Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
I for sure don’t disagree that a society that prioritised human health could have dealt with the plague far more swiftly and efficiently. But COVID-19 was uniquely plague-ready by being both novel to humans and still highly infectious, so you gotta give the virus some credit.
It was widely known among epidemiologists that a coronavirus based outbreak was just a matter of time. A more serious society could have done way more.
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With just the tools we had: The US had a program to distribute masks that was never activated. Cancelling international flights earlier, and actually quarantining cities, could have limited it to just a handful of cities outside of China. We could have distributed vaccines everywhere instead of enforcing international bans on vaccines developed by US pharma companies.
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With governments that take public health seriously: Coronavirus outbreaks were a known risk; preemptive vaccine research could have been funded more, leading to faster vaccine development turnarounds when a variant started infecting humans.
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With a more serious society overall: We could do planned two month global lockdowns once a decade or so, and eliminate COVID, the flu, the common cold, a vast number of unnamed respiratory illnesses, and more.
Just serious quarantines would have made a difference instead we had lockdowns where people would just go mill around walmart because they’re bored
We didn’t do lockdowns in the west. We did half-lockdowns. Go ahead and ask a rancher about “half-locking” the gates of the cow pen closed and how effective that is in containment
Lockdowns should never have been self-policed, optional, based on social shame as a motivator. They should have been government enforced, mandatory and based on force as a motivator with all costs covered by the state and food/medicine/etc provided for free during the lockdown period. All the squealing whining hogs would be quite upset but who cares about them, slam the book down and it will all be over soon and they can get back to their treats like Wuhan managed. They would have ultimately preferred to rip the bandaid off than have 3 years of half-assed lockdowns and culture war.
I genuinely believe a socialist world-republic could have done zero-covid indefinitely. It was effective in China until the let-it-rip policies of most of the capitalist world kept it circulating and mutating. Communism could probably eradicate many diseases just with quarantines.
Is that known? I haven’t kept up but it was never my impression.
There were specific material situations which allowed this pwrticular pathogen to spread. Having to do with patterns of people living and moving, all highly influence by economics. Likely such pathogens pop into existence all the time but the stars do not align and they don’t come to attention.
Ebola was a novel virus in the 70s and it is highly infectious but it was fairly limited in scope.
HIV on the other hand was new about 100 years ago, with infectiousness close to zero. It is basically a miracle to seroconvert. But look at its impact. Once again, everything to do with material conditions.
Trade routes are central to all 4 of the above viruses iirc.
Neither Ebola nor HIV spread through aerosolized particles, which is far and away the main transmission vector of COVID-19. They both only spread through direct bodily contact, so they were nowhere near as infectious.
Again, I don’t deny material conditions play a part, and also that if all humans just stood still it wouldn’t have spread. But it should be self-evident that the properties of COVID-19 were a key part of its success in spreading, and that those properties are encoded by such little information is all I was marvelling at.
Unfortunately, you are completely incorrect about ebola. It was a sheer miracle of fate Reston virus did not wipe America off the face of the earth in the 1990s. It is asymptomatic in humans - so far.
It would take minimal effort to either modify another virus in the ebola family to take on the airborne properties of Reston virus, or change the virulence in humans. I would not be surprised at all if that had already been done somewhere.
It is basically a miracle to seroconvert
Could you explain this to a philistine such as myself?
