7 ms·
I fear we have lost the collective will to conduct pandemic mitigation. The next time something bad comes round, we're just going to have it wash over us and Bl
by hunglee2 2y ago
I fear we have lost the collective will to conduct pandemic mitigation. The next time something bad comes round, we're just going to have it wash over us and Black Death it. It's a shame
- skrebbel 2y agoI'm not sure we ever had it.
- trescenzi 2y agoYea I was in college during Swine Flu and it was mostly treated as a joke. It became an excuse to miss class and the closest the college came to taking it seriously were some strongly worded recommendations to not leave your dorm if you have it. Of course that _might_ be because it wasn’t that bad. But if you get to the point that it’s spreading that regularly you’ve already lost the ability to control it regardless of severity.
- teeray 2y agoMy armchair theory is that it’s partly a marketing problem. Covid was treated with more fear because it was “the coronavirus” at first. Everyone has had “the flu” before, but nobody had had the spooky “coronavirus” at that point (even if they had—they just hadn’t heard of it). “It’s just the flu bro” is a difficult mindset to overcome. The same marketing problem existed with CVEs before Heartbleed. CVE-2014-0160 just doesn’t sound as frightening.
- sadboi31 2y agoThe US government was also recorded (and confirmed) as dumping TONS of covid misinformation throughout the entire world. Leaks from a defense contractor showed as much. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi... Helping a local org give thousands of covid shots to seniors, people living in congregate housing, etc# was not easy because there was a lot of resistance from these communities due to the massive amounts of scary information out there. If you want an example see this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360815298_Foreign_Materials_in_Blood_Samples_of_Recipients_of_COVID-19_Vaccines https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360815298_Foreign_M... It really felt like there was literally nothing wholesome on anyones feeds for almost an entire year. Limited exposure from all non-profits i know of in my community. Significantly reduced views, deleted posts, erroneous flags, etc#..... Meanwhile, everyone in every neighborhood gets nothing but images + videos of people dying or getting sick from "the jab", "5g", "the mark of the beast", etc# Most of the women running these non-profits are former executives, local gov't officials, or workers in DHS or other like agencies. They're not stupid and incapable of "getting a message out". Something is and was seriously wrong w/ operation lightspeed.
- archagon 2y agoCovid was treated with fear because it was massively contagious.
- dist-epoch 2y agoI guess you missed the part with overwhelmed hospitals and grave yards.
- mike_hearn 2y agoCOVID was treated with more fear due to the impact of academic modelling, and in particular the models by Neil Ferguson's group at Imperial College. I remember the sequencing quite well here, the massive freakout and sudden interest in extreme lockdowns appeared immediately after Ferguson went to the press because his models predicted sky high casualty rates if lockdowns weren't implemented immediately. In reality his models were full of bugs, stupid assumptions and were generally unvalidated garbage tier work that didn't match reality at all. A few other epidemiologists pointed that out at the time, but governments are completely undiscerning when it comes to "science" and the press love bad news, so they went with it. End results were wildly off what he predicted.
- tim333 2y agoI think it was more watching people die gruesomely on ventilators in the early days and worries that could be widespread. In fact most people had already had the "four known seasonal coronaviruses (non-Covid-19)" but not really noticed as they are like the common cold.
- arwhatever 2y agoIf I recall, the decision to quarantine people who had contracted Ebola was totally uncontroversial, but I can’t speculate as to how that willingness would scale.
- agilob 2y agoBack around 2007-2009 there was a risk of bird flu in central Europe. We had a local ban on washing cars except in fully automated car washes, it wasn't controversial at all. We just went along with it.
- vanattab 2y agoThat's very different then shuting down the economy and locking people in their houses. I am not saying I think the response was unreasonable (at least initially) but many people cleary did.
- matthews2 2y agoWhat is the link between car washing and spreading bird flu?
- dist-epoch 2y agoCar visits a farm with infected chickens, picks up dirt with viruses on the wheels, brings it into cities. This is one way how it spreads from farm to farm.
- agilob 2y agoWe have lots of trees in the area, it was said not to get close to bird poops and avoid contact with water where birds pollute.
- tim333 2y agoI'm presuming birds poop on cars, spraying the cars with a hose puts droplets of it in the air.
- panarky 2y agoApparently we had the capability for collective action at one time, but most of us weren't around then. The political order of the New Deal lasted from roughly the Great Depression until about 1980. It wasn't just about government actions, it was more about how most people understood the world what it means to live a good life. That way of thinking about the world enabled collective action to improve the standard of living for most people, reduce poverty and inequality, give most people better health, housing and longer lives, faster and safer transportation, dignity in old age, etc. But that political order was replaced by neoliberalism, which started in the 1980s and probably ended at the 2008 financial collapse. Again, it was not only a new political order, it was a shift in how people understood the world and their place in it. It was a time of deregulation, globalized commerce and capital flows, and the supremacy of market-based solutions. We got dramatic increases in inequality, unimaginable individual wealth combined with tent cities and a resurgence of infectious disease. It's hard to imagine accomplishing big collective goals like building an interstate highway system, or implementing social security, or winning a world war against fascism, if all that hadn't been done already. We might not even be capable of maintaining what previous generations were able to build from nothing. I've spent my life swimming in the water of neoliberalism so it's almost impossible to imagine that there are alternatives. It feels like effective collective action for the greater good has never been possible and never will be.
- draw_down 2y ago[dead]
- gotoeleven 2y agoYeah if only people had put a fourth layer of cotton over their faces and refrained from blowing out birthday candles.
- paulcole 2y agoYes, it quickly became clear that at least in the US the majority of the population will not accept any restrictions until (at least) there are bodies literally piled in the streets. And probably not even then, IMO. Will be a grim scene.
- draw_down 2y ago[dead]
- phkahler 2y agoPeople in the US followed until the government got stupid, lied, caved to corporations, etc. If you want people to follow instructions, you need to demonstrate competence first.
- paulcole 2y agoReread my comment carefully. I don’t care why people won’t obey. It’s just clear that they will not obey.
- indigodaddy 2y agoAnd why should they if it doesn’t make sense?
- paulcole 2y agoReread my comment carefully. I don’t care if they obey or not. It’s just clear they will not obey.
- indigodaddy 2y agoBut your comment implies they should blindly obey (does it not?)
- paulcole 2y ago
- kleton 2y agoIt was clear to people paying attention to the hard numbers by February 2020 that Covid was no threat to children and non-elderly adults without risk factors like obesity, which led to the rational decision to treat it as a non-risk. If something bad comes around that is actually killing healthy adults, they would stay home.
- skybrian 2y agoThis seems like hindsight bias. Much less was understood about COVID back then and maybe you forgot how uncertain it was?
- kleton 2y agoI had recovered from it in about January 2020, so it was not one bit uncertain to me.
- skybrian 2y agoHow do you know it was COVID and not some other disease with similar symptoms? Also, why would you be confident that your experience generalizes? Getting to “not one bit uncertain” from what you could possibly have known then shows poor reasoning skills.
- 77pt77 2y agoJust study it, deploy whatever vaccine or mitigation procedure exists and let those that don't want it die. Just let them die. Do not want a ventilator because 80% of those placed in ventilators die? (humans are awful at reasoning) Great! Die. Enough with this nonsense.
- sincerecook 2y agoMaybe we could just try some more rational measures, like not forcing people who are at low risk to take an experimental treatment and weighing the severity of the of the threat against the freedoms we want to remove.
- tim333 2y agoWe're better with vaccines than in the Black Death days. And with flea killing. The UK government has already ordered five million doses of H5 vaccine just in case it come in handy.