Remember: as the number of humans is growing, and we are encroaching on the natural habitats of wildlife further and further, the chances of new zoonotic diseases is increasing, not going down. I'm not saying that bird flu will be it, but next covid-scale pandemic will very likely come sooner rather than later.
Calling attention to this but "as the number of humans is growing, and we are encroaching on the natural habitats of wildlife further and further" is a "mother-nature's revenge" meme and isn't really true.
Zoonotic plagues are not new but pandemics can spread much faster now due to cheap travel and relatively open borders.
Expansion into previously unpopulated areas (logging the Amazon, for example) does have risks. Marburg virus likely comes from an animal living in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitum_Cave ; it's hardly implausible that expanding human habitation/activity into new areas may uncover more.
Speed of travel certainly makes things worse, but even in the 1300s diseases were able to spread widely.
The speed of transmission hasn't really changed much since the beginning of the worldwide shipping trade. Whether the virus spreads in a few days or a few weeks hardly matters over the full course of a pandemic. We know that a virus (either influenza or another coronavirus) spread worldwide in 1889 fairly quickly.
> The key issue, then, is not that zoonotic diseases appear in humans, but that their emergence seems to be increasing in frequency (3). Major changes in land use, increasing urbanization, and global connectedness are well documented as driving disease emergence through increasing human–animal contacts and accelerating transmission rates, and climate change will similarly accelerate the rate of zoonotic events.
It's not a paper in itself but it says what I've been saying above way more eloquently. It also cites this paper:
> Here we analyse a database of 335 EID ‘events’ (origins of EIDs) between 1940 and 2004, and demonstrate non-random global patterns. EID events have risen significantly over time after controlling for reporting bias, with their peak incidence (in the 1980s) concomitant with the HIV pandemic. EID events are dominated by zoonoses (60.3% of EIDs): the majority of these (71.8%) originate in wildlife (for example, severe acute respiratory virus, Ebola virus), and are increasing significantly over time.
I will stand by the meme characterization. The first links assumes Covid was zoonotic which is a fine assumption but not a high quality conclusion and the second link shows the trend peaking in the 80s and then decreasing. Since the world population was only 60% what it is today, that is strong evidence that at absolute minimum the relationship is nonlinear and perhaps inverts at higher population sizes (as wild biodiversity decreases).
To be quite honest, citing research on a politically polarized topic is not as useful as it used to be.
The political polarization within the academy means that there is a lot of pretty loose research that may get through if it has the appropriate orientation. In practice, you can almost always find (low quality) research supporting one’s position if the position is lefty.
Really? I would think that the risk was higher when almost all humans lived in close physical proximity with their livestock - as in slept, ate, etc. in the same structure. What has changed now is that zoonoses are being spread all over the world in a couple of days.
And yet the chances of some do good scientists opening more labs and refining crispr and playing saviour to stop the next pandemic means that the odds of another lab leak is increasing much faster than natural spillover.
In natural spillover, the disease gets a single shot at infecting and then transmitting.
In a lab leak, the disease has been kept alive and cultured with human cells for hundred of generations. Then undergone various genetic tweaks to see where if might attack and take hold in humans. If it can escape the lab, it has astronomically better odds of surviving in humans and transmitting to other humans.
I'm doubtful we see more than 2 or 3 natural spillover events in the next 50 years. I'm expecting a dozen lab leaks in that time the way technology and collection efforts are going.
The 2030s are going to be a shit show. The crispr tools available.... OmG
Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.
We've had to ask you this several times before - if it keeps up, we're going to have to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Zoonotic diseases are more frequently associated with animal husbandry. Also this encroaching has been being walked back in North America and Europe for a long time, and China more recently. In the coming decades India will follow suit and Africa will bring up the rear. Demographics are not a one way street and economic development means most people moving away from the countryside and into cities.
Except bird flu won't come from wilderness, it will come from animal agriculture. The current worry is that the place it will develop mammal-to-mammal and ultimately human-to-human transmission is mink farms, and the incubator for the disease among birds is chicken farms.
