10 lessons I've learned from the Covid-19 pandemic

[Nevilledog]

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Helen Branswell
@HelenBranswell
I’ve been writing about the disease we call #Covid19 for 2 years now. (Minus a few days.) Here are some things I learned about pandemic responses in the intervening months.

10 lessons I’ve learned from the Covid–19 pandemic
Some things have gone surprisingly well, notably the rapid development of Covid vaccines and some therapeutics. But far more things have gone horribly wrong.
statnews.com

https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/28/10-lessons-ive-learned-from-the-covid-19-pandemic/


On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, just hours from when 2019 was going to segue into 2020, I read an email about some unusual pneumonia cases in China’s Hubei province. Over the past couple of decades, China has been a wellspring of dangerous zoonotic diseases — SARS, H5N1 bird flu, and H7N9 bird flu. Better keep an eye on this, I thought to myself.

Fast-forward two years. We’re entering the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic. So much has happened in the intervening months. Some things have gone surprisingly well, notably the rapid development of Covid vaccines and some therapeutics. But far more things have gone horribly wrong.

Multiple commissions and panels have been set up to learn the lessons of this pandemic so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes next time. (Yes, sadly, there will be a next time.) More commissions and panels are likely to follow. But already, some things have become abundantly clear.

Here are 10 lessons I’ve learned in the past two years.

You gotta act fast

For reasons I may never understand, in January and February of 2020 much of the world seemed not to grasp that the new virus that was spreading so rapidly in China wouldn’t stay in China.

*snip*

[Irish_Dem]

1. I learned that many Americans are totally incapable of handling

a national emergency. And in fact, will do everything in their power to thwart efforts to control the emergency.

And half of the American leadership will use the emergency to kill citizens and use the emergency for personal profit and power.

[gratuitous]

2. I've learned that Americans don't understand "exponential growth"

We've had the lesson presented several times, and people just aren't getting it for reasons that are not apparent to me.

There's a very old brain teaser about an invasive species of algae that doubles in size every day and covers ponds until it chokes all the life out of the pond. If the algae covers the pond on day 30, what day does the algae cover half the pond?

It's tempting to say day 15, but the answer is day 29. Which is to say that by the time most people recognize the spread of the virus is a problem, it's already too late. Those low, seemingly insignificant numbers of infections on day 5 mask the fact that a lot of people are asymptomatically infected, far beyond the 5 or 10 reported cases.