What are we going to do about the COVID-2X and COVID-3X World wide Pandemics?

The Swedish case is very interesting - not so long ago they were being berated as reckless as their no of cases stayed higher than their neighbours.

However, they are not seeing any sort of second upturn yet.

It may be that they have indeed demonstrated the true cost/ benefit  of herd immunity for this virus, and it may well have been a better model than a  lock-down in some cases. But we will not know for sure for a long time.

 

But coming back to the OP even when we do understand the best way to approach C19, we cannot know the lethality or the contagion factors for the next pandemic and re-fighting the last battle may not work so well.


Imagine if you will a mutated version that spreads more like measles (un moderated R number 10-12, rather than about 3) and a high lethality more like say Ebola - to put it politely we'd be stuffed if we  approached a virus like  that in a herd immunity way.... Mind you we'd probably not fare so well in a lock-down either...

Equally a degree of fatalism is not a new idea nor is it a bad thing - for millennia humans have lived with their own mortal nature and incorporated it into their social patterns - hence bronze age burial mounds and so on.

We probably need to wake up to the fact the we are still not really omnipotent over nature. And in the meantime stop building open plan offices and large shops, they will be as obsolete as the horn gramophone and film photography  in a few years, a passing fad, something we did for a short time in the 20th century..

The Swedish case is very interesting - not so long ago they were being berated as reckless as their no of cases stayed higher than their neighbours.

However, they are not seeing any sort of second upturn yet.

It may be that they have indeed demonstrated the true cost/ benefit  of herd immunity for this virus, and it may well have been a better model than a  lock-down in some cases. But we will not know for sure for a long time.

 

But coming back to the OP even when we do understand the best way to approach C19, we cannot know the lethality or the contagion factors for the next pandemic and re-fighting the last battle may not work so well.


Imagine if you will a mutated version that spreads more like measles (un moderated R number 10-12, rather than about 3) and a high lethality more like say Ebola - to put it politely we'd be stuffed if we  approached a virus like  that in a herd immunity way.... Mind you we'd probably not fare so well in a lock-down either...

Equally a degree of fatalism is not a new idea nor is it a bad thing - for millennia humans have lived with their own mortal nature and incorporated it into their social patterns - hence bronze age burial mounds and so on.

We probably need to wake up to the fact the we are still not really omnipotent over nature. And in the meantime stop building open plan offices and large shops, they will be as obsolete as the horn gramophone and film photography  in a few years, a passing fad, something we did for a short time in the 20th century..