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Curious if anyone has tried to look on the bright side, and see where humanity will be in the long run. 1. Will take infectious disease more seriously 2. Wi
by beamatronic 7y ago
Curious if anyone has tried to look on the bright side, and see where humanity will be in the long run.
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
- ratsimihah 7y agoWill we though? I'd like to agree but weren't the past pandemic/epidemic diseases within the last 20 years, yet this all feels like a new problem?
- 52-6F-62 7y agoOne data point might be Toronto. SARS had a pretty large social impact here, and people are far more cautious and measured in the face of COVID-19, but not panicking. Not yet anyway. 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.
- beamatronic 7y agoThe scale is different, certainly. But the prep work is the same. Imagine if we did all this for the flu. We'd make pretty short work of that.
- fokinsean 7y agoPlaying Devil's advocate, but if the situation does fizzle out in the US due to active measures, people will likely look back and say how it "ended up not being a big deal".
- venantius 7y agoGiven that current measures in the US don't come close to Italy/SK/China, that seems highly unlikely.
- mikestew 7y agoSee also: Y2K. 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.
- triceratops 7y agoSee also: climate change (if we contain it).
- egeozcan 7y agoMe, a 13 years old kid who was experimenting with QBASIC in 1999, thought that it was just switching from LEFT$(x, 2) to LEFT$(x, 4) when parsing dates. I still chuckle when I think how massively I had underestimated that problem. Meanwhile, the industry still doesn't know how to deal with dates and times correctly: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
- H8crilA 7y agoHow difficult was the problem? I also always thought it's a switch from 2 to 4 and be done with it for the next 8000 years.
- hnick 7y agoIt's a data issue as well as a code issue. Think about what happens if a date of birth with 2 digits is stored in a database or file and read back. You have to change the code and all occurrences of the data, or change the code to detect and repair the data on the fly. 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.
- LeoNatan25 7y agoDid this happen after SARS and MERS outbreaks? Did this happen after Ebola outbreak? Did this happen after Zika outbreak? Don't get your hopes up.
- yitianjian 7y agoThere were changes after SARS that led to better containment and reporting measures in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. 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.
- Fragoel2 7y agoI second what you said and I add that these outbreaks did not have such a massive impact on the western world
- majos 7y agoNone of these occurred on anywhere near the current spread or scale. SARS and MERS were almost entirely confined to Asia, Ebola to West Africa, and Zika to South America. The last was most widespread but was still limited to about 10,000 cases outside of South America and Cape Verde. Even then the greatest danger was to the children of pregnant women and, rarely, lasting complications. The number of “deaths from Zika” was <100 in total. Coronavirus’ combination of “widespread prevalence and awareness” and “killing people” is quite different from previous diseases, I think. It might effect more social change.
- beamatronic 7y agoYes, I would say that the government response in certain Asian countries was informed by their past experience with these outbreaks.
- makomk 7y agoThere have been some quite impressive Covid-19 containment campaigns in the Middle East and Africa thanks to improvements brought on by exactly those outbreaks, so maybe.
- quotha 7y ago5. Stop eating animals
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago6. Eradicate mosquitoes and bats pls
- triceratops 7y agoMosquitoes yes. Bats are vital to the ecosystem though. They eat a lot of troublesome insects that would otherwise devastate agriculture.
- egeozcan 7y agoI'd say not even all kinds of mosquitoes. I remember reading about a debate about how total lack of mosquitoes would disrupt many natural food chains. I don't know what I'm talking about but I hope we have someone reading this who does.
- greenshackle2 7y agoAll mosquitoes could be bad. We just need to eradicate the mosquitoes that feed off humans. Last I heard, they don't fill any particular important ecological niche which can't be filled by the other mosquitoes.
- Dirlewanger 7y agoMosquitoes are also vital as they are a food source.
- triceratops 7y agoAre they the sole food source for some species? Could their niche be filled by something else? As other commenters pointed out, not all species of mosquito are harmful to humans so it could be a more targeted eradication.
