Thanks Matt. I wish more people cared about this. I don't understand how we are just sitting around like assholes with our thumbs up our asses arguing about tax police and transgender people playing kids games after a not too deadly pandemic just killed a million Americans. It's like 9/11 just happened and no one wants to do anything to stop future attacks. Where is our COVID commission?
> I now think it’s become a weird China policy hobbyhorse or grist for the culture war mills
It has, but primarily because the anti-lab leak side consciously prioritized questionable social justice-based arguments over evidence and reason, including high-level officials.
The weirdest thing about this pandemic was how it started out with a ton of scientists saying that respiratory diseases for sure only could spread through large droplets on flat surfaces so we should all wash our hands and every touchable surface there was. But it turned out they had never done research since like the 1930s about how respiratory diseases spread, and that research was wrong. Small, airborne particles was the issue. So the weirdest thing to me was that we had the basic science completely wrong. What other basic science questions about diseases do we have completely wrong? We should spend money and resources to get those basics right so when a new disease happens, we can quickly determine what we should do (ventilate and filter air, wear masks, and don't crowd in small spaces) and not do (wipe crap off door knobs in my house or quarantine amazon boxes for 3 weeks).
A very good article/ essay. A few things come to mind. New zoonoses are of course a real concern. Is there reason to think that virulence in birds correlates with virulence in humans?
Antibiotic resistance is a real problem, yet your 1984 quote overstates the degree. Deaths from now treatable infections remain a fraction of what they were pre-antibiotics.
Policies implemented during COVID-19 led to vastly different reactions from experts and individuals alike, as well as serious loss of trust in our FDA and CDC. These issues would have to be remedied for any effective response could be undertaken. Even effective measures like far UV would have only partial uptake.
"None of this — ventilation, special light, better PPE, better vaccines — is exactly existing science and technology. But it’s close, visibly within grasp ...."
We could end factory farming quickly. We can boycott it now.
I also read Laurie Garrett’s book, and it stuck with me. I used to be more terrified of Ebola (which, to be fair, IS a terrifying disease), but have since realized that airborne respiratory viruses are more dangerous to large numbers of people.
Excellent article on pandemic preparedness. I think on the whole it seems we’ve learned the wrong lessons from the very mild pandemic that was COVID.
COVID was a pretty mild pandemic with about a 1% fatality rate that mainly targeted the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. And yet look still at the damage it caused. Over a million fatalities and many trillions of dollars in economic destruction in the US alone. And no not all or even most of that damage was caused by lock downs (thus they almost assuredly increased it). Not to mention bureaucratic incompetence by multiple agencies in particular the CDC and FDA.
But the important point is this is what happened at 1% what if the next virus (and there will be another one) has a 10% fatality rate like SARS 1, or God forbid a 30% fatality rate like MERS.
IMHO, we need to overhaul the CDC and bring them back to where they only focus on infectious diseases again. Keep them focused on this very real risk, and give them the funding to do their job (and make sure they actually follow the science not the politics of the situation). The FDA likewise needs real reform to make sure they are focused on the consequences of inaction as well.
We also need to make sure we have enough spare domestic PPE and testing capacity.
Finally of course it all behooves us to take what personal action we can. Of course not everyone can buy 20 acres and move out into the country like we did. But everyone can make sure they keep emergency preparedness food and water, and PPE on hand.
There will be a next time. I sure wish our “leaders” would use some common sense and prepare. And voters use some common sense and demand it from our “leaders”
"...ventilation, special light, better PPE, better vaccines" won't and don't matter if the people won't comply. And at least so far, they won't.
The most disheartening aspect of the pandemic is watching people turn their nose up at a miraculous vaccine. Until now, science had never developed a vaccine for any coronavirus ever. And the efficacy of the vaccines is astounding, particularly given how quickly they were developed.
The USA's dysfunctional health system somehow managed to make this complex vaccine available everywhere, and for FREE.
But right now, 68% of adults are not up to date on their vaccinations. Masking compliance is poor. I remain skeptical that adoption of UV lights and "better ventilation" will happen even with local regulations, because compliance with existing regulations (not even pandemic ones!) is spotty and enforcement is generally poor.
There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that new viruses are more apt to evolve in what you would call factory farming. They might spread faster in such an environment but they are also easier to contain. On the contrary they are much safer than the alternative farming practices. If you want interspecies mixing of genetic material that results in new viruses or new strains then you have to have intimate contact among different species. Pigs and chickens, say, on the same farm. Just like the good old days.
What proof do I have of this assertion? Just facts of where these events occur, in wet markets and specifically China where monoculture is relatively rare and people have much more intimate contact with the food supply permitting crossover to humans.
