Perhaps we'll do better for the "next" pandemic now that we have the infrastructure in place and learned some lessons from COVID? Maybe I'm grasping for silver linings and being too optimistic towards humanity...

>lessons from COVID

what in our response to COVID was better and more effective than our response to Black Death and Spanish flu? I don't see any improvement despite 700 and 100 years of accumulated knowledge and technology development since then. There has so far been no indication that the only things we were able to muster - archaic lockdown and masks - can prevent it from reaching the 20-30% spread, basically the level of unmitigated spread.

I mean, for example, 700 years ago people couldn't know that that ship coming into the port of Venice brings the infection. A year ago we knew that this plane from Wuhan most probably does.

Maybe not the USA but Asians countries which one could argue will carry the torch of progress did improve.

yes, like Taiwan who 1. did learn the lesson from SARS and did immediate quarantine upon just hearing (i.e. de-facto using modern communication technology) about some strange flu appearing in China. 2. Used modern technology to do contact tracing. 3. Quickly scaled up extensive testing - again modern science and technology. Most places did nothing like these 3 steps. Those steps weren't available centuries ago and could have prevented the covid from becoming pandemic.

Another noticeable difference is that Taiwan actions were real actions where the government did actually performed them whereis typical "actions" we see around like lockdown and masks are just government orders without the governments actually doing anything.

Many orders of magnitude fewer deaths, for one?

Orders fewer? Lets look at the Spanish flu in US - the US wasn't ravaged by WWI/revolutions/rebelions, didn't have systemic hunger, etc. and had time to and implemented some of those measures like quarantines/lockdowns/masks, so very reasonable to compare to today. Spanish flu killed 700K in US . Covid already 250K in US - even if we imagine that we're at the peak today, it still means end number like 500K.

Food for thought:

- The average age of death during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was 28 [1].

- 70% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths are age 70 and above [2].

These are very different pandemics, and it's not clear what comparisons between the two actually tell us.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoratio...

[2]: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22035

One interesting thing to consider is that the US isn’t actually the center of the world, so generalizing it’s reaction to the rest of the world makes no sense.

Looking at the world instead, COVID has killed just over a million people so far, and Spanish Flu is esimated to have killed anywhere between 17 and 100 million people, at a time when the world population was much less and travel was much harder. So yes, orders of magnitude.

I would only like to add that the US population was only around 100m around 1920, and travel would have been much more limited. But overall I agree that the worldwide handling in 2020 has been sobering.

Why do you think that? They said the same thing after "swine flu" during Obama. Basically, we just got lucky.

“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010 and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/04/joe-biden-contain-h...

It's gonna come sooner rather than later. Humans encroach on the natural habitats of animals all over the world, which increases the number zoonoses dramatically. Most such spillovers don't cause any further human to human spread. Think of MERS. But there are spillovers that do spread between humans, like in the case of SARS-Cov-2. While the COVID pandemic is a major catastrophy, we were still quite lucky. MERS has a much higher case fatality ratio. Something that spreads as easily as SARS-Cov-2 while being as deadly as MERS is entirely possible.

We should start preparing once most of the population is vaccinated and human societies have returned to normal. Develop and test antivirals targetting the conserved proteins in major virus families. Build a pipeline that can respond to new viruses quickly with a vaccine. Create capacities to quickly ramp up mass production of PPE. Map the viruses that appear in animals around us to know what we are up to.

I hope that political leaders will listen to the people doing such proposals.

I hope that the new mRNA technology the Pfizer and AZ vaccines are based on will help us develop and manufacture more quickly. The delivery mechanism will be well-understood, the pipeline will be there, the limiting factor would still be knowing what to target and screening for safety/efficacy but it should still help.

I hope similar things can be done with rapid antigen/PCR testing equipment.

One of the lessons that I've learned from this pandemic is that despite overwhelming evidence and over a million deaths, there's a non-trivial amount of people who still believe it's not real, or who refuse to wear a mask, or who protest against the few, mild, reasonable measures we can take to get through this alive. So if anything, my faith in humankind has gone down :(

The fact that people can be literally dying from COVID in a hospital yet still deny its existence has almost totally destroyed any faith I have in humanity.

good friend of mine is a nurse. She has seen people in the ER with Covid deny that it exists too. There's people currently on oxygen who go "nah that doesn't exist I don't have it, the media made that up". So yeah

Thankfully, life has a way of selecting against people who fail to act to preserve their own.

