> But epidemiologists are a very cautious group. No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly

> But epidemiologists are a very cautious group. No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly with wild abandon. It's like how on Star Trek they were always beaming to new planets in their regular uniforms with no spacesuits or anything. The gimmick or conceit there was that the transporter filtered out nasty bugs during rematerialization. Until we have "magic" bug filters jet-setting is a disease vector. People are talking about "returning to normal" but there's no normal to return to: mass international rapid transit is not normal. Huge cities with millions of people are not normal. Nothing about the last ~N centuries is normal (for whatever value of N up to about 120 or so? Younger Dryas happened about 12Ky ago, eh? The Potbelly Hill dates from around the 10th millennium BCE[1]. Somewhere around there we started in with farms and cities. This has been the blink of an eye in evolutionary and geological timeframes. Everything we're doing is new and radical!) What I'm getting at is this: this won't be the last virus. Remember swine flu? SARS? Ebola? Zika? Hantavirus? Heck, Lyme? Polio is making a comeback, that's the one that paralyses children. We keep expanding into new wilderness. The "attack surface" of humanity is growing exponentially. There's no normal to go back to. (I really do hate to be such a downer, but I just don't see a lot of people taking the long view. Everyone is understandably eager to get back to pretending that viruses don't exist, but they do. Connect the goddamned dots.) [1] Göbekli Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe