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"Ah shit, here we go again..." But seriously, if we did have another similar viral outbreak as COVID-19, what do you think will go better than last time, or wo

• ncr100 2y ago
  Ha. Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.
  • rhinovino 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • shwaj 2y ago
      Citation needed, but of course you can’t provide those numbers. Did the republicans also have higher birth rates, and managed to grow a new batch in time to win the 2024 election?
      • slater 2y ago
        Not op, but: In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
        • galangalalgol 2y ago
          Perhaps related is that the voting age population (vap) only increased ~30% of what would be predicted by the curve fit up to that point. Could be that some people died out of the vap early. Compounded with that, the voting eligible population (vep) increased exactly as predicted. Which means for each early demose of someone in the vap, someone else already in the vap became eligible when they hadn't been previously. Perhaps some states changed their laws about who was eligible?
    • mindslight 2y ago
      Mail in ballots were discarded by liberal Personal Representatives!!1!i!!
    • bandyaboot 2y ago
      What low turnout? Both presidential candidates received more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.
      • zamadatix 2y ago
        This statement is not true, the 2020 election had both a higher absolute total turnout and a higher number of absolute votes for the winning candidate. Regardless, the cleaner way to compare election years is by % VEP or %VAP - otherwise you're effectively comparing population between the years by accident. From this perspective I disagree with GP, 2024 was still a great year for turnout... just not as good as 2020. 2024 sits 2nd in VEP and 7th VAP (out of the last 24 elections).
        • bandyaboot 2y ago
          I was referring to the 2020 election.
          • zamadatix 2y ago
            Ah, thanks for the clarification. In that case apologies for my confusion - I fully agree with your question regarding the GP.
      • Terr_ 2y ago
        > more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that. That fact falls into a whole class of "new records" which sound impressive but are usually meaningless, because it's closer to the default outcome. In this case, the voting-age population was (yet again) going to increase, so each "new record" in votes cast becomes boringly-normal rather than unusually interesting. The same also happens with certain dollar-amount records, which are not adjusted for inflation or overall economy growth. A similar phenomenon to https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ , except it has to do with trends over time rather than geographically.
        • bandyaboot 2y ago
• ethbr1 2y ago
  The biggest fuckup last time was people's general confusion and lack of preparation. Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around. What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    The biggest fuckup last time was relying on the general public to voluntarily do the right thing. It felt like we were in a leaky boat at sea with half the population trying to plug the leaks as fast as they can while the other half were deliberately drilling more holes.
    • wombatpm 2y ago
      Clear, correct, and unbiased information is what is needed. The CDC failed when they said it wasn’t airborne despite the evidence, they failed when they said masks were not needed initially, because they were afraid of panic buying. The FDA screwed the pooch with testing. Many institutions could do tests, but the FDA wanted to maintain control and there process was flawed. Operation Warp speed got a vaccine, but it went from Sterilizing vaccine, to lessen symptoms and hospitalization. They failed to explain the difference between vaccine side effects and disease effects. Myocarditis? Could be a side effect of either. Perhaps they should have developed a test to determine which? They let an idiot spout nonsense on TV and no one on stage correct him or clarified, letting the issue become political. And have they really clarified what we are dealing with. A supposed respiratory virus that causes, myocarditis, neurological issues, stroke , blood clots , and multiple organ failures - is that really a respiratory virus. Then we’ve declared victory too soon. And everything has left a bad taste in our mouths, such that no one will accept a lockdown again unless the disease has a 20% mortality rate. Ebola could break out and some people would compare the bleeding to lots of paper cuts.
      • chasil 2y ago
• akira2501 2y ago
  I doubt people are willing to be bullied into shutting down their businesses and fully putting their lives and children's educations on hold because white coat wearing talking heads on TV told them it would only take two weeks.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    Can you tell me specifically which experts said it would only take two weeks?
    • akira2501 2y ago
      > Can you tell me Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster." > specifically which experts Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.
      • kadoban 2y ago
        > Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster." Your timeline makes no sense. Fauci or anyone would not have been talking about boosters for _years_ after lockdowns started. Booster of what? No vaccine existed.