(Said as someone whose fiance is an ICU nurse)

Unfortunately that doesn't work so well for a disease whose main source of risk to each person is the behaviour of other people.

On a different time scale it does. It’s selecting against groups/societies that reward, value or permit the kinds of behaviours and belief systems that allow such doggedly wilful ignorance to flourish.

Sorry, that doesn't work when most groups/societies are heterogeneous in ideals. Even most people being reasonable isn't enough when the behavior of the few who aren't must be tolerated in the name of freedom. So natural selection alone won't actually improve anything.

Social Darwinism, alive and well on HN...

This is actual Darwinism.

It's a strangely western phenomenon. People might be callous about safety measures here in India, but absolutely no one in my extended circle of friends and family has ever denied its existence or that it's something people need to be careful about.

Globally there's far more trust for institutions and authority than in America. Cultures which respect the elderly, the professional, and the official. Even beyond respect it extends to obedience in some places.

I definitely see it in my own culture, which is Arab. It's a double edged sword, and can be said to enable further oppression, but in a crisis situation it's useful.

Place your faith in natural selection.

In addition to being ugly, this sentiment is pretty misguided. The selection pressure is far too mild to have any evolutionary impact.

To whit: covid selects primarily against individuals beyond their reproductive age, selects far too small of the population (unless we see these deaths continue for decades), and is only mildly selecting for anti mask populations.

Most importantly, being anti-mask can't be attributed to a clear genetic variable (although I suppose there might be some very weak correlation), and natural selection takes way, way longer than a human lifetime to create noticeable results anyway. Not even getting into the fact that there's much more to evolution than natural selection. It actually scares me that supposedly "pro-science" people have such simplified views about it.

Note that the timescale for seeing results is related to the selection pressure. You can see very fast results (e.g. a single or few generations) if the pressure is extraordinary.

AFAIK this only happens via guided intervention (see humans selective breeding of crops, dogs, foxes, etc)

Anyone who treats science as a religion ends up with a pretty terrifying morality.

You can remove science from that statement and it'll still be true. Whoever derives their morality from religion will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Thankfully nowadays even people claiming they do so often actually don't. I.e homosexuality is amoral according to the texts, but society moved on for the most part.

amoral =/= immoral

You can remove religion and morality from that statement and it'll still be true.

People will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Stalin wasn't religious, but he still initiated a gigantic slaughter of his own countrymen. Ditto Mao.

Just trying to make the point that being horrible correlates with being human, not being religious.

What helps me to keep faith in humanity is imagining being alive during Galileo‘s time. How suffocating it must have been for him to find everyone everywhere rejecting science..? Sure we have a large number of people now that don’t believe in masks, vaccines, etc.., but keep in mind that the majority of the popular vote in the US voted for someone that does believe in science. Progress is being made, just sometimes it requires a step back to see it.

> majority of the popular vote in the US voted for someone that does believe in science

You're an optimistic one. They would have voted for a three legged donkey with a nose ring and gold tooth. As long as it wasn't DJT.

The thing that surprises me about modern politics is how much hate there is. I wonder if it was always this bad, or if the internet just shines a light on what was always there.

It really was not always like this. At all.

Some people blame the rise of 24 hours cable news channels. Others blame the rise of the Internet. Both of these have to do with disseminating more information to more people. Is it the fact that there is more information (quantity) or is the information itself (quality)?

That’s good to know.

I don’t know, whatever it is, I really loathe it. It’s practically impossible to have a rational discussion about anything related to politics. Everything seems to degenerate into entrenched emotional arguments rather than discussing actual facts.

I think that's because a) a lot of people nowadays think their feelings hold more importance than somebody else's facts (outrage is a terrible advisor) and b) the facts themselves have become less tangible because there seems to be a myriad of sides to anything, with so many sources putting their spin on things that even just arriving at a neutral base for an argument takes more effort than people are willing/can afford to expend. Especially because that effort has to be expended against the pull of their own biases, which have gotten pretty entrenched thanks to the online echo chambers. Cognitive dissonance is exhausting, so people often just shut down and go into emotional combat mode when faced with opposing views, even when the views are presented in a sensible manner -- and mostly, they are not, because why bother if the gulf is already so large and the people on the other side are clearly idiots.