The other idea that you support and which frankly frightens me is the idea that gain of function research should only be conducted by Evolution in the wild and bad actors trying to create biological weapons.
The fact that this post could be read and commented on avidly by large numbers of people now whereas had it been written in, say, 2018, it would have been greeted with a few sage nods and then people would move on should tell us something. And that something is the way presentism manipulates our attention.
Are future pandemics a threat? Sure. So are lots of things. If the New Madrid fault erupts again like it did in 1812, not only would the devastation be biblical but it would so direct our attention to earthquake-proofing infrastructure (too late!) as to make our heads spin. If one terrorist managed to bring down an airliner with a MANPADS, we would talk and act about nothing else.
We'll always have diseases new and old afflicting us, but the big ones like COVID and Spanish flu are likely to remain fairly rare, no matter what our presentism biases scream at us. The question is how do we take sensible steps to avert or mitigate threats while we pay requisite attention to all the other low-probability catastrophes that may hit us in the coming decades.
I quite agree. Hence my disdain for those who think we should not be looking for the next biological threat whether in the wild or through gain of function research. Imagine applying that logic to a low risk but potentially catastrophic event like an asteroid strike. No one says that if we stop looking for asteroids that might intercept Earth's orbit then it makes it less likely to happen.
I actually think that this post is a smidge misleading in focusing on bioterrorism. Studying pandemics and teaching public health has convinced me that the major threat most Americans fail to think about is the growth of megacities in sub/tropical waterfront zones in less wealthy countries. (If you are curious about my work, including the hilariously on-point museum exhibit I did in November 2019 on the historical experience of pandemics, check out my website.)
Regardless of whether you think Covid was a lab leak, its emergence in a Wuhan wet market perfectly fits this set of circumstances:
1) Wuhan is a "new" megacity (i.e. more than 10 million residents, explosive growth in the last 50 years), which means that many residents are first- or second-generation city dwellers with deep continuing ties to other places.
2) Like most of the newer megacities, it has a relatively less affluent population, which is one reason--though not the only one--why it has a huge wet market.
3) It is unusual for being inland, but it is still constructed in a historic wetland, on the Yangtze.
4) Wuhan is well-connected to the global market / production system.
I will not go long on the specifics, except to say that this is a more or less perfect set of circumstances for nurturing new infectious disease outbreaks. Some of the factors are probably obvious to everyone who reads this (density, population, etc.), but some you might not be thinking about. Just to name two, wetlands and warmer areas are more conducive to both pathogens and vectors (like mosquitoes), and cities with high percentages of first- and second-generation rural-to-urban migrants experience constant flows in and out because of internal travel (go back to the village to visit family), which means you basically have a much higher flow of humans across different immunological / disease zones.
Bottom line is that I worry a lot less about bioterrorism than about old-school novel infectious disease outbreaks, whether they are species jumpers, mutants of existing pathogens, or lab leaks. And I worry a lot about those. We have lived through a bunch of either actual or potential events already in just my lifetime--HIV, ebola, SARS, MERS, flu, Covid, zika, monkeypox, resurgent resistant strains of TB and gonorrhea--although most of them went unnoticed because they did not end up being a big deal or haven't become a big deal yet (i.e. the last flu pandemic was a relatively mild strain). But the truth is that we are getting hit on the regular. A Covid style event was just a matter of time, and the same is probably true of something worse.
I suspect that bioterrorism is harder than we suppose. Life forms are very complicated. You may think you have engineered the most awesome virus or bacteria in the lab but that doesn't guarantee that dumping it in the reservoir or spraying an aerosol in a crowded train station will lead to vast numbers of people dying.
Of course, even a very limited "success" would be very scary.
It's at https://www.jeffreycwomack.com. The exhibit was called "Going Viral"; you can see our official poster, including the now-hilarious November 2019 launch date, on the aqua colored block on my work page. There is a link within that goes to the tattered remains of the exhibit, but it's not much to see at this point, which makes me sad. But you can also find some stuff from the early pandemic on my blog page.
The tragic story of the exhibit is that it was conceived as a counterpoint / closing piece to the museum's exhibit on the 1918 flu pandemic, which launched that same fall (maybe the same month?). That exhibit, "Spit Spreads Death," was really heavy on digital interaction, with a bunch of touch-screen computer displays that let you do cool stuff like zoom in on particular blocks of Philly to see who died in your home during the flu pandemic. My exhibit was therefore designed as a totally non-electronic display with a heavy physical interaction component, as kind of a counterpoint palate cleanser to all the screens.
