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By David Wallace Wells
Opinion writer
What happened to our Roaring Twenties? In the first year of the pandemic, it is not uncommon to hear predictions that, as brutal and groundbreaking as it may seem in the short term, the world would be, at some point, celebrating the end of Covid-19, perhaps in a giant. Bacchanal to remember the dizzying decade that followed the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919, which killed 675,000 Americans.
But that end never came, not definitely. That the pandemic is no longer thought of as an emergency is obvious; Just take a look outside. But the country has not turned as much of a page as it has advanced, amid fogs of tiredness and loneliness and a long Covid, at the dawn of a new era in which the coronavirus has receded to its maximum component as The daily risk, however, would continue as a gothic background noise, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.
It is possible that a real post-pandemic era is still looming, even a real crazy twenties. But in recent weeks, as researchers recorded an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in mammals one after another, another option has emerged: one after another pandemics: news potentially caused by a disease that in recent decades has killed a portion of humans with known infections.
There have been few cases of human-to-human transmission of avian influenza, which is the main explanation for why its incursion into human populations has been so limited. The World Health Organization has said that the threat to humans is low, but also that “we will have to be ready for any replacement in the prestige quo. “There is an explanation as to why if the virus took such an evolutionary leap, it can lead to significant relief in severity. We also don’t know precisely how temporarily such a disease would be transmitted to humans, although we have noticed mind-boggling outbreaks in mammals over the past year: in minks, for example, on a Spanish farm; but also in bears, seals, raccoons and foxes, to name just a few of the recently inflamed populations in the United States. In Peru, about six hundred sea lions died.
The option of a momentary pandemic raises the apparent question of whether we have learned anything from the last one. Is there any explanation for why we are expecting that, even with new political leadership, will the country’s reaction to a new global epidemic – of H5N1 or in a different way – be more coherent or more coordinated?On the contrary. Contemplating the option of a new pandemic in the short or long term suggests all the tactics in which the United States, in its rush to return to normalcy, did not do all that could have ensured a lasting normalcy.
Consider the state of the country’s institutional public health apparatus: since 2020, no meaningful national disease surveillance network has been established or planned. (Our mosaic on avian influenza has given us a rough picture of where it’s spreading among animals lately. )F. D. A. still moves too slowly in some things and too fast in others. There is no Operation Warp Speed-style investment plan for immediate vaccine development; In fact, the president who can claim credit for it has stopped praising it as one of his achievements.
Billions of dollars have not been spent on investments for things like air filtration systems in schools, leaving public buildings no more prepared to treat airborne diseases than before Covid. There has been little progress to date in laboratory protection, even in the lab leak skeptics will recognize it as an ongoing threat, and early applicants for more expansive coronavirus vaccines, which can protect themselves against many other pathogens in the same circle of relatives as the coronavirus, are only in early trials. evolve slowly. )
As we now know all too well, containing the pandemic is not just a matter of policy and public investment. It’s a complex internet of leadership, social acceptance as true and public acceptance, hopefully. But it’s hard to believe that the country is now capable of being more supportive and vigilant than it was in early 2020. Vaccine skepticism may not necessarily be this pandemic, but the symptoms are troubling and there has been very little political attention on what can trump that skepticism. Trust in the public The handling of the pandemic by fitness officials has also declined. And the Biden administration, which bit the brakes on inauguration day, now provides public fitness recommendations akin to “you do you,” taking flight from the pandemic reaction, cutting millions of others off expanded Medicaid coverage and canceling the provision of new tests and booster shots for the personal market.
There are encouraging symptoms related to avian influenza: federal discussion of a mass poultry vaccination program and the “rapid” rollout of existing avian influenza vaccines for humans. Wasting the beginning of a new pandemic, and perhaps more than that, repeating debates about the last one. The fault lines can already be seen, with those who think the country’s Covid reaction has gone too far by turning to social media to scoff at the suggestion that one of the same measures (social distancing, masking, school closures) can be imposed to stop a new contagion, as if it makes no sense for this new one to be several times more deadly.
Over time, drastically higher death rates than seen with Covid would (hopefully) shake off much of the country’s existing mitigation fatalism, because a disease that kills 5% of those who are inflamed is very different from a disease which only kills 1%. But a deadlier pandemic would also likely perversely revive arguments about our reaction to the coronavirus, because such a death rate would make this disease relatively benign, and the global reaction to it much more significant, by comparison. As of 2020, Covid downplays that compared to the flu, which kills a fraction of them (and tends to infect far fewer). If in the next pandemic, death rates were five times as high, would minimizers dismiss it in the same way: “It’s just covid”? We have already normalized many more deaths than almost all Americans imagined in early 2020, when the country withdrew in response to warnings that the disease could kill 100,000 to 200,000 people. Normalization is rarely just a matter of vaccine skeptics on your Facebook timeline. During the election campaign, Joe Biden said that any president guilty of 220,000 American deaths deserves not to be president anymore; he now he has presided over 700,000.
In 2020, we were panicking; Now we are exhausted. In 2021, many doctors have left the profession, and those still in operation report burnout. Even some nurses said in surveys that they planned to leave the profession, as did a fifth of doctors. In the post-emergency phase of the pandemic, national hospital capacity is under pressure and rural hospitals are depleting at a dizzying pace.
This is not to say that in the face of any possible new pandemic, failure is inevitable. But even a limited epidemic, effectively contained through mitigation or overcome by immediate vaccine production, would still constitute a grim premonition, an undeniable sign to many that the world has now entered what epidemiologists have memorably called the Pandemic. That is, a new epoch, explained both by the increasing frequency of viral spread events and the Anthropocene explained by human influence on the planet.
When we give our time names like these, disjunctions are inevitable, almost predetermined. But the human consequences of a new disease are no more inevitable than the human consequences of carbon emissions. Here, the accumulated burden of indifference can be just as high. , and only at the apparent human cost. By unequivocally welcoming 8 billion of us into a new pandemic era, a new epidemic would cast a kind of permanent viral shadow for decades to come, a legacy less akin to the 1920s and closer to the Great Depression.
David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), editor of Opinion and columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth. “
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