Yeah well back when YouTube started censoring videos suggesting a connection between vitamin D deficiency and covid it became pretty clear times are not particularly changed from Galieo’s.

Could you provide a source please? Were the videos making claims that taking Vitamin D would protect against COVID or some other misinformation, or were they legitimately talking about mortality rates of those with v.D deficiencies?

I think there is a clear difference in private platforms stopping the spread of misinformation (you aren’t free to use their platform to spread information harmful to society) and what happened to Galileo.

But I am making an assumption because I don’t actually know what videos you are referring to.

Censoring? De-monetizing maybe but they do that with every video mentioning Covid no matter the contents.

The fact that YouTube exists at all shows how much things have changed since Galileo.

> majority of the popular vote in the US voted for someone that does believe in science

Why would Trump support accelerated vaccines if he didn’t believe in COVID and science?

They know COVID is real and they almost certainly believe in science. They just don't care if it doesn't line their pockets.

Agree, but that doesn’t match the rhetoric above. The voter mindset is similar. People are choosing “the economy” over shutdowns, not ignoring science.

Do you yourself truthfully believe that Trump wanted to make policy decisions based on the best science available?

The most scientific policy would be to physically force everyone to stay in a room alone for months and physically force them to wash their hands after they use the bathroom, etc. This is the best way to get rid of the virus and it describes a horrific, dystopian, society.

Trump isn’t even close to the best man for the job of handling a pandemic but to pretend we should be following science to the t is politically ignorant (as most scientists would tell you.)

“Based on science” means using science as a core part of the decision making process.

It sounds like you actually agree with what I said, but also misunderstood.

Because there is political value in supporting people's freedom to choose and rejecting totalitarian actions of political adversaries.

It had absolutely nothing to do with freedom or rejection of totalitarianism.

He could have easily encouraged people to wear a mask and set an example by wearing one himself.

But you're right that it was about political value. Or at least perceived political value.

> It had absolutely nothing to do with freedom or rejection of totalitarianism.

I don't know Trump's motives, but for many people, this is about freedom and rejection of power tripping bureaucrats and politicians.

The original comment referenced Trump's anti-mask attitude. His position was never just that you shouldn't be forced into wearing a mask; he was against masks period. He refused to wear one publicly while mocking others for wearing them. He explicitly turned masks into a political issue claiming that people wore them just to express their disapproval of him. He even refused to wear a mask while touring a mask factory.

So again, this _clearly_ had nothing to do with freedom or totalitarianism.

Millions upon millions die around the world each year due to poor choices. Don't let a fraction of that amount getting a bad flu change your outlook. Humanity is doing just fine. Could be better, could be worse, but take a slow walk around the block and I think you'll agree.

Fefe (a prominent German Internet commentator) posted a user's email yesterday which shows 3 perspectives I really haven't given much thought to.

The Google translation is pretty good, one big mistake though, it mistranslated "Asi-Kindern" as "Asian children" instead of "asocial kids": https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%... . And Case 1 is someone who builds booths for conventions.

A lot of people are going through the "denial" phase of grief and loss, although I wonder if this is valid for the people who showed up with guns at state capitols...

These perspectives make a lot of sense. The livelihoods of people who depend on non-pandemic circumstances are either destroyed or are on death's door. It's a lot easier for us working jobs that are easy to transition to remote and are mildly inconvenienced by the pandemic.

Hopelessness, stress and uncertainty all take huge mental tolls on us, and rejecting covid can help these people cope with this malaise.

That sounds more like the anger phase. Or maybe bargaining, ha!

Since this thing started, I re-read various publications about the black death. And the social reactions are so strikingly similar.

Do you have a list? I'm interested.

I was surprised that even in 2020 you have people making up straight lies about covid, while I believed that the wild theories that people had about the plague back in the day (e.g. the one that blamed the jews for it) were born from the fact that these people haven't went to school and were badly educated. But now they can write and relevant parts of the population claim similar things. And COVID is way less deadly than the bubonic plague is. This is a pandemic in easy mode. We would have been in for much worse had it been like the bubonic plague.