        • Dalewyn 2y ago
          Here you go: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-spread/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s... https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regarding-presidents-coronavirus-task-force/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/st... https://www.npr.org/2020/03/30/822448199/how-15-days-became-45-trump-extends-guidelines-to-slow-coronavirus https://www.npr.org/2020/03/30/822448199/how-15-days-became-... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/covid-a-year-later-trumps-15-days-to-slow-the-spread-pledge-shows-how-little-we-knew.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/covid-a-year-later-trumps-15... In no uncertain terms, your obtuse dismissal of history that most of us here literally witnessed with our own eyes is appalling. Everyone in a position of power, including Trump and Fauci, fucked up because everyone wanted to use covid for political ends. Noone is going to trust the government, Trump or otherwise, the next time and for good reason.
• unclad5968 2y ago
  Way worse. The public perception in my community is that the response to covid was hyper-exaggerated. Unless people they knew in real life were dying, they would basically never go through the masking and quarantine again.
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    As the partner of a critical care nurse during COVID-19, the perception gulf between "everyone" and "frontline medical workers" was mind-boggling vast. The former didn't see people on ventilators and dying, but yet still had strong opinions about how serious it was or wasn't. The latter went into work every day and saw the flood of critical patients, then finally went out after lockdown and heard about how it was an imaginary pandemic. ... I wonder why we had so many nurses leave the profession?
    • nostromo 2y ago
      Your partner is the one with the biased view, not the general public. Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.
      • wizzwizz4 2y ago
        But "sufficiently-sick people go to the hospital" is always true, surely? You don't get loads more people in hospital unless loads more people are getting sick. A biased sample's informative if you know exactly how it's biased – in fact, it can be more informative. (If you want to study popular music, you look at the charts, not a random sample of tracks uploaded to SoundCloud.)
      • rscho 2y ago
        How is your view closer to reality?! We saw fucking legions of people flood our ICUs overnight, and those were not all people that 'would have died anyway', far from it. How many deaths do you need before it becomes part of your reality?
• Mistletoe 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • nightowl_games 2y ago
    I need you to know how sick and callous that "it will be good if they die" attitude is to me. I know you think it's just, but as an outsider who isn't as politically inflamed as you are, it looks truly sick.
    • s5300 2y ago
      >> who isn't as politically inflamed as you are Saying that it’s okay for bonafide anti-intellectuals to meet the fate they’ve crafted for themselves despite all evidence is no sign of political inflammation. Be serious.
      • echelon 2y ago
        But that's what it looks and feels like. Partisan neener neener. We don't withhold mercy because someone doesn't believe in receiving help, or because they play for the opposite "team". We do our best to help anyway. A doctor doesn't withhold treatment because a patient believes God is responsible for healing them. We don't stop trying to eradicate Polio because people distrust vaccines. It can be a thankless uphill battle, but that's the human condition, and it's important to retain human empathy. We shouldn't gloat when someone dies from Covid, just like we shouldn't gloat when someone dies from HIV AIDS. We're all in the human experience together, sharing this infinitesimal overlapping moment within the lightcone. It'll be easier to push together instead of treating everything as a tug of war. Sometimes that means being nice to people you disagree with.
      • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        Tying it to swinging election results is political inflamation. That's so obvious that I think it's you who are not serious.
    • generj 2y ago
      I struggled with similar feelings to the parent commentator during the pandemic. This is me processing it, because your comment reminded me of that feeling. I realized I wasn’t hoping death on the people who gleefully refused to comply with basic pandemic presentation measures. That was a sort of sick dark humor to help with the fact they were exhibiting anti-social behavior but we live in a a non-just world and so they would go unpunished. The only punishment coming their way was from nature, and I didn’t celebrate it so much as not find it in myself to care. On reflection I was just angry they were violating the social compact and wished somehow not to have them in my tribe. I think that’s very human, we don’t tolerate society members that endanger the society especially in extreme moments. We were at war, I was sacrificing to fight, and they were effectively treasonous in that fight. The biggest help was realizing they lived in effectively an alternative world with alternative fake facts. I’ve mostly overcome that anger now that I’m not actively in a pandemic but it’s really hard to feel good about people that willingly endangered my grandma. I don’t know how society would fare in a more serious pandemic and that scares me. My trust in society has been permanently broken.
• susiecambria 2y ago
  Absolutely worse if RFK Jr.'s nomination makes it through Congress. I know career staff can take their time making changes the CDC head wants, but they can only be so slow in the face of pressure from the agency director and president.
  • threeseed 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • timr 2y ago
      Marty Makary is neither anti-vaccine nor a conspiracy theorist. He's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, author of the paper that turned into the "checklist manifesto", as well as multiple NY Times best-selling books on medicine. Please stop.
      • llamaimperative 2y ago
        None of those are exclusive of being anti-vaccine or a conspiracy theorist. But agreed he doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Best of luck to him surrounded by that team of experts!
