Absolutely. Urbanisation, climate change, global travel are going to increase the frequency of pandemics until we are always going to be in one. A professor of mine who worked on modelling the spread of disease warned about this years ago. (And yeah you can argue about the definition of pandemic, but having more endemic diseases is not a good thing either.)
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.
> 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.
> It would be better to have a more coherent communication strategy ready for the next time.
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.
> 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.
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.
And yet, only in 2019 it jumped from animal to humans. There were other human coronaviruses before of course. But as far as we can tell, this specific one did not make the jump in all the years before. The reason is, as with all zoonoses, it takes close proximity to the animal, lucky mutations, and conditions for subsequent spreading to turn into a pandemic.
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.
Clickbait title. Polyepidemic is only mentioned once in the article, where the interviewee briefly mentions that climate change is going to induce massive problems for humanity, including disease.
I think you gotta admit the focus on risks, especially along the rural/urban divide are considerably unhinged from reality. And it's largely to do with the memes.
As I make my drive from a 30k population county to 5m population county, and I have to adjust from telling people, no the cities aren't full of shootings, 5G microwaves aren't harmful, to no climate change isn't going to kill you, no covid isn't still overflowing morgues.
Cars man. Never can convince people of the dangers of car accidents.
now i got thinking about it, covid and climate change have the same issues for people to understand. individually, on a personal level, neither are particularly deadly.
like sure you could have been unhealthy and had complications, and sure if you live in the south and work outside and are regularly dehydrated, you could be the unlucky ones. your probability is still low.
but the actual problem with both of these was/is systematic risk. that covid put enough people in the hospital to see something close to a collapse of the medical system. that the eastern seaboard flooding and droughts could be bad enough to see a cascade in failures to find housing and food. that both are ok right up until the tipping point where they very much aren't.
and the media doesn't do well at all explaining personal vs systematic risk.
> that both are ok right up until the tipping point where they very much aren't.
I think this part is right, and that Nassim Taleb has correct take on it - you can never predict ahead of time when that tipping point will occur, you can only fortify yourself against the possibility (become less fragile to it).
But people tend to make the mistake of looking back at past tipping points that caused systemic harm and arguing they were foreseeable based on what we know now after it occurred, not what we knew and perceived then before it occurred. Any analysis or consideration of pending systemic risk must take steps to avoid this mistake.
and thats why i span the rural/urban divide. because about 10 years ago I heard the chatter of scientists explaining that the IPCC was wrong, that the chance for rapid acceleration of things we can reverse was real high, and I made a plan.
bout 3 years ago i moved to the middle of nowhere, to a storm resistent building, geothermal, adding solar, in a swamp where ground temps are mediated, in a state least likely to be touched.
originally i did it because i thought it was prudent because it was going to happen to me. nowadays I'm so sick of people i long for my dirt nap, so with the agroforest, with the nut trees and the garden, the shop and the spare parts, maybe i can at least live (and leave good bones) for the people who come after me to do better than we did.
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.