3 ms·

> Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get s

by piva00 2y ago

> Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years. > My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light. What exactly did you expect though? The pandemic stage has ended, it's now a novel virus that will continue to circulate among us for many, many years until we find a way to eradicate it. Eradicating requires broad vaccination of the population against it over generations, like smallpox, or the way polio is going (many societies have eradicated it). There's not much more to talk about on COVID, for now the strains are not the same killing machines from the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people have been vaccinated while many others refuse to vaccinate themselves. Just like influenza continues to kill (or maim) people year-over-year, COVID will keep killing and maiming people but it's not creating a huge strain in the healthcare system globally. Also, there's not much more to do, the disease exists and will continue existing, we might get new vaccination schemes (like for influenza) to protect the most vulnerable people, we will continue to catch it and probably suffer side-effects but the emergency part of it is mostly over... What were your expectations?

hnbad 2y ago
I can only speak for myself and I'm not in the US but having been raised on a diet of "end of history" era Hollywood stories about the world coming together to defeat a common threat, I expected something closer to a war economy than just a bunch of temporary subsidies, conflicting mandates and half-assed lockdowns that ultimatel fizzled out before even the lower bound of vaccination for what the scientists said would be required for herd immunity was met. Instead we saw countries stepping over each other to buy last minute supplies from China because they had eliminated their stockpiles for "efficiency", politicians opportunistically demonstrating defiance in order to make a name for themselves and subsidies being tailored to the specific niche interests of major industries while public services were told to exercise "individual responsibility" instead of receiving additional funds. We clapped for the nurses and then went back to cutting the public health budget because the economy was tanking while a few lucky businesses redistributed societal wealth into their pockets. Nobody demonstrated leadership. Anyone who did was kneecapped by opportunists. Even the EU couldn't commit to a joint plan without having individual member states decide they're special and allowed to do backroom deals to break the same rules they just agreed to. The only thing any politician could agree on was that the economy had to "keep running" at any cost. What did I expect? I don't know, to be honest. But I expected something more coherent and closer to the lies we were told about the state and what it is good for. But what shocked me more is how after the mask came off and revealed that it's all always been false advertising, we simply went back to normal. But this already happened before, e.g. after the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. I shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to forget.
btbuildem 2y ago
I'd expected something similar to the John Snow pump handle story -- that once we learned that the virus spreads via air, we would invest in clean indoor air, and innovate ways to make it safer to share spaces with large numbers of people over extended time. The acute phase death rate may have dropped off (and the data collection has most definitely dropped off, stopped entirely, or became obfuscated, so it's hard to know for sure), but we know for a fact that about 15% of those who get sick, get a long-term sickness that ranges from seriously inconvenient to severely debilitating. We know this from collected data [1], not some statistical models. My inner cynic concludes that in for-profit healthcare systems, having a growing proportion of the population be chronically ill is actually the optimal scenario: you can dole out treatments and medicines at high prices, and as long as your patients don't die or get better, it's a very profitable proposition. I'm not saying we're doing this consciously like some comic-book villain, but the incentives are aligned exactly so. 1: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article/00015-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...

by piva00 2y ago

hnbad 2y ago

I can only speak for myself and I'm not in the US but having been raised on a diet of "end of history" era Hollywood stories about the world coming together to defeat a common threat, I expected something closer to a war economy than just a bunch of temporary subsidies, conflicting mandates and half-assed lockdowns that ultimatel fizzled out before even the lower bound of vaccination for what the scientists said would be required for herd immunity was met. Instead we saw countries stepping over each other to buy last minute supplies from China because they had eliminated their stockpiles for "efficiency", politicians opportunistically demonstrating defiance in order to make a name for themselves and subsidies being tailored to the specific niche interests of major industries while public services were told to exercise "individual responsibility" instead of receiving additional funds. We clapped for the nurses and then went back to cutting the public health budget because the economy was tanking while a few lucky businesses redistributed societal wealth into their pockets. Nobody demonstrated leadership. Anyone who did was kneecapped by opportunists. Even the EU couldn't commit to a joint plan without having individual member states decide they're special and allowed to do backroom deals to break the same rules they just agreed to. The only thing any politician could agree on was that the economy had to "keep running" at any cost. What did I expect? I don't know, to be honest. But I expected something more coherent and closer to the lies we were told about the state and what it is good for. But what shocked me more is how after the mask came off and revealed that it's all always been false advertising, we simply went back to normal. But this already happened before, e.g. after the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. I shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to forget.

btbuildem 2y ago

I'd expected something similar to the John Snow pump handle story -- that once we learned that the virus spreads via air, we would invest in clean indoor air, and innovate ways to make it safer to share spaces with large numbers of people over extended time. The acute phase death rate may have dropped off (and the data collection has most definitely dropped off, stopped entirely, or became obfuscated, so it's hard to know for sure), but we know for a fact that about 15% of those who get sick, get a long-term sickness that ranges from seriously inconvenient to severely debilitating. We know this from collected data [1], not some statistical models. My inner cynic concludes that in for-profit healthcare systems, having a growing proportion of the population be chronically ill is actually the optimal scenario: you can dole out treatments and medicines at high prices, and as long as your patients don't die or get better, it's a very profitable proposition. I'm not saying we're doing this consciously like some comic-book villain, but the incentives are aligned exactly so. 1: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article/00015-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...