Thing is though, we've already got significant contact tracing in place, to the point where we know exactly where the vast majority of our positive cases came from. And when ypu add in the fact that we can easily test and isolate at risk people from dangerous countries like the US, then that makes it even easier to be ready for a second wave.
... yeeeah, no. We don't have the numbers to say that. Getting them is at least four to ten months out.
... which falls under the category of "evidence that you don't understand how medical science, and particularly epidemiology, works," I suppose I shouldn't exactly be surprised.
Exactly. We don't have the numbers, yet you're acting as if your claims are facts.
Are you absolutely sure you wiped out the virus? And are your borders really locked down? And how long can you keep things locked down? Just think about how international trade and travel goes on during normal times. And how long can your economy last with the people locked in place and the borders shut?
Our borders are honestly much less of a problem than our home-grown idiots.
Who is going to enforce that? If the soldiers or police are out of their homes, they are breaking the lockdown. Autonomous killbots?
You're the one making unwarrantedly optimistic claims about the economic consequences of letting people get infected when every indication is to the contrary.
That's why i said it was impossible.
You're actually forgetting a factor that mitigates for multiple places in Africa in general.
We might be freaking done then, since regardless of what some people in this thread are trying to sell around, I still am not sure we'll ever have an efficient, lasting vaccine for this thing (and certainly not before a year or two), and it's obvious global lockdowns lasting long enough as to stop transmission aren't really an option either.
Human testing for one decent-looking vaccine started roughly a month ago in Oxford, UK.
Eh, the black death is overhyped... it killed a bunch of people in a narrow span of time, then burned itself out. A flash in the pan, little more. Still infects a few people every year in the modern world (including the USA and Australia)... otherwise, we basically ignore it.
Bubonic plague caused periodic apocalyptic epidemics all over the world all throughout human history; what we call "the Black Death" was only the biggest one. E.g. Plague of Justinian, Plague of 1666, probably others I'm forgetting.
What you described was the definition of 'flash in the pan' plague. I don't think there's been a single disease in history that's only had *one* outbreak. Even Wuhan Flu is SARS 3.0 .
Another fun fact: the Finnish verb 'rokottaa' (to vaccinate) literally translates as 'to infect with pox'.
That *is* fascinating. Thank you.
Further trivia: "vaccination" comes from Latin "vacca", "cow", since the original smallpox vaccine was in fact just an infection with a closely related but much less severe disease, cowpox, that conferred an immunity to both cowpox and smallpox. There's another word in English, "variolation", which was the original therapy on which vaccination was an improvement: this was just to infect people with smallpox, using a small dose under controlled conditions, in order to confer smallpox immunity after recovering from the disease a few weeks later. Variolation killed about 2% of its patients; however, this was an improvement over uncontrolled smallpox, which killed more like 30%. (And of course "variolation" comes from "variola", which is the Latin term for smallpox itself.)
It is rather funny. In many cases it can be a matter of incompetence and blind optimism in which case they should have seen this coming. In other cases it maybe due to liabilities they owe in various deals that are all of a sudden being demanded by other companies in similar situations with everyone juggling around what actual liquidable assets they have on hand to pay out their debts.
Billion-dollar corporations are expensive. Electricity isn't free, production of... well, products... takes resources. Employees are nowhere near cheap.
Yes, no and maybe-ish
Except, you know, pretty much every public health expert for the last 30+ years?
That doesn't invalidate my post.