Sadly these days the ability to read and write is insufficient in order to be an informed citizen because of how complex our media world is.

One really needs to have some solid critical thinking skills in order to be able to judge the overall reliability and trustworthiness of a book, article, tweet, news episode, etc.

And ideally have some fundamental historical knowledge, basic math, logic, fundamentals of science, etc.

Id argue many Americans are, through no fault of their own, not well-educated.

EDIT:

I cribbed from Noam Chomskys description of what it means to be educated:

https://www.openculture.com/2016/04/noam-chomsky-defines-wha...

'Humboldt, Chomsky says, “argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.” A true education, Chomsky suggests, opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.'

not OP but ...

John Kelly: The Great Mortality

An Intimate History of the Black Death

Robert S Gottfried: The Black Death - Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.: Cultures of Plague: Medical Thought At the End of the Renaissance

Philip Ziegler: The Black Death

Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron

there are some fictional works that I enjoyed such as Ken Follet World Without End (should be read after Pillars of the Earth IMO) and it's probably not enough on-topic for what you're asking.

Thanks!

I second that - this is very interesting, I would love to see some sources, too.

Well, a crisis situation (be it real or manufactured) is a perfect vehicle for driving all kinds of agendas. It is natural there is some opposition.

The brain is part of the immune system.

Conspiracy culture is a huge problem in modern society that I fear we won't be able to solve

This was apparently learned in 1918 also.

Unfortunately I see these peoples around in Russia. My estimation of anti-maskers is about 10-15% of population here. Mostly 35-55 males who thinks that wearing a mask is the sign of weakness and/or keeps saying that COVID is "just a flu" and those who died would have been dead anyway in 2-3 month if not from COVID then from something like common cold. Even recent death of 28 y/o school teacher and 23 y/o political activist didn't change their mind.

SARS-CoV-2 is pretty perfectly calibrated to hide in people's inability to comprehend statistics and probability.

High transmission rate + (relatively) low complication / death rate = ideal conspiracy fodder

Pictures of the September Moscow marathon make me think even the government are some kind of anti-maskers

a good mask will help when you're occasionally visiting an infectious patient in a hospital. There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus, and the people in the country have no resources for any prolonged lockdowns. Add to that that the top people in Russia, like in any other country, receive highly personalized healthcare, and that means that they have practically no risk of death from Covid as it is a very treatable given enough resources (antibody injection, etc. under very personalized treatment resulting in just few days of "bad flu" - i.e. while infection-wise Covid doesn't distinguish much, outcome-wise it is very socially unequal decease).

> There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus

A mask is very effective and is worn for others, not yourself. At any point in time you might be carrying asymptomatic or not-yet-symptomatic COVID. Your mask prevents your saliva from flying in the air around you, protecting people near you and their parents/susceptible relatives this might get passed on to.

And if it’s against your interest when emergency healthcare can’t help your sick child because they have not enough resources due to COVID patients, then over long term wearing a mask is actually for yourself, too.

> A mask is very effective and is worn for others, not yourself

You have no evidence to support this point.

Scientists (WHO, CDC, Lancet, etc) don't say "masks are very effective", they say that masks _may_ help prevent the spread, but only if they're part of a package of preventative measures. They all say that distancing is much more important than mask wearing.

I think “very effective” is a subjective turn of phrase and no self-respecting org would use it in official communication.

That said, I believe it is settled that airborne transmission happens via saliva droplets, and a properly worn, clean mask is great at stopping those from traveling further than your face (physics) without harming your own health.

Also, I believe it is wrong to equate WHO, CDC messaging with “scientists”. Those organizations are careful not to make specific claims that masks are great at preventing the spread, since a mask is pointless if it’s not a suitable mask (e.g., lets large enough particles through) or is worn badly, since human error is unavoidable, a dirty mask is actively dangerous to the wearer, and over-reliance on improperly worn masks could result in a disaster.

Does it mean we shouldn’t bother deploying our individual common sense in equipping masks? That we wouldn’t make a positive difference to the spread by wearing a good mask properly? I disagree.

