Comment on Ours
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 11 hours agoTell that to countries that had a zero-covid policy, like China after February 2020.
With hundreds of millions of infectees worldwide, covid had space to evolve quickly enough to eventually overcome zero-covid restrictions by mid-2021. But if the early variant (lineage B) had been contained immediately, it would not have had the reservoir size to evolve past those.
It’s this kind of fatalism that gets millions of people killed.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
I never meant to imply that nothing should have been done or greater measures shouldn’t have been taken sooner but we can only view this retrospectively. I struggle to believe an airborne disease as contagious as covid would not have found a route out of China other than passenger planes before stricter measures were taken. This is not a matter of whether it is possible to contain such a disease but a matter of whether such procedures had a chance of being implemented quickly enough before the disease was understood.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 10 hours ago
Whether such procedures “have a chance” is a political decision. Covid-19 didn’t appear out of thin air. Covid in general had been on the WHO’s radar for decades. Experts were saying a pandemic was only a matter of time with the procedures in place. With tens of millions of lives on the line, it would be reasonable to have procedures that put a thousand cities on lockdown for false alarms for every pandemic prevented.
It’s not that people are too selfish for that. People go to war to die en masse for a vague notion of national welfare all the time. It’s just that pandemic prevention doesn’t make the rich richer so it doesn’t have more propaganda money than god.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
yes, I guess I wasn’t fully clear on my position and I apologize for that. I do not believed there was a single state on this earth that had the political will to take the effective measures required to prevent spread in time. I personally believe this is due to how our economies are structured.