The Return of Polio.

As more information about the virus emerged in the early months of 2020, it struck me that in some respects the pandemic more resembled a polio epidemic on a world scale than the 1918-19 Spanish flu outbreak to which it was often compared. Simple methods of combating the two viruses, such as handwashing, are the same: When Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia during a polio epidemic in 1954, there were fears that the crowds of schoolchildren assembling to greet her might pass the virus to one another and maybe even to the young monarch herself. Few people realized - certainly I didn't - that if polio epidemics were a product of modernity and not of backwardness, then the way might be open for other epidemics of equal or greater severity to appear. FEATURES I MUST HAVE BEEN UNLUCKY TO CATCH POLIO IN CORK, IRELAND, IN 1956, AS THIS was one of the last polio epidemics ever in Western Europe and the US. [Extracted from the article]