense review in the weeks ahead — as it should be.
But while failures of leadership and decision-making may hobble rapid response to red flags, that doesn’t mean the red flags aren’t worth watching. One day we will know if there was evidence that COVID-19 was spreading in our communities sooner than we thought. If so, the next question will be what we should have done about it.