        • timr 2y ago
          Except he plainly isn't anti-vaccine, nor a conspiracy theorist. It's a lazy slur, and it's discouraging to see people repeating it. He was against a Covid vaccine mandate, which is not "anti-vaccine", except in the heads of people who have replaced logic and scientific knowledge with politics.
          • llamaimperative 2y ago
            I don’t know enough about him to say, my only comment was that “he is a NYT best-seller, invented the checklist manifesto” etc aren’t rebuttals. This comment you made is much more substantial.
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• brandonmenc 2y ago
  We won't again permit the economy and life in general to grind to a halt for months on end unless it's as dangerous as polio or the black plague. So that's better.
  • jeffbee 2y ago
    In terms of mortality COVID-19 was way, way worse than polio ever was.
    • deleted 2y ago
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    • Terr_ 2y ago
      It might be that visible and permanent disability from polio was actually scarier than abstract death, simply because the former is a lot easier to visualize and generates a larger set of hypothetical "what would I do next" challenges.
    • brandonmenc 2y ago
      Mortality isn't the only measure of danger. Like 80% of COVID deaths were over age 65. For young people with no comorbidities, COVID was mostly benign. Magnitude aside, that's more or less a normal disease. Polio was paralyzing thousands of healthy children every year with no end in sight. People freak out way more about something like that.
  • rscho 2y ago
    Fantastic! Except you can't know in advance. So, the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with. Otherwise, by the time you decide it's dangerous enough to do something, you've already got an uncontrollable spread on your hands.
    • maskzoff 2y ago
      [dead]
    • 2y ago
• rscho 2y ago
  Public perception of healthcare is far worse, so far fewer people would attempt to limit transmission and protect vulnerable populations. On the other hand, we now have experience in handling respiratory disease pandemics and would likely fare better at actually medically supporting patients (avoid early intubation, etc.). So overall, probably much worse since population dynamics would flood our healthcare system, even if it has improved.
  • mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Yeah, I don't think people are going to tolerate going through the lockdowns, masking and everything else all over again. People seem far more affected by the economic fallout, inflation, etc to do it all again.
    • rscho 2y ago
      IMO, a new lockdown isn't possible but also would not be necessary if people were willing to behave rationally (I know, I know...). We know influenza viruses far better than we know covid. Masks would be extremely efficient at limiting droplet transmission.
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        I think we learned the first time around that relying on individuals to take coordinated, collective, cooperative action is pointless. Too many selfish people will choose “defect” in the Prisoners Dilemma.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Yea the general public learned nothing from COVID (more like learned negative from it), but the medical system learned a lot. We could be prepared to handle the next global pandemic, our institutions are probably better prepared. But we won’t because the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant, so overall we’re going to fuck it up even worse next time.
• pfdietz 2y ago
  Don't we have a stockpile of flu antivirals?
  • smileson2 2y ago
    Yeah the government has been heavily ramping up production of influenza antigen that should be effective against this strain the past year of so and funding more targeted mrna type vaccine research for h5n1 we won't be as blindsided or unprepared as we were by covid for this one
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      I meant things like Tamiflu, but good.
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  • classichasclass 2y ago
    You're probably referring to the Strategic National Stockpile. There are approximately 55 million doses of Tamiflu on hand as of earlier this year, though the ASPR generally keeps this number under its hat. In the meantime, there is an H5N1 candidate vaccine, and it would probably be able to get to market fairly quickly (compare with the H1N1 vaccine rollout in 2009).
  • cameldrv 2y ago
    My understanding is that there is also some stockpiled H5 vaccine from years ago. Supposedly it's not a perfect match for the current strain going around in cattle but it's pretty good.
• tonetheman 2y ago
  Much worse. The incoming health person is a vaccine denier. Which could put the US in the spot where we will not develop vaccines and lots of people could die.
• School-Cotton 2y ago
  I think there’s almost no chance we’d lock down like we did before, so the health impact would be a bit worse, but the economic and social impacts would be much less bad (almost nonexistent).
• archagon 2y ago
  Uhm, I would not be surprised if Trump's administration outright bans vaccination and masking this time around.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    Nah, no money in that. It's more likely the Executive Trumposphere will try to put itself in no-oversight charge of where the supplies flow... so that they can allocate them as partisan rewards and punishments to different states.
• Fomite 2y ago
  From the perspective of someone who works in public health: We are less prepared as a society, and have fewer tools at our disposal.
• deleted 2y ago
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