“At that time, experts speculated that precautions taken to stop the spread of COVID-19 — such as masking and social distancing — had not only driven the overall number of flu cases to historic lows but may have completely snuffed out this type of flu virus. “.
Handwashing, masking, distancing, and isolation when sick were simple yet effective behavioral measures taken by the population of the world which actively caused this extinction of the Yamagata lineage. We did it, collectively folks. Congratulations!
I wonder if lockdown was the final nail for it. I’ve been wondering if there were any variants of common illnesses we’ll never see again because it required more human cross contact to sustain its population.
We should do a winter lockdown every decade, just to keep it clean.
I’m pretty sure covid 19 was a big fluke. I believe we will never, ever achieve that level of global cooperation again against a health crisis.
Even then, the levels of global cooperation were, uhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
COVID was a much bigger deal than it would have been if China hadn’t tried to play fuck fuck games and pretend that there is no pandemic in Ba Sing Se. Instead, it took doctors getting in trouble with the state and blasting the alarm on social media (before dying of COVID) to raise the alarm that shit was going down. By that point, we were already a couple months into human-human transmission and the genie was already out of the bottle. Imagine if China hadn’t played stupid fucking games and immediately said “hey, guys, heads up, we’ve got something going on here” and collaborated with the international community on it from the get-go. We might have gotten a handle on it like we did with SARS.
I don’t think China was up to some shit and was trying to bury the evidence, I just think it was a mix of not wanting to disrupt commerce now (in exchange for disrupting a lot of commerce later, which is sort of the tale of global warming writ small) and not wanting to be ‘embarassed’ by another epidemic like SARS. I hope whoever was in charge of those decisions realizes what a stupid fucking decision that was, and thinks about just how many people they got killed and commerce they got disrupted (and reputation they destroyed for China).
But won’t someone think of the shareholders!?!?
Or the kids? It was terrible for their education and social development. Hard to weigh the pros and cons there.
It had a huge impact on my kids. You are not wrong. The teachers were unprepared and often left to their own devices. I will tell you that older teachers and technology don’t mix. And it was like Christmas for all the kids who stayed in physical classrooms because now class was only 15 kids instead of 35. Sure, most of these kids are on their 4th round of covid, and my kids have still yet to get it, but it was two very important years that just went “POOF.” I need both hands and feet to count the grandparents I am personally aware of that are now KIA due to stubbornness. The whole time was a shit show, and we learned nothing from it. My oldest had some pretty sever issues due to the depression of the whole thing. Better than getting covid and checking out, yeah no question, but still f’d
My oldest had some pretty server issues….
Send him over to homelabs; they can probably help.
