Originally Posted by
Dark Stanley
The suggested return to normalisation I’m afraid isn’t an option. What are you trying to preserve for your children? That’s an open question for us all.
My answer to that would be, did we start wearing sandals, long socks and revert to socialism en masse after 100 million died of Spanish flu In 1918 and then nearly a million globally from the 1957 outbreak (from a much lower global population). Or did we just get on with it? I’ve never suggested throwing the elderly or vulnerable under a bus. But there are more intelligent and effective ways of handling this crisis.
This situation is not unique. The global community has been here before and had it much worse. What has changed is some bizarre notion that we all have a right to live to past 100, despite ignoring scientific advice about smoking, obesity, drinking and type 2 diabetes.
If you want to look for a reason things are going off the rails, it’s not globalisation. It’s too many people on a planet that is past capacity. We don’t have a too much co2 problem for example. We have a too many people emitting Co2 problem. Nature has a pretty good track history of correcting global imbalance.
Most of the time a virus will mutate to a less potent state, Ebola has several strains.....if you want to sleep well don’t search for what the worst does...
I was at the front line of the U.K. response to the last major outbreak on and off for a number of weeks, with flights to West Africa. I saw it first hand In some of the U.K. repatriations and evacuations we were involved in. All UK were caught by testing at a very early symptomatic stage, runny nose that sort of thing. The briefings we had (including some disturbing photosfrom the last stages) made it quite clear you didn’t want to get it. Fortunately, Ebola has a pretty low Transmissivity, certainly much lower than NCov. when foreign assistance first turned up, survival rates were pretty much zero. By the end, it was more like 60-80% in the patients favour. Most of international help cut the outbreak in 2014/15 by education in how to handle dead bodies. There were a lot of cultural norms which were massively increasing transmission and took a lot of work/education to break those norms.
What I would say a lot was learned from that outbreak, more than you will ever know at a deep research level. I hope that some of what has been learned is being deployed in fighting NCov from a potential treatment perspective.