- vharuck 7y agoBesides #2, most of these would disappear after a couple generations. We've obviously forgotten a lot since the Spanish Flu, polio, and other highly infectious diseases.
- malandrew 7y agoIt's actually not a bad thing that it's between 1% and 3% mortality. Can you imagine if this had been Ebola or MERS? This pandemic will leave us much better prepared for one that could be much much worse.
- m4rtink 7y agoMore dangerous infection often kill their hosts before they can infect many others, so might result in horrendous dead toll locally but might find it hard to spread very far.
- malandrew 7y agoMy understanding is that it isn't the death rate that makes this different but how long it incubates for, allowing it to spread much further. The death rate could have been much higher and we'd probably still end up with a pandemic.
- the-pigeon 7y agoI actually think its' success is largely due to the low mortality rate. 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)
- flukus 7y ago> 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. 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.
- brazzledazzle 7y agoHumans don’t seem to be very good about internalizing lessons across more than 2, maybe 3, generations. Especially if there’s any sort of indirect effects or abstract concepts involved.
- themagician 7y agoIn the US, if enough people over 65 die it could fix a lot of things economically—Social Security, Medicare, high housing costs, etc. Even if only a million die, the boom that comes after would be huge.
- leesec 7y agoThis is gross economy-over-people type thinking. Please focus on humans first, and then the rest.
- theonionknight 7y agoMy god, at the end of the day these are still human beings. "Only" a million, thats a massive number.
- odorousrex 7y agoThis is one of the most disgusting and repulsive comments I've ever read on HN. These are people - my parents, my in-laws, and my sister-in-law are all in this age group, as I'm sure a lot of posters here are as well. These are human beings like you are I. Please have a little more respect.
- themagician 7y ago?? I'm not saying I want this to happen. This would be my parents too, mate. But it's just the morbid reality of the situation. OP was talking about the "bright side", well after the dust settles this is an upside.
- Insanity 7y agoDamn, that's some dark thinking. Really stretching the definition of "bright side"..
- ultrarunner 7y agoAnd if everyone died all problems would be resolved. You're not wrong (or maybe you are; perhaps those people add more economic value that you give them credit for, even indirectly), but there's difference between pursuing a better world and resolving problems like they're tech support tickets.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agowith everyone washing their hands like crazy now, I wonder what the percentage of normal/everyday colds/flus will be like this year, vs other years.
- pixl97 7y agoIt has already been a bad flu season and it naturally starts to taper off this time of year.
- baq 7y agoThere’s some evidence that some of the ‘bad flu’ cases were actually covid-19, present in both the US and Italy as far back as November. Just ask if these bad flu people regained their fitness.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoNovember? That's a long time ago, please give me more info on that.
- baq 7y agosee my comment above for a bioinformatics approach and apparently the CDC now someeewhat agrees, though i know neither the guy on the video nor the source (not US citizen): https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1237974799999062016?s=20 https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/12379747999990620...
- flukus 7y agoIt takes about 10 weeks to go from 100 infections to half a million, if those flu cases were covid-19 the world would be in dire straits by now.
- tn890 7y ago>some evidence Well, don't be afraid to share it with the world, if such evidence does exist. I highly doubt it though.
- downerending 7y agoMost people have little interest in operating their motor vehicles safely, even though doing so would be trivially easy, and not doing so kills a staggering number each year. So no, not optimistic on this.
- buboard 7y ago5. Will invest in counterbioterrorism defense
- marcosdumay 7y agoPeople will probably invest on research on how to contain and react to new types of diseases. Both those 4... 3 of them are against human nature, the other one is expensive, just forget about it.
- JPKab 7y agoThe CCP has finally closed the wildlife markets that have spawned several dangerous diseases like this one. Finally.
- nomel 7y agoHow many times have they shut down the wildlife markets now?
- soberhoff 7y agoHow is it a "bright side" that when something bad happens people try to avoid it happening again in the future? That's just circular.