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by enjoy-your-stay
1910 days ago
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>I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems. I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well. Of course for some it's been worse than for others, but on the whole the planet has coped not too badly. It has also flushed out at least one useless govt from power (US), is in the process of hopefully doing so with another (Brazil), and we can only hope that it will also hasten the departure of England's PM too. We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse. |
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I mean, it's all relative, right? From my US perspective, I guess prior to the pandemic, I thought the CDC was one of the few federal agencies with a high degree of competence, but they didn't even have meaningful reserves of ventilators, masks, or other PPE nor any plans to procure the same (even though we've had several major respiratory epidemics). Similarly, there were apparently no plans to scale up PCR testing capacity, and the CDC rejected the WHO test in favor of its own tests which were problematic at the start, especially in that they were difficult to scale. The testing turned out to be an even bigger debacle because it left decision makers completely in the dark.
Even if you lay the blame at the hands of Congress for defunding them, that still indicates a problem with our political health.
So yeah, we didn't enter a dark age or anything, but it was far worse than I would have guessed. The death toll is still quite high, but to your point, it could have been higher.
> We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.
I guess my point is that prior to the pandemic, I expected that our advancements in science and technology (if not politics) would have left us much more capable of dealing with a disease like the 1918 influenza than we apparently are.