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As somebody who has been tracking and interested in this story since late January, the one thing I can without qualifications is that whatever seems true now wi
by DanielBMarkham 7y ago
As somebody who has been tracking and interested in this story since late January, the one thing I can without qualifications is that whatever seems true now will change in a few weeks' time.
In general the outlook has gotten better as the data got better and we were able to compare notes, although there have been some setbacks, too.
I don't think we'll ever, ever get back to "normal" as this is the pandemic we've been reading about and planning for over the last century. Nobody [alive today] has ever lived through something like this and it is bound to have lasting consequences.
But I would be cautious about reading long-term plans. I know everybody wants to know how the story ends, but people who have engaged in long-range planning over the last couple of months have consistently had to re-plan. I would expect that trend to continue. We don't know exactly what small changes might have large consequences. For instance, monitoring temperatures at points of entry and exist for all businesses could have a major effect, or forms of "frontier testing"
No doubt this is a period for the history books. We'll probably have to live through it to finally figure out how it's all going to end.
- abfan1127 7y agowhat do you mean "nobody has ever lived through this?" We've had huge pandemics in the past: the plague, Spanish Flu, measles, polio, smallpox. I agree we should be cautious about reading long-term plans.
- DanielBMarkham 7y agoI meant nobody alive today. I guess now we could argue about smallpox, measles, and the like, but I am working from the general definition of the last pandemic being the Spanish Flu. I have added the two missing words to my original post for clarification. Thank you.
- nostromo 7y agoThank you, this context is important. Swine flu killed between 150,000 to 575,000 globally in 2009, and almost nobody even remembers it. HIV is a recent pandemic that many living people have lived through, from discovery to treatment. And of course the flu, which is different than SARSCoV2, kills between 250,000 and 500,000 each and every year. If you're 30 years old, between 7 and 15 million people have died from flu in your lifetime.
- viklove 7y agoCoronavirus has already killed 100k, and we're still in the first quarter.
- crispyambulance 7y agoYep, and also we don't have overloaded hospitals, young people critically ill, mass graves, and unplugged global economy for the flu. It's hard to argue that this isn't _VASTLY_ worse than the flu in both scope and intensity.
- standardUser 7y ago'I don't think we'll ever, ever get back to "normal"' People keep saying this, but it's a meaningless sentiment. The "normal" of today was never going to be the "normal" of two years from now, with or without this pandemic. It's not like the world was going to be frozen in time until this coronavirus came along. Before 9/11 we didn't have to take off our shoes to fly. Now we usually do. Im sure there will be plenty of similar changes due to the pandemic, and most of them will be similarly easy to adapt to, just as we adapt to so many other changes year after year. But this threat that we may never "get back to normal" rings hollow to me.
- Simulacra 7y agoThis article seems like a lot of fear mongering, almost doomsaying. I think we will get back to normal, and we will basically return to what we were doing before with little change.