While the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t an experience anyone wants to repeat, infections disease experts like [Dr. Pardis Sabeti] are looking at what we can do to prepare for the next one.
While the next pandemic could potentially be anything, there are a few high profile candidates, and bird flu (H5N1) is at the top of the list. With birds all over the world carrying the infection and the prevalence in poultry and now dairy agriculture operations, the possibility for cross-species infection is higher than for most other diseases out there, particularly anything with an up to 60% fatality rate. Only one of the 70 people in the US who have contracted H5N1 recently have died, and exposures have been mostly in dairy and poultry workers. Scientists have yet to determine why cases in the US have been less severe.
To prevent an H5N1 pandemic before it reaches the level of COVID and ensure its reach is limited like earlier bird and swine flu variants, contact tracing of humans and cattle as well as offering existing H5N1 vaccines to vulnerable populations like those poultry and dairy workers would be a good first line of defense. So far, it doesn’t seem transmissible human-to-human, but more and more cases increase the likelihood it could gain this mutation. Keeping current cases from increasing, improving our science outreach, and continuing to fund scientists working on this disease are our best bets to keep it from taking off like a meme stock.
Whatever the next pandemic turns out to be, smartwatches could help flatten the curve and surely hackers will rise to the occasion to fill in the gaps where traditional infrastructure fails again.
“..those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Franklin
What you are advocating in “contract tracing” is outright Orwellian. Perhaps this is what you are going for?
for example: a wall provides security, or it can trap you. a wall can even starve you. are you for or against walls?
it’s not the tools that are orwellian but rather the system built around them. it’s reasonable to fear how systems will relate to tools. nuance is a tool i’d try to use to understand systems, but perhaps i’m alone in that.
I’m for walls that I control.
Actually “contact” tracing. They did it in New Zealand and it was very effective.
I’m unclear on how contact tracing would have directly inhibited the spread of a disease. By “unclear”, I mean I don’t get it at all as an effective preventative. I feel like I don’t like it, but maybe that’s because I don’t understand it?
I’ll explain like you are five. Let’s say Patient A presents with Covid. You trace all of Patient A’s contacts for the previous time period about the length of the incubation period. You tell them they have been in contact with a Covid case, and either force them to quarantine, or ask them to quarantine. It’s an effective preventative measure because it stops people who may be infectious from infecting others, because now they know.
If you know you are, or may be, infected you can take steps to protect others, by self-quarantining, wearing a mask, enforcing social distancing, and other simple measures. Unless you are a selfish idiot, of course.
You admit to not understanding it at all, so you’ve concluded entirely on vibes (“I feel like…”) that an entire field of epidemiology must be BS.
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
-Isaac Asimov
Pandemics cure overpopulation. I’m not complaining.
My, aren’t we edgy. Go back to 4chan.
I presume you’re volunteering to be subject to the ‘cure’…
So do education and access to contraceptives, maybe we should try that instead of pandemics?
We did a terrible job with the Covid pandemic, especially since people think its over when it isn’t and the World Health Organisation still call it a pandemic. We just swept it under the rug along with all the Long Covid sufferers. You can still catch Covid and die, you have quite a concerningly high chance of developing Long Covid after every Covid infection, and you average 2 of those a year. I do find talking about a current event like its historical while talking about how well we will treat a future pandemic as somewhat ironic.
It’s not longer has public health emergency status.
Eradication was never likely.
we have to balance many fears at once. unfortunately we can’t get perfect safety. we can’t even really defeat a single hazard. so yeah covid goes on, and so do we.
Just like other flus and Pneumonia, covid is here to stay. That’s life. Like the flu, most of us had it, move on.
It’s no longer a pandemic, it’s endemic, we have to live with it now.
Who’s “we”? New Zealand and Norway did a great job to protect their citizens. The US and Sweden, not so much.
Get all one’s shots while insurance is still paying for it.
Or not. Should be up to individual, not the government. That was what was wrong with the Covid flu. A balance is needed. Life is a risk, deal with it – don’t whine about it.
By getting vaccinated you help reduce the spread and severity of the disease. This is especially important for protecting others in society who can’t take the vaccine due to age, medical conditions, immunocompromised, etc.
I see that you might want to choose to be unvaccinated, but you should acknowledge other people’s rights to shun you.
Fortunately for you, smarter, caring people vaccinated you against childhood diseases when you were very young.
Or live in a country with public healthcare.
Don’t worry, with RFK Jr in charge we’ll be ready with ample supplies of cod liver oil, energy healing, jade eggs, and heroin.
They’ll be stored in all the empty laboratories we won’t be doing science in.
Yes! Make polio great again!
With RFK Jr. in charge, your children won’t have to worry about ingesting petrochemicals, like Red 40 and Yellow 5, everytime they eat breakfast cereal since the US is finally joining the rest of the world and banning them.
With RFK Jr in charge, drug company reps will no longer be sitting on the FDA advisory committees intended to regulate them.
With RFK Jr in charge, the HHS will no longer be funding illegal gain-of-function research at shady Chinese biolabs that leads to a pandemic which kills millions.
With RFK Jr in charge, parents will be
able to decide if their child is injected with an experimental vaccine, not the government.
With RFK Jr in charge, the US will finally join the rest of the world and ban drug companies from marketing directly to consumers (brought to you by Pfizer).
If these empty labs are the same ones that gifted COVID to the world then we can do without their “science”
With RFK Jr in charge you are experiencing a resurgence of measles, and an increase in child mortality from flu. The children won’t have to worry about much once they’re dead.
Preparing for the next pandemic that we will create?
“SARS escaped Beijing lab twice” published in journal of genome biology
USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) is the source of current H5N1 bird flu epidemic published in the journal of poultry fisheries and wildlife sciences (titled proximal origin of epidemic …. H5N1
Lyme disease from plum island covert us bioweapons research
And… Covid which all intelligence agencies agree came from the wuhan insitute of virology.
Maybe we should stop preparing for the next pandemic because we are doing more harm than good.
In general you should take fatality rates with a huge grain of salt. There are a lot of confounding factors. Obviously there is every chance that the disease will mutate significantly before you are ever at risk of picking it up. In addition people who are early victims, are often, nearly by definition immunocompromised and thus more likely to die from it. These early victims are often getting a very ineffective-at-compromising humans version of the virus, so to even be susceptible the victims often need weak immune systems. Then you have to account for the demographics of the early victims. People who work in poultry farms or with cows in close proximity, especially in developing countries, are often not the healthiest or wealthiest. This can contribute to their susceptibility as well as their ability / willingness to seek medical aide until it is too late.
I’m not even going to seriously address the absurd and Orwellian nonsense around giving governments the capacity to track your every movement at all times.
I like science. In my world science is empirical and results can always be repeated. Some examples, 1 volt through 1 ohm flows 1 amp of current, 10 volts through 10 ohms flows 1 amp of current, 1 BTU will raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1 degree F., Only so many conductors are allowed in half inch conduit, 1 ton of cooling requires 400 CFM of airflow. Medical science is not science and delves more into witchcraft or something of that nature. Create a new drug, test it on 100 persons, It cures 78, does nothing to 13, and kills 9. Side effects include it make the noses fall off some people, It causes some peoples taint to get infected, and it may cause strokes. What a great success now sell it to the plebes. In my world that is not science. I think the scamdemic that was covid opened my eyes to this phenomona even more because the Gov’t kept saying “follow the science” and then changed the recommendation every so often.
“Medical science is not science…” Whoever convinced you of that is your enemy. Seriously.
Sweet Mother of Sagan these comments are a (sadly quite predictable) utter mess of conspiracy theories.
Worth remembering that, even by the CDC’s worst-case estimates (as of Sept 2020), the IFR was very low for the younger segments of the population:
0-19yrs: 0.003%
20-49yrs: 0.02%
50-69yrs: 0.5%
70+yrs: 5.4%
https://archive.is/edmyC
And, if you remove those without co-morbidities, the younger segments of population are statistically insignificant (May 2020):
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/predicted-covid-19-fatality-rates-based-age-sex-comorbidities-and-health-system-capacity.pdf
Also worth remembering that, in the US (and many other countries) deaths caused by clearly extraneous factors (e.g. a car crash) were still classified as SARS-CoV-2 deaths at that point in time if there was measured infection. So, the real figures would likely be lower.
This reads like a dressed-up-in-citations version of the second and third lines of the narcissist’s praye: And if it did, it wasn’t that bad; And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
No matter how you slice it, excess deaths for those years were enormously up, and just because a person has a comorbidity doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to die. Honestly, your whole comment feels like a giant exercise in the Just World Fallacy.
It is no conspiracy theory that the state is rubbish at everything, yet 99% of the population somehow expects them to have all the answers and to be able to fix it all.
Anti-vax nut jobs out in force today.
Ya, I know, right! It’s simple people, take the COVID vaccine and you won’t get sick! Take the boosters and you won’t get myocarditis either!
Ivermectin is horse dewormer!
Trust the science people!
(brought to you by Pfizer)
Here’s some science – 280 studies worth
https://c19ivm.org/
Transmucosal viral infection is, in theory, a solved problem. You can have a billion different virus variants but they still need to be able to target a very limited and slowly evolving set of receptor targets on human cell walls. Vaccines are an outdated and flawed solution in this context as they cannot address the high mutation rates associated with RNA virus genomes, and in fact can drive an unnatural selection process that favours more infective variants. At this point if you are reading this thinking “Huh, why don’t I know about this?” well indeed, why don’t you know about this? Have a good long think about that.
The most alluring aspect of any conspiracy theory is the idea that you, personally, are so clever as to be “in” on some amazing secret knowledge that even highly educated people aren’t. That you, personally,somehow have it ALL figured out, by virtue of some completely un-investigated inherent genius that just goes unappreciated by the world at large, allowing you to discover the truth of the world that thousands of millions of trained scientists, working diligently for decades, were just too deluded to figure out.
“Have a good long think about that.”