I’m glad to see this and we need to concentrate on speeding this process up. This isn’t the last pandemic and all things considered this one was a pretty benign one to have to fight. The next one might not just kill mainly the old and weak and might need much more than a mask (that we still can’t get people to wear!) to prevent its spread. Hopefully before then, we can work to get everyone more on the same page and have a rapid vaccine task force ready.
My brother is a doctor and he got his Pfizer shot yesterday. Less than one year has passed since the first case in the USA. I consider this one of the great accomplishments of science. It will go unnoticed by many idiots on social media but it is an amazing achievement by all the scientists and doctors involved.
To get worse than COVID you'd need a virus that takes a long time to develop symptoms and then has a high death rate. In that scenario there would be a lot more public fear and we'd have an easier time keeping people at home. So I'm still of the opinion it's harder to have a worse situation than COVID.
Yeah this pandemic has been described as the perfect middle ground for politicization, denialism, and just laissez-faire attitudes.
Any more deadly (like Ebola) it becomes incredibly scary and people likely do whatever it takes when they see people around them dropping like flies (especially in horrific ways).
Any less deadly (basically the yearly flu) and it becomes easy to ignore and just becomes part of the background process.
COVID is somewhere in between. Deadly enough that hundreds of thousands of people are dying unnecessarily. But can still feel a million miles away for so many people.
Was it not though? I assume you'd want a pandemic deadly enough for that convinces a majority of the populace that it's a serious event (to encourage downstream change to better prepare for a worse pandemic), while at the same time not causing people to drop like flies. As you stated, anything less severe would be taken less seriously. To have something to be taken more serious, it has to be more deadly.
Despite the denialism we currently have, it seems to have made the world recognize the importance of preparation.
"more deadly" does not necessarily mean more deaths in this case. If it kills like ebola more folks could take it seriously ultimately resulting in lower transmission and death rates.
In particular, when COVID19 was first spreading but we knew about it back in February countries could've easily contact traced to flush it out and then quarantined all incoming travelers to keep it out.
But most countries deemed those actions too extreme and economically damaging so instead let it come spread and do way more damage.
Also taking into account that often the balance between spreading the disease and letting people work to feed themselves and loved ones is a massive challenge.
In my country we have destroyed economiy due to 10 years of incompetent greedy politics which had killed it already. People are out of work because of that.
Now the pandemic has made sure no one will recover at an acceptable rate, because new politicians also struggle to find the balance.
At this side of the planet we are screwed at such a hard rate, its amazing I can still feed myself, pay utilities and internet and be medically insured
What you're proposing is highly experimental and probably wouldn't work. There's no single country in the world that has been able to restrain the sars2 virus despite spending millions trying to do so.
Seriously, we can't expect to match the performance of a low income country we bombed back to the stone age just a few decades ago?
Vietnam isn't a paragon of wealth and competent administration today, there is no good reason our public health departments should not have been able to perform equally or better than their equivalents in Vietnam.
Other than Australia, China, New Zealand, and Vietnam, you mean? And China managed that after it had already spread widely domestically; the others were quick on their feet.
Cambodia too. We had our first known case of community transmission three weeks ago. It topped at 41 cases and we’ve had no new ones for three days.
We have mandatory two week quarantine for all arivals, stores lose their business licenses if they let anyone in without a mask. Schools, cinemas, gyms, clubs are all closed.
We’re hoping things will open up again in two weeks.
Ah yes, "warned", by assuring us that the virus was no worse than the common cold, and we were rapidly "turning a corner", and that it would just "go away on its own".
> wanted to close the borders
If he really wanted to, what stopped him? He was clearly fully capable of closing borders, given that he did close the border to China (too late) and Europe (also too late). Where was the closure to South Korea when the virus was spiking there?
"Ah yes, "warned", by assuring us that the virus was no worse than the common cold, and we were rapidly "turning a corner", and that it would just "go away on its own"."
I suppose he shouldn't have listened to the WHO at the time, which told us it couldn't spread from human-to-human. Nobody really knew anything about the virus at the time, except China, and the lied about it...but orange man bad.
