obvert
Posts: 14050
Joined: 1/17/2011 From: PDX (and now) London, UK Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy quote:
ORIGINAL: obvert quote:
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy quote:
ORIGINAL: obvert However bad it gets, it’s definitely the most impactful new disease strain since HIV. Nonsense. Haha! So many one icon or word responses. It’s all conjecture right now but if you don’t think this is changing the world in financial, medical, social and cultural arenas already then you’re not paying attention. Here in Europe everything is being cancelled including conferences and sprouting events. This is a big deal. I disagree with your stated polemic. While I agree that there's a lot of concern and conjecture about it-and see the attendant changes in the financial, medical, etc. ways, I don't believe that this is the 'most impactful disease since HIV'. How about worldwide spread of drug-resistant TB, particularly in the last decade? Drug-resistant TB killed more than 1.2MM people in 2012. MRSA has a lot of people worried-still. And if I wanted to cast a blanket of 40 years (the timeframe you identified), I'd also have to throw in drug-resistant malaria and cumulative Ebola mortality (several different outbreaks). Now you are to forgiven if you don't remember those or have overlooked their public health importance. Western media doesn't cover those as much because they're not novel or sexy. It's mostly underdeveloped countries / middle income countries that have to content with these issues and, really, nobody in the West seems to care. But to say that this iteration of COVID-19 is the most important disease since HIV is wrong. That sort of public health declarative, without context of the other underreported global ills that have prevailed for the last 40 years, is exactly what I'm talking about with an overfocus on the novel and a lack of perspective. I hope that clears up my previous one word response. I’ll ignore the condescension of your post since you actually merit it by your expertise. Interesting, but none of those diseases have impacted as many areas of our world culture as the current Covid-19. You forgot to mention Dengue which is a big problem in many areas a s well, or dissentery, or the rise of diabetics and heart disease among other problems caused by diet and behavior in affluent countries. My thought may not have been stated well, but it is that this has already and will have a world impact greater than those diseases, as is playing out in multiple spheres right now. The Chinese have reduced transmission RO below 1 for a time, but now everyone is going back to work after forced isolation. How long before a secondary spike in cases there? We simply don’t know how this will play out, but indications are that it will influence all continents (minus Antarctica maybe) and may not simply go away. To continue downplaying the outcome won’t help us, but might hurt the most vulnerable more than if we took every precaution.
_____________________________
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
|