Stop eating and wearing so many animal products and we'll be fine even with billions and billions of people all over the world.
Seriously, I know I'm coming off as an angry veg here, but are people blind to the fact that COVID likely came from a meat market (I mean the lab leak is also possible but the original meat-market theory is pretty likely too), and bird flu will come from meat-animal industrial farms and fur farms?
Humans have been eating and wearing animal products since before we were even Homo sapiens. We'll be fine regardless. If the cost of using animals is an occasional pandemic then so be it, that's just the natural order of things.
I feel like we got lucky with COVID-19. It just wasn't that deadly. Not to be too cold about it, but it had the potential to be a good test run to see how we deal with a more fatal pandemic.
In some ways we passed the test pretty well. In others, not so much.
My question to HN is: what could we do better next time?
edit: to be clear, "we" in what could we do better = our global civilization and maybe separately in each user's country of residence.
Well, bodies did literally start to pile up in morgues and hospitals and still some groups of people managed to convince themselves that it was fake or made up.
Bodies piling up in morgues is one thing but bodies piling up in houses because there's no more room in the morgues and no one going around to collect them is quite another.
That also happened. I remember seeing the reports from some south american nations (don't remember exactly which one) of people who had dead relatives in their houses and no one could go and fetch them.
I think your comment really proves my point. Even when there's overwhelming evidence of how bad it really was, there's always someone who will downplay it or even deny it.
Did people downplay the severity in Ecuador, or did the piles of bodies make people take it seriously? Where I'm from (Northern Europe) the bodies were definitely not piling up. It's even hard to show that any excess mortality over the period. If the people of Ecuador didn't take covid serious after that horrible situation, I guess I can forget about westerns rallying against a more deadly pandemic.
I'm just pointing out that when the evidence of bodies piling up emerged, people denied it, so I assume that will still happen even if bodies pile up even more.
If that did happen, I think it could have been a civilization ending event. There are some viruses with 50% fatality rate. That would have been non-deniable, pushing people to wearing full hazmat suits for daily activity. It is hard to see how any renormalization could have happened.
This is almost backward, from my understanding. If it was much more deadly, it wouldn't have spread.
I'm sure there is an inflection point on the "deadly" nature versus the "spreads" factor.
That said, I fully endorse your closing question. I'm not at all sure what we learned. Other than folks get heavily invested in their narratives and don't back down. Pretty much ever. (Though, I think we already knew that?)
Would a virus with a lethality of, say, 10% really have its infectiousness damaged that badly by 1 in 10 sufferers dying? I appreciate that once you get up to a more substantial fraction, people die before they can spread the disease... but "too deadly to spread" is a much higher number than "deadly-enough to literally decimate its carriers".
> If it was much more deadly, it wouldn't have spread.
That depends fairly heavily on how much more, and how long before symptoms and death you're infectious. Measles, for example, is insidious in part because it's infectious days before the rash appears.
Evidence shows that there is a negative correlation between transmission and virulence, where the more virulent a virus is the less it spreads. I believe this is at least partially due to the fact that if it kills the host, it can't spread as far as if the host lives and keeps spreading. However, I believe that correlation is over the long run, and that there is plenty of evidence towards diseases that both spread easily and are deadly in the short run (smallpox, cholera, etc). Selection pressures seem to push viruses to be less deadly over time, but that's just it: over time.
Cholera is an interesting example of this because it relied on the fecal transmission route, where it would easily spread through tainted water. It didn't matter all that much if the hosts died, as long as it got into the water supply.
My worry is that the public's willingness to take a pandemic seriously has been burned out by COVID-19, so our response to a far more lethal bird-flu pandemic will be weaker than our COVID-19 response was (and it was legitimately impressive how everybody pulled together for like a few weeks back in March 2020).
Perhaps I am mistaken, but most of the supply chain issues seem to have been caused by the reopening more than the pandemic. The economy cannot be shutdown and re-opened on a dime. I think it was a big mistake to think it could be.
I’m no a COVID scold but it is behind only cancer and heart disease for leading causes of death, in the US. It certainly could have been worse, but, pardon the pun, that’s nothing to sneeze at either.
Because COVID is insanely contagious. The non-specific measures we took (social distancing, masking, &c) absolutely crushed the flu, but only maintained partial control over COVID spread pre-vaccine.
In my small company we are cca 25 people and we have very cramped quarters. However, it has been more than once that some colleagues have had covid but nobody else was infected, despite being in meetings with the sick guys.
You can get lucky, but not this lucky with something that's really contagious.
I have had a hard time squaring how contagious it is by external evidence, with how non contagious it is within family units. I finally started seeing families where it would hit everyone in the family, but there are tons of examples of it not spreading to everyone. Which is practically unheard of for this style of virus. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to kid sicknesses. For the most part, you can just ask if other kids are getting sick to know if your is about to. Covid? We literally carpooled with families and did not catch it from them. Just, how?
This is a touch naive, though. How is heart disease so high on the list? After all, we are "convinced" it is poor diet and exercise.
There is some irony that it may be much of the really poor aspect of our diets came from health programs of the last century that were grossly miss targeted. Of course, the frustration there is it was not some nefarious push by folks. We just got it wrong.
Back to covid, I share the incredulity in how the deaths are driven largely by unvaccinated numbers. Even crazier when you see stories like https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072411820/law-enforcement-de..., where the very groups that are seeing rises in deaths pushing back against vaccines. Truly mind numbing.
It may be counter intuitive, but in some ways the opposite may be true. Viruses that are more deadly, are much less likely to cause massive pandemics like we experienced with Covid. When a virus is so virulent that it kills its host quickly and consistently, it dies off faster as the host doesn't have as much time to pass the virus to another host.
Fine what about this instead: a forced government propaganda campaign that is amplified 50x over, by all mainstream media corporations, that is designed to coerce you into getting a shot created by a company that has been fined over 10bn in the last 20 years.
This propaganda campaign will scare you, demoralize you, and ultimately try to split apart tribes (friends, families, churches, etc). It will threaten, and in some cases take, your job and your livelihood. It will restrict your travel and it will call you insane, a conspiracy theorist, and a murderer if you disagree with it.
There. That's a lot more palatable than forced government injections at gun point.
Who are the we here? As a civilization, we could willingly take precautions with an understanding that it's worth while to try them even if we're not 100% sure they would work (i.e. wearing masks). We could prep emergency plans for extended telework. We could do research on the best remoting learning methods so students don't lose substantial educational time (and we may even be able to apply those in beneficial ways.). We could mandate workplaces must not allow sick people to come to work instead of the hodge podge of workplace policies we have. And we could react with empathy towards the sick and the ones who could lose loved ones instead of anger.
The issue with "what could we do better" is that in a system of intelligent free actors (as opposed to some sort of sim game in which the 'creator' has control over everything) the actions that people take will change depending on the effects (for example lethality) of the virus in question.
There are personal values in play here, but very roughly, if we have a pandemic with an x% risk of death or serious debilitating injury then it's worth spending x% of our time, resources, etc trying to prevent its' spread.
Everyone is going to have a different number there, some will think we should just never give up ever, others will just think "screw it, I'll take the personal risk", but that's a good average.
We do this all of the time - people can get post viral syndromes from common colds, but we accept that this is an incredibly unlikely situation and so most people don't get into a panic when around other people.
And that's actually what we saw with coronavirus. The vast, vast majority of people at least in the first weeks of the pandemic took it seriously. After a few months a lot of people simply stopped caring because it wasn't as fatal as we feared. For whatever reason this became extremely politicised in a way that I can't quite understand.
I think people stop caring, because it is impossible to keep up a high level of vigilance for an extended period of time. Plus the risk becomes normalized.
People are not very good at evaluating risk. From an evolutionary perspective, we mainly do it by copying others. I cannot comprehend what a X% fatality rate really means on a personal safty evaluation. But seeing what other people are doing gives favorable odds. Of course, this heuristic has its pros and cons.
> My question to HN is: what could be do better next time?
About everything. For a start weighting in more factors like quality of life, economy, health (everything else than the pandemic at hand & including mental health) than just just a few metrics.
Second graduating the response to the dangerosity of the disease. It was clear 3 months in that only a small subset of the population was really at risk so it made no sense to punish the whole population. Young people were affected proportionally harder than older folks: best of social and love life gone, poor education for a few years, difficulty to enter the job market, while the people most at risk already lived for more than a century, have a home, often kids, etc.
Third let citizens have basic human rights. I shouldn't have to right it, but if basic human rights like movement and commerce can be removed with a finger snap (they were) we are not living in a democracy.
Four, don't push untested pharmaceutical products made by firms with proven contempt for human life on millions of people. Don't put resistants in camp (Australia) and don't censor divergent opinions like an autocracy: public debate must be this, a debate and made publicly.
Five, base policies on real science, not the reverse around where "science" is twisted to fit a narrative.
Somewhat agreed in direction, but disagree in statement. We weren't "punishing" the whole population. Nor were basic movement and commerce flat out taken from most people. There are some countries that did that, true, but I was always able to make it in to a mostly empty office to do work. And buying things was never fully impacted.
I would love to see an even handed comparison of the different responses in all countries to know if any had meaningful impact. But with how wildly different the virus acted in places, I am worried nobody will believe any analysis. At the least, we know not everyone will.
And I fully cede my understanding may be sadly behind. I remember the damage/death it was doing at the beginning in Italy and how we were all trying to not overwhelm hospitals. Then, the next few years had case counts that were off the charts, and I'm not sure what changed. Do we have a good handle on that, now?
A year in, it had between 1.5 and 3.5 percent mortality rate, the first few months it was up to 15 percent in some areas and segments of the population [1]. Even today at 0.1-1 percent fatality rate [1], the odds are horrible for something so easy to contract. NB the statistic does not differentiate by vaccination status.
Yet, despite those odds, an enormous segment of the population of the US failed to all sorts of cognitive biases, and is convinced, contrary to all evidence [2], that it's better to get covid than a vaccine. This indicates to me that the US has failed as a society to respond well to such a preventable disease.
Denmark ( where I lived during Covid ) handled it much better and is a similarly capitalistic society, but with a different attitude towards institutions, and the issue was not politicized. The general population listened to the CDC-equivalent institution. The government offered free testing, (rapid+the more expensive ones), and was proactive with respect to vaccination. The government coordinated a very successful booster vaccination campaign in early January of 2022, effectively ending the covid era.
The death rate is so hard to really interpret. It is stupid skewed by age in ways that so many other things aren't. Even for non-vaccinated people, you have to get into the 30s before you see that number jump above .1 after the initial wave.
And the initial wave being so high just screams that we weren't counting the accurate number, as we didn't know how widespread infections were. As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value.
None of which is to downplay it. Lots of people died. I hope we can find actionable things to help for any future outbreaks.
> As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value.
According to [1], it's 40.5% of the confirmed population. It's indeed a high rate, but those cases are also taken into consideration wrt to mortality rate as far as I am aware. It also highlights just how transmissible this virus is, allowing it to eventually infect the vulnerable population.
We also learned that covid was a component in a very large portion of excess deaths. Yes, somebody may have died of cancer, but covid was also present. It's possible that the patient sans covid would not have died.
Plus, there is the inverse, long covid and its symptoms lingering and weakening the population making it susceptible to subsequent diseases.
The problem however, in all of this, is that any trust to certain institutions in the US is now gone, which will only cause more harm.
> In this meta-analysis of the percentage of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections among populations tested for and with confirmed COVID-19, the pooled percentage of asymptomatic infections was 0.25% among the tested population and 40.50% among the confirmed population.
The charts did not seem to get updated based on backfilling of how many people were infected. Or does that just not reflect on how I read the charts?
I still get people that are 100% convinced young people were somehow not getting it during the initial waves. Which frankly is non-sensical. Knowing that kids can get it, there is no explanation I have seen that could somehow magically have kept it out of every school that hadn't closed yet in the first year.
And testing is still... interesting. With many I know that test positive only doing so weeks after any symptoms, such that I was even told that 'loss of smell' is no longer a defining symptom? Schools have flat given up on either testing or requiring negative before the kids are allowed back. Ours at least encourage and support masking during the return period.
I don't think it is trust in the institutions, necessarily. Though, that certainly isn't helping. I think it is lack of certainty period. In large because we just don't have anyone with a 100% handle on the situation.
Please stop spreading misinformation. The population level infection fatality rate for SARS-CoV-2 was never as high as 1.5% at any stage of the pandemic.
Sure, fair enough I used the reported cases to deaths, for that rate which is what the world in data listed. In contrast the CDC claims that it is now a 0.6% rate.
This however, reinforces my point, even with an exaggerated deathrate we failed to properly contain the disease and take things seriously.
In open societies outside of a few islands there was never any real possibility of containing the virus after it left Wuhan. And what does "take things seriously" even mean? The notion that regular people should restrict their lifestyles and submit to mandates indefinitely over a virus with a >99% survival rate was always stupid.
> The notion that regular people should restrict their lifestyles and submit to mandates indefinitely over a virus with a >99% survival rate was always stupid.
We didnt know that at the time. The statistics at the time showed a very different story.
You can compare the handling of the situation across countries and regions with similar socioeconomic conditions and observe that certain states performed significantly worse than counterparts outside.
I didn’t speak about indefinite mandates either and mentioned Denmark repeatedly, for a good reason.
In Denmark we didn’t have vaccine or mask mandates, and opened well before most countries in January of 2022 while sustaining far fewer deaths compared to say Sweden.
Correction, you had the option of wearing a mask or being vaccinated, depending on the kind of establishment. For metro masks were required. In other spaces, masks were required when moving around, but not when sitting.
> it had the potential to be a good test run to see how we deal with a more fatal pandemic.
Wasn't the AIDS pandemic already a good test run? It appears AIDS killed twice as many people in the African region in the year 2021 alone than COVID-19 has all told. Particularly with respect to the Americas, I expect AIDS would have proven to be far more deadly if it weren't for our effective proactive measures. That we seemed to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off when COVID-19 came around, even after the lessons learned from the previous major pandemic not that many years earlier, suggests that we simply don't learn (or tells that pandemics can be different enough that the lessons aren't transferrable).
> The Cambodian Ministry of Health has swabbed 12 of her close contacts, and only her 49-year-old father has tested positive. H5N1 infections typically occur in people who have been in close contact with poultry, and so far, there is no evidence that this strain has spread between people. Investigations into how the girl was exposed to the virus are underway.
I imagine this is one reason for the low-key tone of the article. Had any of those other 12 close contacts, who presumably don't also have contact with the poultry on the farm, tested positive - this would be consistent with human-to-human transmission.
The father is more likely to have been in contact with the poultry, which could explain his positive test.
Still, knowing little about a risk is not the same as knowing that the risk is low:
> Everyone was quite concerned that the girl might have had the strain 2.3.4.4b, which is circulating around the world and causing major problems in Europe, North America and South America right now. 2.3.4.4b is a new viral clade, and we don’t know a lot about it.
Also, check assumptions before concluding that this is the result of encroachment into native habitat:
> We know that, in Cambodia, the pandemic increased the amount of backyard poultry farming. Many people, for example tour guides, couldn’t work and had to supplement their incomes and sources of food for their families. All over the world, people are still struggling, which has resulted in changes in agricultural practices that can increase spillover risk. And changes to people’s health, for example malnutrition or being overweight, can make people more susceptible to getting infected.
86 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadWhat is new is the virus gets on a plane and goes 500 mph.