He was also being impeached at the time and the Democrats were too busy with this to care about the potential spread of Covid-19.
He also talked about hydroxychloroquine, which his doctor was using at the time as a preventative measure for Covid-19.
Was it a cure? No (he never said it was), but Doctors were taking it at the time and many were still were taking it before the vaccine.
Because everything Trump said is bad, it was equated with junk science and possibly lead to the deaths of many more people.
"If he really wanted to, what stopped him? He was clearly fully capable of closing borders, given that he did close the border to China (too late) and Europe (also too late). Where was the closure to South Korea when the virus was spiking there?"
Right. He could easily just make decisions without the Democrats using everything in their power to stop him. Where have you been the last 4 years?
Again, The WHO was warned about this back in December from Taiwan officials.
Trump has been stopped from making decisions every step of the way from the Democrats and then Demonized in the press (which spread false information to the masses).
You really can't then blame him for making the wrong decision.
"It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month. And, if not, hopefully it will be soon after that."
— Trump, 2020-03-31
That's long after human-to-human transmission was confirmed. So, no, you can't blame the WHO there.
> Right. He could easily just make decisions without the Democrats using everything in their power to stop him.
...Uh okay? Since when has Trump cared what Democrats thought? Again, why did he not attempt to close the South Korean border if he cared so much? I'll tell you why: it's because Trump was just looking for an excuse to close the border to a country he already didn't like. He never cared about the virus, only about his personal agenda.
The China border was “closed” yet we had tens of thousands of Chinese travelers enter the US straight after the closure.
And the European border “closing” was so badly managed that it almost certainly seeded the massive outbreak in the NorthEast in the initial phase by causing hundreds of super spreader events daily in airports across the northeast as people all tried to return from Europe within the same few days and the airports were completely unprepared to handle them safely.
Most countries were unprepared, except for Taiwan. The government of China lied about SARS outbreaks and Taiwan has since had scientists that study disease outbreaks in China. Covid was spotted in December, but the WHO is under the influence of China and didn't listen.....
It's strange how the Chinese government: lied about the disease, allowed it to spread throughout the world without warning anyone, and purchased all of the PPE (creating a shortage and possibly causing even more deaths).
MERS (which didn't reach the US) was probably a better "training pandemic" because of the high rate of symptoms early on in the infection. One could take drastic measures to isolate the infected and prevent many deaths.
It didn't cause billions of people to gain experience in stocking up on supplies, learning how to live while locked down and the problems it entails, and wearing masks and taking other precautions. Therefore, it didn't serve as a training pandemic, except maybe for a small group. (It seems it did serve as training for vaccine developers, at least.)
It was a good "training pandemic". Some countries did quite well (Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, New Zealand, etc.) and some countries did poorly (the US, Brazil, parts of Europe). Overall, being able to develop and deploy a vaccine within a calendar year seems like a success. Though a lack of inexpensive, quick, home administered tests seems like kind of a failure - they exist, but they haven't been backed by governments to the point where they can be manufactured in large numbers.
Ebola requires direct contact with bodily fluids, it's not nearly as easily transmittable as Covid. Note that seasonal flu levels are at historic lows [1, 2], despite Covid raging to the point where many US states' ICUs are filled to capacity.
The more deadly a virus is the less likely you will have super spreaders. If the virus was 5x deadly you would probably also see 5x worse symptoms in most people. So instead of taking a bunch of DayQuil and going to the business meeting that person would be home feeling and looking like shit.
> The more pain we suffer now, the longer the lesson will last.
More evidence of the pervasive political attitude that’s “science-based” but more like modern day fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone “anyone smiling wrought all the suffering in the world” Christianity.
If the death rates in children vs. elderly were reversed with COVID, all hell would have broken loose. There is nothing people are more protective over than their kids. Behavior would have been completely different.
I was in SE Asia when H1N1pdm9 hit. There were 60m cases in the US that year, and 14,000 deaths that year in the US, and 75,000 deaths since 2009. It predominantly affected younger people[1], and barely hit elderly people. The CDC estimates it killed 150k to 500k people the first year it circulated across the world. I was wearing a mask in Macau, and my kids aged 12 and 9 years-old in the US at the time were not as almost all Americans were not wearing masks. The WHO declared an end to the pandemic in August 2010, but it causes illness, hospitalizations, and deaths each year as a seasonal flu the same way COVID-19 probably will in the coming years.
