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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

In the future, I see a robust economy built around communicable disease prevention. This was a wake up call for the world. The free ride is over. But this virus can’t overcome humans making a concerted effort to beat it. Worldwide we see the need for increased sanitization and emergency treatment and having lived though this we will all be properly motivated. There’s a lot of jobs to be created and money to be made in our new health oriented economy.

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Lessons are generational. Unfortunately. For example, the rhetoric from anti-vaxers would be unthinkable to people from the generation that lived through polio.

I am hopeful that this pandemic will take the wind out of the sails of the antivax cult for at least a few generations.

I will absolutely guarantee you that some folks will cling to it even harder - anti-vaxxers have a hell of a lot of delusion to draw on and I've often seen discussion lines from them about the "benefits to long term health of getting the disease" while ignoring the benefits of simply getting vaccinated for it.

I'm afraid you're sadly ignoring the power of willful ignorance.

The education system failed these people.

The education system failed all of us - it's left us needing to deal with these folks.

In my humble opinion wake up calls were in 2003 SARS and 2009 H1N1, but we decided to ignore those, now we get the real thing, that has improved and evolved.

Maybe, maybe not. I predict we're not gonna take any lessons from this either; 10 years from now people are gonna write comments like this saying "2020 COVID19 was the wake up call, now we get the real thing, that has improved and evolved".

I think at the very least some regulations/restrictions have been lifted which are never coming back. Examples might include allowing doctors to practice telemedicine accross state borders and allowing local labs to create their own tests without waiting for federal approval.

If the following calamity will not fix USA healthcare I don't know what will.

Anytime someone questions a healthcare investment, from now on, it must be met with “this will happen again”.

Just like an alarm clock, some nations have hit snooze and others have woken up. It's pretty clear who is ready (Taiwan, HK, SK) and who is not.

Note: I think it's fair to say, SK is/was ready or has responded well, patient 31 notwithstanding.

I think the USA needs to work on the basics, but other nations will have so interesting advanced strategic decisions. i.e. Does ventilator design changes frequently? Does it make sense to have an on-demand factory or just build up a stockpile of ventilators that can be distributed as needed?

If we regularly have virus outbreaks, will we usually need ventilators, or is this something specific to COVID-19? Is viral pneumonia a common effect of these kind of viruses?

The first DIY ventilator tutorial I saw mentioned the avian flu, so I assume so

Always fight the last war! /s

What if we created a more sanitary world, eliminated the seasonal flu too, and it was all for nothing!

> ...a more sanitary world

Be careful what you wish for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

To many people those were crying wolf rather than wake up calls.

The wolf is not leaving anytime soon. In fact, there will always be a wolf. There are wolves roaming your neighborhood now. And if you take care of 1, it will be replaced. The page has turned and what we need is daily neighborhood wolf suppression now.

We had plenty of calls, just nobody woke up.

Doubtful. It just doesn't make sense to prepare for these 1 in 100 year things, especially when the next pandemic virus will likely meet a much better healthcare system, perhaps one with broad-acting antivirals. Like, this pandemic will likely not kill as much as the 1918 spanish flu simply due to better medicine.

"It doesn't make sense?" A "much better health care system"?

I encorange you to think what,would happen in a scenario where airborne ebola is burning through the world at the same time as most of our antibiotics start to fail due to resistance.

It's so horrendous to think about. I can't belive you think it's not worth preparing for. You reckon the USA should scrap its military until an invading force turns up on the west coast?

I think we're in a window where we know enough to detect it quickly and monitor the spread, but vaccine production is slow.

This looks completely different if, in 10 years, we can produce vaccines in months, not years.

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