Is a ‘polyepidemic’ humanity’s next big threat?
science.org
science.org
Adding to this is that we lost a great deal of capability of large scale coordination that we need to fight such diseases, compared to say 60 years ago. We eradicated smallpox, and completely suppressed measles and polio in most of the world. We rid Europe and the US of malaria. We had multiple chanches to stop covid: right in the beginning of course, but also in the summer of 2020 when the incidence numbers were suppressed to single digits per 100000, at least in most of Europe.
(Corona viruses are actually well suited to eradication because of something called overdispersion: A majority of people are effectively not contagious at all, whereas very few people cause a large number of infections. That means the numbers go down very quicky with social distancing or by partitioning the population, and once they are low enough you can do contact tracing and catch the remaining cases.)
Instead of being enthusiastic about doing something for their own health (and maybe enjoying two or three weeks of work from home or paid vacation which would have solved the problem at one point), people turned wearing masks into a ridiculous political issue.
In my country, “wear masks because we say so, else you are an idiot” came just after “people who buy masks are selfish baboons because masks are not useful at all.”
When you treat citizens like idiots, or threaten them, it usually becomes a “political” issue at some point.
It would be better to have a more coherent communication strategy ready for the next time. It would also be great to have literate leaders in charge, something we sorely lacked over here.
Either way, it was pretty obvious wearing masks basically had no short term downsides and yet.
I don't think the problem was an incoherent communications strategy as much as having imperfect information. Plus, the way that news organizations and other popular media handled things made everything much worse.
At the start, everyone was figuring out what the threat vectors actually were. The changing advice was a result of investigation leading to better understanding.
What happened was better than the alternative: in a fast-moving crisis like this, waiting until you have a very high degree of confidence can be worse than doing the best you can with what you know, even if it turns out not to be great as understanding develops.
There is far too much splitting going on.
Total nonsense. SARS-CoV-2 exists in animal reservoirs, and all the available vaccines for it (or for any coronavirus, for that matter) are decidedly non-sterilizing. It's a total non starter, even China-level control of people's movement and interpersonal behavior wasn't enough to keep up Covid Zero forever.
Pandemics are not at all inevitable. My point is we are inadvertently creating the conditions that allow diseases like this to spread in the first place.