Zoonotic plagues are not new but pandemics can spread much faster now due to cheap travel and relatively open borders.
Speed of travel certainly makes things worse, but even in the 1300s diseases were able to spread widely.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn2222
> The key issue, then, is not that zoonotic diseases appear in humans, but that their emergence seems to be increasing in frequency (3). Major changes in land use, increasing urbanization, and global connectedness are well documented as driving disease emergence through increasing human–animal contacts and accelerating transmission rates, and climate change will similarly accelerate the rate of zoonotic events.
It's not a paper in itself but it says what I've been saying above way more eloquently. It also cites this paper:
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06536
> Here we analyse a database of 335 EID ‘events’ (origins of EIDs) between 1940 and 2004, and demonstrate non-random global patterns. EID events have risen significantly over time after controlling for reporting bias, with their peak incidence (in the 1980s) concomitant with the HIV pandemic. EID events are dominated by zoonoses (60.3% of EIDs): the majority of these (71.8%) originate in wildlife (for example, severe acute respiratory virus, Ebola virus), and are increasing significantly over time.
Lastly, some other recent research: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29378-2
To be quite honest, citing research on a politically polarized topic is not as useful as it used to be.
The political polarization within the academy means that there is a lot of pretty loose research that may get through if it has the appropriate orientation. In practice, you can almost always find (low quality) research supporting one’s position if the position is lefty.
In natural spillover, the disease gets a single shot at infecting and then transmitting.
In a lab leak, the disease has been kept alive and cultured with human cells for hundred of generations. Then undergone various genetic tweaks to see where if might attack and take hold in humans. If it can escape the lab, it has astronomically better odds of surviving in humans and transmitting to other humans.
I'm doubtful we see more than 2 or 3 natural spillover events in the next 50 years. I'm expecting a dozen lab leaks in that time the way technology and collection efforts are going.
The 2030s are going to be a shit show. The crispr tools available.... OmG
We've had to ask you this several times before - if it keeps up, we're going to have to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
90% of the population used to have direct contact with farm animals
Population density to spread in? Large open plan workplaces, public transit, concert halls...
> 90% of the population used to have direct contact with farm animals
A localized, fairly small, not very mobile set of farm animals.
Stop eating and wearing so many animal products and we'll be fine even with billions and billions of people all over the world.
Seriously, I know I'm coming off as an angry veg here, but are people blind to the fact that COVID likely came from a meat market (I mean the lab leak is also possible but the original meat-market theory is pretty likely too), and bird flu will come from meat-animal industrial farms and fur farms?
COVID was milder than expected. The next one might not be.
In some ways we passed the test pretty well. In others, not so much.
My question to HN is: what could we do better next time?
edit: to be clear, "we" in what could we do better = our global civilization and maybe separately in each user's country of residence.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/don-t-leave-him-here-ecu... https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-04-01/el-coronavirus-desbor...
It got to the point that the COVID task force coordinator had to issue an apology: https://twitter.com/EcuadorTV/status/1245492946675347460?s=2...
I think your comment really proves my point. Even when there's overwhelming evidence of how bad it really was, there's always someone who will downplay it or even deny it.
I'm sure there is an inflection point on the "deadly" nature versus the "spreads" factor.
That said, I fully endorse your closing question. I'm not at all sure what we learned. Other than folks get heavily invested in their narratives and don't back down. Pretty much ever. (Though, I think we already knew that?)
They are not useless, to be sure. But they will be very dirty in the stats.
Though I cede it may as well be wishful thinking on why we have never seen one like it, since.
You should read up on smallpox. 30% death rate and extremely transmissible.
That depends fairly heavily on how much more, and how long before symptoms and death you're infectious. Measles, for example, is insidious in part because it's infectious days before the rash appears.
Cholera is an interesting example of this because it relied on the fecal transmission route, where it would easily spread through tainted water. It didn't matter all that much if the hosts died, as long as it got into the water supply.
And for added benefit that would also apply to other potential disasters.
