Dilbert_X wrote:
We had all the experience of SARS-1, the leadership of most countries failed and continue to fail.
i have literally told you about 3 times that SARS-1 has a very different infection profile to SARS-2. same family of viruses, yes, but tabbies and lions are part of the same family of felines, too. don't confuse them.
SARS-1's infection window coincides with its onset of symptoms. therefore you can quickly isolate and quarantine anyone who has the disease. indeed, east asian cultures effectively self-isolate whenever they exhibit symptoms of cold-like illnesses, anyway. we are talking a culture of people who routinely elect to wear masks in public for common colds, for e.g., and have been doing so for decades.
SARS-CoV-2 is (or was, if we specifically consider the ancestor strain) invisible for 10-15 days, or thereabouts. the peak of its infectivity comes during this asymptomatic period.
now tell me how any health body, state authority, or national government could have prevented a novel pathogen from leaving its borders in the first month or so. please, enlighten us. there was no way to notice, isolate and shut down 'patient zero' with this thing. the first person to get infected was carrying it around a high-population, high-density city for 2 weeks. that's even with all the best will in the world, the most open sharing of data, the spirit of greatest cooperation, etc, from the CCP.
yes, many countries with a recent skirmish with SARS-1 were able to effectively contain the spread of SARS-2 better. but that didn't stop it from leaping their borders, invisibly and undetected, in the first place. they were fortunate in that they had huge apparatuses of contact tracing, quarantine systems, medical resources, etc, recently established for just such a purpose. 90% of the world didn't have that; they had reports and warnings, pandemic preparedness documentation, sure, but no concrete and existing infrastructure; but that's not the same thing. we didn't "all" have the experience of SARS-1 outbreaks at all. what in the fuck are you talking about?
your vagueness with the history of this pandemic is pretty astonishing.
the leadership of most countries failed and continue to fail.
well, quite, but i would argue that this thing was a clear indicator that the world system is incredibly complex and our illusion of species-level coordination and control is (for now) just that: an illusion. most states were slow to respond even when the evidence was pressing; there's just so much inertia built into the everyday run-of-the-mill life of society. most nations which had oodles of reports prepared for a pandemic/terrorist attack/natural disaster/etc scenario are mostly exercising a form of wishful thinking or anxiety avoidance by commissioning such things. the simple truth is that in the face of a global-scale emergency, or at the moment of need, a lot of leaders delay or fadge it.
this is human society tbh. these things are a once-in-a-century event, once in every 3-5 generations in any case, and most of the time the sense of emergency and the urgency to act - along with the tangible, painful memories of the human costs - gets lost along the way. even with all the warnings in the world from scientific advisors prior to the pandemic, was it on any western government's list of priorities to fund such systems and keep them permanently on standby? i think not.
Last edited by uziq (2022-01-09 05:48:58)