Also, having been to crowded subway trains of Seoul recently, I question the claim that Russian cities are somehow crowded enough to render masks useless.

>A mask is worn for the others, not yourself.

so, imagine one "other" without a mask and everybody around in masks (actually "face coverings" which allow air in/out from sides) commuting everyday in a densely packed bus. Do you think that "other" has much improved chances when aggregated over several months? (again, i'm not arguing against proper mask's efficiency during occasional exposure)

Yes, I don't see why they wouldn't. If everyone is wearing masks then the likelihood of transmission is lower. Also the viral load of any transmission may also be lower, which could improve the outcome.

i'm not arguing against [proper] masks lowering the transmission chance in any given case. I just don't see it having any aggregate effect. Basically i don't see the local effect translating into global.

The herd immunity is 2/3. If say 1/3 of population has already some pre-existing immunity (from casual reading of Internet it looks that some noticeable share of population does have it for Covid and it seems larger than 1/3) then the total infection rate until herd immunity is reached is 1/3. The Spanish flu hit 30% of human population for example.

So, for Moscow 1/3 is 4M. They already got 0.5M cases and currently is having, despite the tight masks/gloves/partial lockdown measures, 7K/day cases. I don't see why would it slow down, and if anything i suppose it will only go up in the coming several months. Thus in the year they will have a total of 2.5M of officially registered cases. If one adds non-detected cases one can see that it is would be in the ballpark of 4M. I.e. herd immunity, end of pandemic, masks or no masks, lockdown or no lockdown. Basically like Spanish flu scenario, and i personally just don't see how the numbers can play differently.

> Basically i don't see the local effect translating into global.

Global effects are the sum of local effects. I don't see how you can simultaneously believe that a mask lowers the local transmission rate without effecting the global transmission rate.

This argument fails to include at least 3 factors:

1) A slower infection rate prevents or at least helps with “flattening the curve,” that is, avoiding overwhelming health care systems, which impacts both COVID and non-COVID patients

2) A lower initial viral dose seems to lead to better outcomes (lowers mortality rate)

3) We are seemingly within reach of effective vaccines

1) instead we've had empty hospitals and a lot of non-COVID patients didn't get various treatments which they would have gotten overwise. Plus economic hit to the hospitals, and that most probably will have impact on the future patients. Hardly a win, if any.

2) Would be a win if it is so. I haven't yet formed even a barely informed opinion. It looks like a new development though, and I don't remember such thing mentioned about other viruses.

3) which is why i put the numbers only up to a year ahead as any mass vaccination doesn't seem happening earlier than that.

One of the big problems is that early in the Pandemic, the WHO, Fauci and most media said that Masks were useless. This was repeated several times. The turn-around occurred later and nobody apologised for their earlier, incorrect stances.

> The turn-around occurred later and nobody apologised for their earlier, incorrect stances.

Fauci has widely explained why he felt it was justified at the time, admitted he was wrong, and apologized. Like when I just started to do a search to provide sources, it autocompleted the query even. Probably similar for the other sources you named, so I encourage you to do some research if interested.

> One of the big problems is that early in the Pandemic, the WHO, Fauci and most media said that Masks were useless.

No, the problem was that people took the statement that we didn't yet have the evidence on efficacy to mean that masks were useless.

Not having evidence... Means that things can go either way. And the WHO didn't even stop by saying no evidence, they said no evidence, and then went ahead and said it might help anyway.

> Although there is no evidence that this is effective in reducing transmission, there is mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness of this measure. - WHO

Incorrect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_over_responses_to_t...

Certainly happening in Canada too, even though COVID has basically been treated by the government and opposition parties as a non-partisan issue, federally and in every province, as far as I'm aware.

The most pressing problem we have is not Coronavirus, it's Moronavirus.

Elon Musk is one person who is one person who thinks the restrictions are too strict. So maybe it is sensible for younger people to keep working and living near to normal.

I totally agree on Musk, but I think you could say similar things about many “role models”. We’re just going to need to teach young folks that people are complex. In situations like these I think about how Dave Chappelle speaks of Bill Cosby.

Elon Musk is on track to become the Martian John McAfee.