Like imagine the impact if the Port of Los Angeles couldn't operate for X period due to an awful earthquake.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
In my small company we are cca 25 people and we have very cramped quarters. However, it has been more than once that some colleagues have had covid but nobody else was infected, despite being in meetings with the sick guys.
You can get lucky, but not this lucky with something that's really contagious.
There is some irony that it may be much of the really poor aspect of our diets came from health programs of the last century that were grossly miss targeted. Of course, the frustration there is it was not some nefarious push by folks. We just got it wrong.
Back to covid, I share the incredulity in how the deaths are driven largely by unvaccinated numbers. Even crazier when you see stories like https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072411820/law-enforcement-de..., where the very groups that are seeing rises in deaths pushing back against vaccines. Truly mind numbing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nasal-covid-vacci...
This propaganda campaign will scare you, demoralize you, and ultimately try to split apart tribes (friends, families, churches, etc). It will threaten, and in some cases take, your job and your livelihood. It will restrict your travel and it will call you insane, a conspiracy theorist, and a murderer if you disagree with it.
There. That's a lot more palatable than forced government injections at gun point.
Yes, as a civilization is what I meant. But good question. Also maybe in any HN'ers home country.
There are personal values in play here, but very roughly, if we have a pandemic with an x% risk of death or serious debilitating injury then it's worth spending x% of our time, resources, etc trying to prevent its' spread.
Everyone is going to have a different number there, some will think we should just never give up ever, others will just think "screw it, I'll take the personal risk", but that's a good average.
We do this all of the time - people can get post viral syndromes from common colds, but we accept that this is an incredibly unlikely situation and so most people don't get into a panic when around other people.
And that's actually what we saw with coronavirus. The vast, vast majority of people at least in the first weeks of the pandemic took it seriously. After a few months a lot of people simply stopped caring because it wasn't as fatal as we feared. For whatever reason this became extremely politicised in a way that I can't quite understand.
People are not very good at evaluating risk. From an evolutionary perspective, we mainly do it by copying others. I cannot comprehend what a X% fatality rate really means on a personal safty evaluation. But seeing what other people are doing gives favorable odds. Of course, this heuristic has its pros and cons.
About everything. For a start weighting in more factors like quality of life, economy, health (everything else than the pandemic at hand & including mental health) than just just a few metrics.
Second graduating the response to the dangerosity of the disease. It was clear 3 months in that only a small subset of the population was really at risk so it made no sense to punish the whole population. Young people were affected proportionally harder than older folks: best of social and love life gone, poor education for a few years, difficulty to enter the job market, while the people most at risk already lived for more than a century, have a home, often kids, etc.
Third let citizens have basic human rights. I shouldn't have to right it, but if basic human rights like movement and commerce can be removed with a finger snap (they were) we are not living in a democracy.
Four, don't push untested pharmaceutical products made by firms with proven contempt for human life on millions of people. Don't put resistants in camp (Australia) and don't censor divergent opinions like an autocracy: public debate must be this, a debate and made publicly.
Five, base policies on real science, not the reverse around where "science" is twisted to fit a narrative.
I would love to see an even handed comparison of the different responses in all countries to know if any had meaningful impact. But with how wildly different the virus acted in places, I am worried nobody will believe any analysis. At the least, we know not everyone will.
And I fully cede my understanding may be sadly behind. I remember the damage/death it was doing at the beginning in Italy and how we were all trying to not overwhelm hospitals. Then, the next few years had case counts that were off the charts, and I'm not sure what changed. Do we have a good handle on that, now?
Yet, despite those odds, an enormous segment of the population of the US failed to all sorts of cognitive biases, and is convinced, contrary to all evidence [2], that it's better to get covid than a vaccine. This indicates to me that the US has failed as a society to respond well to such a preventable disease.
