The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

28 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL so we did not go on authorized or ordered departure (nor did we close our border with Mexico). We piloted web-based American virtual town hall meetings during which, in English and Spanish, I shared what we knew and what we were planning to do. This was a real breakthrough for that time, made possible by our creative public affairs and information technology teams. But after every virtual town hall, I took multiple calls from enraged family members who had cabin fever in a foreign country and wanted answers I didn’t have. Moreover, after the United States also declared an H1N1 public health emergency, embassy community families look- ing to finish the academic year in the United States found they weren’t welcome. This was another blow to morale. Colleagues who only weeks before had been mapping out presidential motorcade routes were now donning full protective gear and accompanying CDC doctors into labs to act as translators, procurement specialists and helping hands. Crucially, we were fortunate that few in our community fell sick, giving us the grace of time to see how the situation evolved. In one instance the child of a same-sex couple became infected, and our MED unit was not initially authorized to provide the nonemployee parent with prophylactic support. Thanks to Man- agement Counselor Isiah Parnell we overcame that, anticipating reforms in department policies that were still a few years away. Within months, however, a new normalcy evolved. CDC, Mex- ican and global experts collected enough data to establish disease transmission rates and verify mortality rates—both were better than initially anticipated. Medical facilities across the country (and around the world) were soon equipped to identify and respond to the disease. As more facts became known, schools in Mexico reopened, with masked teachers taking the temperature of every child before they were admitted onto the campus. Step by step, we recovered our newly appreciated normal lives. Looking at our world today, I am reminded yet again of the one lesson CDC officials seared into my brain then: No two pandemics are alike . It is impossible to “fight the last war,” as the military is often accused of doing, because public health experts understand that every single pandemic is unique. The H1N1 virus was first identified in the United States in April 2009 and spread rapidly through the Americas; it also affected Western Europe, several countries in Africa, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Australia and parts of Southeast Asia. The pandemic lasted for a year, until April 2010. According to CDC estimates, in that year there were 60.8 million cases, about 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths from the virus in the United States. There were 151,000 to 575,000 deaths worldwide, with 80 percent of the deaths occurring in people below age 65. The impact of the H1N1 pandemic was less severe globally than previous influenza pandemics, states the CDC. During the 1968 H3N2 pandemic, mortality was 0.03 percent of the world population, and global mortality was 1 percent to 3 percent dur- ing the 1918 pandemic. By contrast, the 2009-2010 pandemic had an estimated mortality rate of 0.001 percent to 0.007 percent. The H1N1 virus that caused that pandemic is now a regular human flu virus and continues to circulate seasonally worldwide. What the medical experts hope to count on across pandem- ics is the integrity of scientific evaluation, the strength of insti- tutional relationships, the shared commitment to fact-based recommendations and the globally heroic effort required to tame disease. Our experience in 2009 Mexico exemplified the best of pandemic cooperation, and the Mission Mexico team, as well as their social-distancing, housebound families, played a key role. n The author and then Mexican Under Secretary for North American Affairs Carlos Rico during a panel focused on H1N1 cooperation, May 2009. EMBASSYMEXICOCITYPUBLICAFFAIRSSECTION