It's a global effort, and we played the game with one of the strongest players suffering a concussion and a hangover.
There was no realistic chance of keeping this under control once it spread beyond Wuhan.
This is probably our main point of disagreement then. Given that many governments did quickly get it under control, I would contend that with proper testing and quarantine during travel, it could have been extremely different.
There was a lack of global coordination, and with that coordination I think this could have turned out very differently. And I fear that we are not learning the lessons to prevent another incident precisely like this one.
That said, I'm not fatalistic, and think there still may be a chance for wiping out this disease, but I think it's only going to get harder with time.
The most likely scenario is that almost all of us will eventually be infected no matter what we do.
I was at Newberry Lava River cave, Oregon last week. There was a mandatory orientation before entering the cave which went along these lines: "this cave is a bat sanctuary. As you may or may not know, Covid is a zoonotic disease that is transmissible between humans and bats. If our bats here get infected, Covid will become endemic to North America and will never go away. I've had Covid, and I was bedridden for 6 weeks and have scars on my lungs. I would not wish this disease on my worst enemy. PLEASE do not go in if you're sick and wear masks if you do." People were walking in without masks even after hearing that. Not a peep from the multiple park rangers, because freedom, I guess.
As a species, we're pretty much just asking to be wiped out by the next pandemic.
Also, I have to admit that message you heard is strange. I don’t believe there is evidence that humans can transfer Covid to bats, plus, if the sanctuary believes that, why are they letting anyone through at all? I would expect the consequential threat wouldn’t register as many people already believe the disease is not going away. I’m not saying wearing masks is unimportant but the cave warnings are a good example of how melodramatic speculation can be counterproductive when coming from officials. We won’t make progress by asking for perfect behavior to stave off doom.
Good question, especially considering that they did go on to say that if covid was found in this bat population, the cave would be closed off for human entry permanently. I didn't probe further but I suspect that policy might be based on what you said about evidence of human -> bat transmission.
Still, I do feel that closing it off seems like the prudent thing to do. It seems kinda myopic to have a policy to only close after the fact while knowing full well that Covid is zoonotic and mutations can in theory occur in a bat population on North American soil. At that point, last year's exercise of pointing fingers at Wuhan effectively becomes a historic unfunny joke because it's not like the US tests their wild bats every day and what can possibly go wrong w/ reactive policies... </shrug>
My overall point though is that even if we have perfect root cause analysis, people will still choose to ignore anything from informed recommendations to even appeals to emotion. As they say, it only takes one bad apple.
So it's a false proposition to say if we in the US had achieved 100% immunization it would have stopped any mutations. It would not have.