I believe there's been a misunderstanding where people think COVID is more dangerous to elderly people because they just tend to be generically vulnerable to a lot of disease.
That's not the case, however. If you compare death rates within different age groups, the risk for elderly is dramatically higher, even in comparison to other diseases that tend to be worse in old age (yes, exactly, such as the flu).
Even though it's less dangerous for young people, there's still reports that it was the top cause of death for people in their 20s or 30s this summer. The absolute numbers aren't that high, but it turns out people in their 20s and 30s don't die randomly that often either.
It also depends on how one defines danger. Would you rather die a few years earlier in your old age? Or live with reduced lung capacity for many years? And how common is that with COVID19?
We're still waiting to see the fall-out of long COVID.
You say this now but if we ask you then, the day of your death, would you rather die now or live a few more years in a diminished capacity, you might have a very different answer.
If you told anyone, on their death bed, "if you had run 25 km a week since [n-15 years] you would have been able to move better / dance with pretty girls / play [tennis | golf | etc] until two years ago," I think most people would say WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME.
True. But the data to date indicates that it boils down to marginalized vs not. Covid has done well with nursing homes and lower socioeconomic minority communities. People absolutely care about the children. But they care about what threatens them directly as well.
The profile to date is not close enough to home for most (white) middle class Americans. But that lack of fear to some extent, at this point, is statistically justified. That is, once you get outside the sweet spot the chance of death declines.
The virus is real. The deaths are real. However, despite the media hyperbol (and complete lack of basic lack of understanding of data and data analysis) how those deaths are distributed is uneven. Very much so.
Honestly, kids are just fine with it. Anecdotally, they are managing far better than adults. Not oblivious to the situation, but far more adaptable to just staying at home.
History rhymes and we are doing our best.
Please don't blame others ala "Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat the mistakes"...
We will have much more possibilities and views in the future though and are currently blind(er) compared to that.
Or COVID! There's been some reports about long term damage to people's lungs and such. To be frank, that's what scares me a lot more than the acute disease as someone who's still relatively young.
It seems to be at least a few percent of all cases. A majority of cases which are hospitalized have long-term effects too. It's also common enough that anecdotally -- I'm in a city hit hard and early by COVID. I can't tell you if it's 30% or 2%, but it's definitely not 1:10,000.
There’s no evidence to suggest COVID causes serious damage to those with minor to medium level symptoms. When the media talks about lung damage they seem to be talking about those who nearly died from the disease.
Not trying to minimise the seriousness of COVID, but simply suggesting there is no evidence of serious long term impact to the majority of cases.
I know of three colleagues who had minor cold like symptoms, 2/3 still talk about being winded climbing stairs, and both are physically fit 30 somethings.
I think lack of evidence is more a symptom of limited information.
Not lost on me that despite being a rare disease I know five people that have had guillain barre syndrome[1]. And I know about ten people who appear to have some sort of chronic malaise. I suspicious those are the result of viral infections.
There is also the minority opinion that some forms of dementia are due latent viral infections.
[1] You don't guillain barre syndrome takes years to recover and is absolutely traumatic.
Kind of related - most people probably don’t know, but the first studies around “zombie apocalypse” were just that, simulations of a bad virus outbreak.
Better yet, a virus (or some other kind of infectious agent, how about a fungus next?) that spreads rapidly but has no symptoms, and may lay dormant for over a year until it receives certain infrequent but not rare triggers, upon which it kills the host quickly.
Let's say pregnancy, a new Star Wars movie, or birth; transferred from parent to child, "activates" inside the newborn and then kills the parents too.
My brother is a doctor and he got his Pfizer shot yesterday. Less than one year has passed since the first case in the USA. I consider this one of the great accomplishments of science. It will go unnoticed by many idiots on social media but it is an amazing achievement by all the scientists and doctors involved.