1. Will take infectious disease more seriously
2. Will build out health care infrastructure to guard against future occurrences
3. Personal sanitation will be improved
4. People less likely to take risky behaviors like getting together in huge groups
edit: formatting
I don’t say that lightly. That was 20 years ago, so maybe you youngsters just read about it in books. But in summary, a bunch of us busted ass to make sure the predictions of ATM and power failures did not come to pass on 1/1/2000. Our reward was, “See? We got all up in arms about nothing.”
Plenty of those same short-sighted dipshits are still alive, and of those now deceased, I’m sure replacements are just reaching voting age.
That’s assuming the U. S. puts forth anything close to the effort of fixing Y2K. Which is not even remotely guaranteed.
Meanwhile, the industry still doesn't know how to deal with dates and times correctly: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
This is also why y2k problems happening on Jan 1st was a bit misleading for many use cases. Things like insurance renewals and investment projections look ahead to future dates and so problems will start showing up earlier and get fixed well before.
In short, it was massively overblown and misunderstood - people expected their own computers to blow up and even made shelters - and some scammers even took advantage of those fears. It made perfect sense for someone who didn't knew what was going on and was fed on doom and destruction to see things continuing without any hitch and wonder what was the fuss all about.
Absolutely, the hype was way above the risk. But if the hype wasn't there I'm not sure it would have been prevented, so it served a useful purpose.
As a society we need the right amount of panic at the right time, but for this pandemic it feels like too much and too late.
18 years away now and an absolute ton of affected systems are still out there and mission critical.
These type pf issues, from Corona to 2038 to climate change, always remind me of that Homer Simpson quote.
"Pfft, that's a problem for future Homer. Man I don't envy that guy."
Already halfway, and we haven't done shit.
Fauci said today that if we don't get aggressive, the death toll will be many millions.
Did this happen after Ebola outbreak?
Did this happen after Zika outbreak?
Don't get your hopes up.
Sure, the initial cases were clearly messed up, but it has mostly been contained in Hong Kong and Singapore. And with the way this disease has progressed, I would bet many countries are going to overtake China in case counts.
Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.
None of those became major issues in the US or Europe. The media did it's typical the sky is falling thing and then nothing happened.
So, now we have a virus that is hard for us to contain but people haven't taken it seriously until Italy started having crazy day over day numbers.
So no, not optimistic on this.
Well, don't be afraid to share it with the world, if such evidence does exist.
I highly doubt it though.
was on mobile yesterday, sorry for not providing sources
At the extreme if it killed 100% of the people it infected then everyone would've locked down borders immediately and taken it very seriously.
But instead it's only 10x as deadly as a common virus (the flu) that most people have personally had. Which made people not very wary of it until they saw the exponential spread problem illustrated in Italy. (China also illustrated that but Westerners really only feel something can personally affect them if it happens to other Westerners)
Depends on how fast it kills too. Something like airborne aids that somehow didn't have respiratory symptoms would be the most terrifying scenario because it would spread world wide before anyone noticed.
But small changes have been impactful—like some businesses immediately getting on wider WFH policies and self-quarantine for returning business travelers as well as general hygiene—people aren't always great at that but it's a conscious act on everyone's part lately. Businesses and buildings even started placing more sanitizer stations, etc.
Both those 4... 3 of them are against human nature, the other one is expensive, just forget about it.