This is not a message that any politician can ever espouse. It is sadly the way of things.
I suspect that the next novel coronavirus will meet with quite a lot of resistance. It seems we screwed the pooch/jumped the shark/fucked up ... with SARS which was our last warning apart from Bird flu (H5N1) and the other horrendous epidemics and pandemics across the years.
It's a bit embarrassing to have several world class virus killer orgs here in the UK and yet we are only deploying them properly fairly recently. You Yanks can stop sniggering at the back - you've screwed up in the same way we have. It is of course not that simple and we are all unprepared for this. It will be different next time and there will be a next time. All countries are changing visibly with their response to this thing. It is remarkable and quite humbling. Keep your eyes peeled and your brain on point and observe. We will never see the like again in our lifetimes (I hope)
My take away is that we need to get all our govts onboard with real risk assessment.
That's a bullshit line by incompetent politicians who deliberately dismantled the very systems that were put in place to deal with this.
As for warnings: By end of December, the epi community knew something was up. By mid January, there was a pretty loud clamor that we need to address this.By end of January, Covid was a regular occurrence in the intelligence briefing for the president, and the warnings weren't exactly ambiguous. By mid February, anybody who was paying actual attention was preparing one way or another.
As for warning the general public: Bill Gates did a whole song and dance on a TED stage. We had SARS, and Mers, and swine flu.
So, no, we are not "all unprepared". Many closed their eyes and pretended wishing extra-hard makes science go away.
And yes, there's a good chance we'll see another one in our lifetime. As we encroach more and more on animal habitats, it's pretty inevitable. (That, too, is a thing people have been warning about for decades)
In the US, the Trump administration’s bungling incompetence handling of the outbreak is truly staggering. Wildly contradictory statements from moment to the next, no coordinated pandemic plan, “hijacking” PPE shipments enroute from China and Malaysia to the countries that had bought, and paid for, them...this is rogue/failed state level stuff.
Other western countries also messed up big time. In Canada, France, the UK and Spain people in longterm care homes were abandoned and left wallowing in their own filth as COVID-19 burned through these facilities like wildfire, killing scores of elderly inpatients, many of whom were left to suffer and die alone.
It’s striking how some of the most “advanced” countries utterly failed to prepare for and manage a very foreseeable pandemic.
Then again, is it really that surprising that this happened in places where health care systems have been chronically underfunded for decades as permanent homeless camps have become normalized and the middle-class economy replaced by low-wage precarity and easy credit?
It’s like after four decades of “there is no such thing as society” governance the health and well-being of people, of the public, in these places has become an afterthought.
The scramble to blame other countries or pretend that “there is nothing we could have done to prepare for this” is theatre designed to deflect attention from the fact that dictatorships, like China, and places with authoritarian governments, like Singapore and South Korea, care more for the health of their citizens than many of the western liberal democracies, where austerity and massive neglect of public services and infrastructure have become the norm.
Like the market crash of 2008, the coronavirus outbreak of 2020 is showing that the social and economic system underpinning the west is seriously broken and can’t handle even the slightest amount of stress.
It needs to be replaced with an arrangement that reins in the ability of the avaricious banker and CEO class to dictate how the economy should be run. The health and well-being of all people in society needs to come first or these places will degrade even further.
We (humans) are trying to impose evolutionary pressure by isolating potential carriers. Maybe that will help.
The Influenza causing the Spanish flu became deadlier in the second wave, it then evolved to be milder in the third wave, however, still more dangerous than in the first wave.
The evolutionary pressure is for reproduction, and if other factors facilitate reproduction, like a large window during which the infected are asymptomatic but contagious, or maybe airborne transmission, then the virus can very well be deadly.
It appears SARS-Cov-2 is very well adapted given how contagious it is. Personally I fear a more dangerous second wave in autumn or next year.
My understanding is that viruses typically cause symptoms because they cause the virus to spread, things like coughing spread the virus. If a virus induces too strong of a reaction then the host dies or can't function while they have it and it doesn't spread.
It's probably unlikely for a virus to develop an infectious period where the symptoms are mild but strong enough to spread and then shift phases to become lethal, as a virus has no coordination between itself.
I think typically viruses are either in an asymptomatic phase, where they're less likely to spread and don't cause symptoms (because they haven't replicated much), and a symptomatic phase where spreading is more likely but obvious the person has it.
As a last bit, my understanding is that "novel" viruses, such as this novel coronavirus, are particularly concerning when they cross over from a non human host and become infectious because they haven't developed to have mild symptoms that are amenable to spreading well, and so can be more deadly than viruses that evolved alongside or within the human population.