It was a three-part setup that basically walked you through historical ideas about infection before winding up in the modern era, with germ theory, and it paired the theories with particular diseases and epidemic events. In each section, we had sensory experiences paired with the images and text to help the participant imagine themselves in an epidemic event, trying to understand that event with the prevalent theories of the time. My favorite was cholera, where we had set up this little area as a mock-up urban alleyway, with sewer covers and windows and the like with smelly sachet bags; the idea was that you could replicate that famous Puck image of the health inspectors and go looking for the miasmatic smells causing the outbreak.
The final section concluded with germ theory, starting with Lister (the museum has one of his carbolic acid sprayers) and going through measles, which as you may remember had caused some outbreaks in low-vax communities in the summer and fall of 2019, including most famously the Disneyland and New York episodes. We did a lot of stuff that I am proud to say held up really well in the pandemic. We had a great section helping patrons see the interesting parallels between the old Plague Doctor costume and the stuff worn by modern medical professionals in high-risk situations like outbreak response (the bunny suit) and in surgical theaters (mask, gloves, eye protection, etc.).
In keeping with my own work in public health, we also had some fun material on hand and respiratory hygiene and vaccination. We put in this great mini-mock-up of a SEPTA bench and a lenticular--one of those things where it shows a different image from different angles--where you could see first a cartoon image of people riding a subway car, then an image of the same scene, but with points of contamination / germ contact highlighted in green (i.e. the air in front of a coughing child). It was a great exhibit, and I think everything held up really well to the actual experience of a pandemic.
Then Covid hit, and when the museum reopened, well, you can guess how excited people were about an exhibit where you walk around imagining yourself in a pandemic and interacting with exhibits that you were supposed to touch and smell. Heavy sigh. It was supposed to run until 2022 or '23, but instead they quietly pulled the whole thing down shortly after the museum reopened. It was a real bummer; we had spent a year and a non-negligible budget on all those interactive displays (building stuff strong enough for patrons to interact without having it break is surprisingly expensive because it has to be really robust down to little details). They left a little website up, which is linked on my site, but it's mostly just a bunch of teaser text.
This sounds amazing! Is there any chance you could persuade the museum to get it back up next year, maybe with an appendix about covid? Or are all the physical objects now gone?
I honestly don't know what happened to them. There was a great Plague Doctor mask mockup that someone walked away with, and I wish that someone had been me. It's probably just in storage.
But what was the population in those periods? Any idea? As far as I know, no city crossed the ten million mark (the modern definition of a "megacity") until the 20th century, and I'm pretty sure that Wuhan crossed it only in the post-WW2 period. But, hey, I'm happy to be wrong about that.
This is what I mean by "new," and it is specifically why I put quotation marks around the word. Wuhan is obviously not a new city, but it has a large population of residents who are relatively new, by which I mean one to two generations deep living in the city. That matters because, as I said, people in the first and second generation are much more likely to still be cycling back and forth to the countryside, because they still have family living out there or similar reasons to return. These internal movements are a significant source of pathogens moving into and out of cities that have experienced recent growth (and by "recent," I mean post-1950).
To give another example, I grew up in Houston, and I was the second generation born there; my dad's parents had moved from rural east Texas to Houston to work in the oil refineries. As a result, they still had family and some land in East Texas. Dad, as a kid, spent every weekend in a little town called Crockett. I, as a kid, spent much less time there, but we still went there 10-20 times a year, in part because Dad's dad spent an increasing amount of time there post-retirement. We did a lot of outdoors activity there. As a result, I was at much higher risk for, say, lyme disease exposure than you would expect for someone living in a white-collar upper-middle-class suburb of Houston. That is much less true of my son, who has been to Crockett maybe three times in his whole life. When he visits his grandparents, he goes to a suburb of Houston, rather than to the property in Crockett.
Does that make sense? It's not the newness of the city. It's the newness of the residents, as described by population growth patterns.
I mean, yes. That's the point. It could definitely have just as easily happened in those megacities or in many of the other, non-China megacities that have grown up in the last 50 years.
What I wrote is that modern megacities are particularly problematic centers for the outbreak of epidemic disease because of common qualities that differentiate them from the smaller cities with which most Americans are accustomed. What, precisely, are you arguing with me about? I get the you misunderstood my usage of the word "new"; is that what is bothering you? I don't think you actually disagree with me that Wuhan did not have ten million residents a hundred years ago. I think you agree that is a relatively novel development because...it is.
Like, precisely what statement from my comment that you think is wrong, and why did you go off on bats, a thing that I did not mention, almost as though...I knew better than that? I'm genuinely curious, because if I'm screwing up something in the public health literature that I teach, I should fix that misunderstanding. But right now I can't figure out what you are getting at, which leads me to believe that there's a misunderstanding.
