Courtesy of commentor Redshift: What Happens Next? COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations ??https://t.co/lGdTjaJYEF A 30 min, interactive read. Incredibly well done by @ncasenmare! pic.twitter.com/qMFEWi1gWx — Marcel Salathé (@marcelsalathe) May 2, 2020 #Covid19 vaccines may set records for development, with some manufacturers predicting they could have data to support emergency use in the fall. But …
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Before any of this began, I used to wonder about the ‘historical amnesia’ of Americans who lived through the Spanish Flu. Despite the impact it must have had, it just didn’t seem to exist in books or movies written by the survivors. Now I suspect at least some of it was a form of deliberate avoidance — a sort of societal PTSD.
Pretty sure I posted the video tweet when it first appeared, but it’s worth parsing:
A short thread
1/ Throughout my time working on #covid19 response here in Massachusetts, I have come back time & time again to this single video by the head of the WHO epidemics response, @DrMikeRyan
If there's only one thing you watch, let it be this: pic.twitter.com/62xWGVApaF
— Abraar Karan, MD MPH DTM&H (@AbraarKaran) May 5, 2020
4/ My favorite line from his whole speech is this:
"If you need to be right before you move, you will never win."
Read that one more time. And then consider how many times we have done the opposite in our response here in the US.
— Abraar Karan, MD MPH DTM&H (@AbraarKaran) May 5, 2020
Some more thoughts on this thread below…in another threadhttps://t.co/kri7HOyuaO
— Abraar Karan, MD MPH DTM&H (@AbraarKaran) May 5, 2020
The responses from other medical professionals to Dr. Karan’s thread are worth reading, too!
Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist, on the difference between this and ‘historic’ pandemics:
… When a pandemic comes, cities scare the hell out of people. The crush and bustle of the sidewalks and subways feels like a big petri dish. One instinct is to run. The literature of viral apocalypse, including recent masterpieces such as Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, starts with masses fleeing to the countryside. This choice rarely turns out well.
That’s the paradox of the megalopolis. Its population density means it’s the place where viruses often begin and that epidemics, if undetected, can explode fast there. New York is about to become a major focal point of infection and mortality, and London is not looking too good, either, because they didn’t close their crowded drinking places earlier.
But the biggest cities are also the safest places in the world.
Only they have the infrastructure, staff and organization to really quash an outbreak – Taipei and Tokyo, both more dense than New York, were able to flatten their virus-spread curves almost instantly using the unavoidable communications, visible deterrence and bureaucracies that only a tight-packed urban centre can muster. If you’ve spent any time in a small town, you’ll know how hard it is to keep people inside or away from each other.
And only huge cities have the resources and the reserve armies of medical talent to tool their health-care systems up to pandemic-level capacity in time to save lives. New York, because it’s able to build and staff huge convention-centre hospitals in short order, will have a lower mortality rate than the smaller, more elderly towns and cities that will be hit next…
Cities were, until the 19th century, “population sumps,” in the words of the late Canadian historian William H. McNeill, that attracted thousands of immigrants every year and promptly killed them with epidemic diseases. London required 6,000 immigrants a year in the 1700s just to maintain its population of 650,000 because disease deaths greatly outnumbered births.
Then two things happened. First, the tight-knit populations of cities, and their connections to other cities, meant that the urban world became a homogenous human pool of immunity. The practice of inoculation saw its first widespread Western practice in the English countryside at the end of the 18th century to fight smallpox – by that point, Londoners didn’t need it because their immunity had transformed it into a fairly harmless childhood disease. In 1790, London baptisms outnumbered deaths for the first time and, from then on, cities became safer than towns…