Denmark ( where I lived during Covid ) handled it much better and is a similarly capitalistic society, but with a different attitude towards institutions, and the issue was not politicized. The general population listened to the CDC-equivalent institution. The government offered free testing, (rapid+the more expensive ones), and was proactive with respect to vaccination. The government coordinated a very successful booster vaccination campaign in early January of 2022, effectively ending the covid era.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...
And the initial wave being so high just screams that we weren't counting the accurate number, as we didn't know how widespread infections were. As we learned that more and more infections were effectively asymptomatic, early numbers on what was happening are hard to take at face value.
None of which is to downplay it. Lots of people died. I hope we can find actionable things to help for any future outbreaks.
According to [1], it's 40.5% of the confirmed population. It's indeed a high rate, but those cases are also taken into consideration wrt to mortality rate as far as I am aware. It also highlights just how transmissible this virus is, allowing it to eventually infect the vulnerable population.
We also learned that covid was a component in a very large portion of excess deaths. Yes, somebody may have died of cancer, but covid was also present. It's possible that the patient sans covid would not have died.
Plus, there is the inverse, long covid and its symptoms lingering and weakening the population making it susceptible to subsequent diseases.
The problem however, in all of this, is that any trust to certain institutions in the US is now gone, which will only cause more harm.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> In this meta-analysis of the percentage of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections among populations tested for and with confirmed COVID-19, the pooled percentage of asymptomatic infections was 0.25% among the tested population and 40.50% among the confirmed population.
I still get people that are 100% convinced young people were somehow not getting it during the initial waves. Which frankly is non-sensical. Knowing that kids can get it, there is no explanation I have seen that could somehow magically have kept it out of every school that hadn't closed yet in the first year.
And testing is still... interesting. With many I know that test positive only doing so weeks after any symptoms, such that I was even told that 'loss of smell' is no longer a defining symptom? Schools have flat given up on either testing or requiring negative before the kids are allowed back. Ours at least encourage and support masking during the return period.
I don't think it is trust in the institutions, necessarily. Though, that certainly isn't helping. I think it is lack of certainty period. In large because we just don't have anyone with a 100% handle on the situation.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655
This however, reinforces my point, even with an exaggerated deathrate we failed to properly contain the disease and take things seriously.
We didnt know that at the time. The statistics at the time showed a very different story.
You can compare the handling of the situation across countries and regions with similar socioeconomic conditions and observe that certain states performed significantly worse than counterparts outside.
I didn’t speak about indefinite mandates either and mentioned Denmark repeatedly, for a good reason.
In Denmark we didn’t have vaccine or mask mandates, and opened well before most countries in January of 2022 while sustaining far fewer deaths compared to say Sweden.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts...
Wasn't the AIDS pandemic already a good test run? It appears AIDS killed twice as many people in the African region in the year 2021 alone than COVID-19 has all told. Particularly with respect to the Americas, I expect AIDS would have proven to be far more deadly if it weren't for our effective proactive measures. That we seemed to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off when COVID-19 came around, even after the lessons learned from the previous major pandemic not that many years earlier, suggests that we simply don't learn (or tells that pandemics can be different enough that the lessons aren't transferrable).
I imagine this is one reason for the low-key tone of the article. Had any of those other 12 close contacts, who presumably don't also have contact with the poultry on the farm, tested positive - this would be consistent with human-to-human transmission.
The father is more likely to have been in contact with the poultry, which could explain his positive test.
Still, knowing little about a risk is not the same as knowing that the risk is low:
> Everyone was quite concerned that the girl might have had the strain 2.3.4.4b, which is circulating around the world and causing major problems in Europe, North America and South America right now. 2.3.4.4b is a new viral clade, and we don’t know a lot about it.
Also, check assumptions before concluding that this is the result of encroachment into native habitat:
> We know that, in Cambodia, the pandemic increased the amount of backyard poultry farming. Many people, for example tour guides, couldn’t work and had to supplement their incomes and sources of food for their families. All over the world, people are still struggling, which has resulted in changes in agricultural practices that can increase spillover risk. And changes to people’s health, for example malnutrition or being overweight, can make people more susceptible to getting infected.