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With our species encroaching further and further on the natural habitats of wild animals, it's likely that another disease causing agent with pandemic potential
by est31 6y ago
With our species encroaching further and further on the natural habitats of wild animals, it's likely that another disease causing agent with pandemic potential like sars-cov-2 will emerge sooner than we think. Will it be another coronavirus? Will it be a bacterium? We don't know, nor do we know how it will look like, how easy it'll spread and how many of us it'll kill next time.
There are already as we speak, countless spillover events from animals to humans. Most of these diseases don't spread between humans and only affect that single patient, which is good. But eventually one of them will be able to.
Something like Ebola with the transmission characteristics of sars-cov-2 would be absolutely devastating for our civilization. It won't be the last one to have been destroyed by disease.
- dheera 6y agoTo a great degree if everyone wore N95 respirators for a month we'd probably be through this pandemic already. But we're still 6 months into it, they don't have N95 respirators at any of my local stores, many people aren't wearing masks, and those that are are largely using ineffective cloth or surgical masks with holes on the sides. And they were harrassing Asians for wearing masks in the early stages of the pandemic, too. It's politics, misinformation, and ignorance that has the biggest potential to kill.
- Retric 6y agoBuilding machines to make N95 masks quickly is extremely difficult and the masks themselves don’t last for that long. Scaling production to cover just medical professionals within 6 months didn’t happen, let alone the general public. However, we could scale N95 capacity for the next pandemic relatively cheaply. The fact nobody is talking in those terms suggests it’s simply not going to happen, and arguably the real reason why why we don’t have them for this pandemic.
- ipsum2 6y agoI admire your optimism, but: > In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. government turned down an offer to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-days-of-the-pandemic-the-us-government-turned-down-an-offer-to-manufacture-millions-of-n95-masks-in-america/2020/05/09/f76a821e-908a-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d...
- m0zg 6y agoThat's WaPo though. They only publish facts by mistake.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoDoes that imply if I only read stuff that WaPo doesn’t mention it will be almost certainly a fact?
- samatman 6y agoTo add to the sibling comment, Taiwan convened an emergency committee very early in the pandemic. The first thing they looked at was masks: they could produce 2 million a day, and needed 20 million. So they ramped up, and made them. These were, as I understand it, medical masks, not N95 respirators. But the results speak for themselves.
- beamatronic 6y agoAmerica in the 1940s and 1950s could have done that too.
- nradov 6y agoEven if hypothetically every human wore an N95 mask for a month (which is obviously impossible), afterwards some people would be infected by animals and in a few months we'd be back to where we are now. I'm not trying to discourage anyone from wearing a mask, they can certainly reduce your risk in some situations. But believing that masks can end the pandemic is magical thinking.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ashtonkem 6y agoIs there any evidence of re-infection by the original animal vector? Because asserting that we’re still getting new infections from animals (as compared to human to human) is quite a statement to make.
- mc32 6y agoThe plague is now endemic in the western US. It’s postulated[1] that it came here via ship from Asia and through San Francisco at the turn of the XX cent. Most cases happen in the four corners region, but they happen all through out the west. It’s not particularly new. [1] https://academic.oup.com/jme/article/44/3/530/856131#90966825 https://academic.oup.com/jme/article/44/3/530/856131#9096682...
- closeparen 6y agoAt some point we’ll get to meet the viruses that were frozen in the polar ice caps for millennia...
- namibj 6y agoIt's already happening in Siberia.
- accountinhn 6y agoSee this is the part that scares me the most when it comes to climate change. For the rest of the issues like water level rising, weather changes and related food scarcity there are models, research and hypothesis. These frozen viruses over a millenia is a big unknown
- adrianN 6y agoI'm more afraid what changes in agricultural zones will do to political stability. If all agriculture happens in Canada in Siberia, and the rest of the world becomes unable to feed itself, I think that could cause wars.
- kadoban 6y agoChanges in agriculture and water availability will absolutely cause wars. Some of the current conflicts already have some muddy influences from climate change. They'll get more common and the cause-and-effect will become progressively more obvious, though there's rarely any conflict that can be traced to just one cause. The most likely way it'll look for the near future is climate change will put more stress on existing societies, making it more likely for violence to break out. This is similar to what we are seeing, and will see more obviously in the future with extreme weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, flooding, etc.). It will be difficult to trace any one in particular to climate change, but they'll become more common on the whole.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoThat is already happening with the thawing of permafrost in Sibiria and North-America.