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The Political Hierarchy of Infection
- PaulHoule 4y ago... what this all forgets is how scary the initial wave looked in NYC. I remember the subway being downright spacious in the 1990s and early 2000s, sometimes sitting across from a model or seeing an illegal vendor going from train to train selling hooch or illegal DVDs. By 2019 it was getting crazy crowded most of the time and they were not kidding when they told you take off you backpack and you could get pretty compressed sometimes. With global connections to every airport on Earth, NYC picked it up fast and it just exploded, maybe one person in a subway car could infect hundreds of people directly. They had no idea how to treat it and they were pulling up refrigerator cars to nursing homes. It is no wonder people freaked out. If you are living further out it looked quite different (what is a safer activity than going for long hikes in the woods or riding horses?) but for the "elite" in big cities things looked pretty dire at the beginning.
- breck 4y agoIt only looked scary to the public because our information infrastructure has gotten so rotten (b/c of copywrong laws). On February 17th, 2020, the first big dataset on Covid was released (N > 70,000), and it was crystal clear that this wasn't going to be that big a deal. I even Tweeted about it: https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1229648681483169792 https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1229648681483169792 The biology and epidemiology of the thing was so easy to figure out (I am in an epidemiology department at a cancer center). This was a bad flu (2x - 4x worse than a typical flu). What I never anticipated was the extent of the brokenness of our information ecosystem, and the amount of dumb and dishonest people in power.