I mean, honestly I was confused about the whole thing. It's the end of the quarter and I'm pulling some late nights right now on account of working three jobs this summer (long story, bad choice, will endeavor not to repeat), so I'm probably just being brain-fogged. It's why I wrote that last paragraph.
What I’m taking away from Covid and now monkeypox is that once something starts spreading, it’s too late: how far it goes is a question of transmissibility and luck. Learning about early US cases in February and March 2020, or situations like that cruise ship where everyone was infected and then just allowed to walk, it seemed incredibly clear that the horse was out of the barn and yet there was no real acknowledgment that what we could see was only the tip of the iceberg and the official response was hopelessly behind. That has been echoed since in policies that, for example, assume everyone will wear masks but ignore how many people in a given public space won’t have their noses covered. The speed with which the vaccine was developed is amazing and encouraging, but as far as the day to day disease management stuff, especially where public participation is necessary, we seem to be at the mercy of the virulence of whatever comes along.
Thanks Matt. I wish more people cared about this. I don't understand how we are just sitting around like assholes with our thumbs up our asses arguing about tax police and transgender people playing kids games after a not too deadly pandemic just killed a million Americans. It's like 9/11 just happened and no one wants to do anything to stop future attacks. Where is our COVID commission?
> I now think it’s become a weird China policy hobbyhorse or grist for the culture war mills
It has, but primarily because the anti-lab leak side consciously prioritized questionable social justice-based arguments over evidence and reason, including high-level officials.
The weirdest thing about this pandemic was how it started out with a ton of scientists saying that respiratory diseases for sure only could spread through large droplets on flat surfaces so we should all wash our hands and every touchable surface there was. But it turned out they had never done research since like the 1930s about how respiratory diseases spread, and that research was wrong. Small, airborne particles was the issue. So the weirdest thing to me was that we had the basic science completely wrong. What other basic science questions about diseases do we have completely wrong? We should spend money and resources to get those basics right so when a new disease happens, we can quickly determine what we should do (ventilate and filter air, wear masks, and don't crowd in small spaces) and not do (wipe crap off door knobs in my house or quarantine amazon boxes for 3 weeks).
A very good article/ essay. A few things come to mind. New zoonoses are of course a real concern. Is there reason to think that virulence in birds correlates with virulence in humans?
Antibiotic resistance is a real problem, yet your 1984 quote overstates the degree. Deaths from now treatable infections remain a fraction of what they were pre-antibiotics.
Policies implemented during COVID-19 led to vastly different reactions from experts and individuals alike, as well as serious loss of trust in our FDA and CDC. These issues would have to be remedied for any effective response could be undertaken. Even effective measures like far UV would have only partial uptake.
"None of this — ventilation, special light, better PPE, better vaccines — is exactly existing science and technology. But it’s close, visibly within grasp ...."
We could end factory farming quickly. We can boycott it now.
The Fermi Paradox is making more and more sense every year.
I also read Laurie Garrett’s book, and it stuck with me. I used to be more terrified of Ebola (which, to be fair, IS a terrifying disease), but have since realized that airborne respiratory viruses are more dangerous to large numbers of people.
Excellent article on pandemic preparedness. I think on the whole it seems we’ve learned the wrong lessons from the very mild pandemic that was COVID.
COVID was a pretty mild pandemic with about a 1% fatality rate that mainly targeted the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. And yet look still at the damage it caused. Over a million fatalities and many trillions of dollars in economic destruction in the US alone. And no not all or even most of that damage was caused by lock downs (thus they almost assuredly increased it). Not to mention bureaucratic incompetence by multiple agencies in particular the CDC and FDA.
But the important point is this is what happened at 1% what if the next virus (and there will be another one) has a 10% fatality rate like SARS 1, or God forbid a 30% fatality rate like MERS.
IMHO, we need to overhaul the CDC and bring them back to where they only focus on infectious diseases again. Keep them focused on this very real risk, and give them the funding to do their job (and make sure they actually follow the science not the politics of the situation). The FDA likewise needs real reform to make sure they are focused on the consequences of inaction as well.
We also need to make sure we have enough spare domestic PPE and testing capacity.
Finally of course it all behooves us to take what personal action we can. Of course not everyone can buy 20 acres and move out into the country like we did. But everyone can make sure they keep emergency preparedness food and water, and PPE on hand.
There will be a next time. I sure wish our “leaders” would use some common sense and prepare. And voters use some common sense and demand it from our “leaders”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-should-expect-more-and-worse-pandemics?utm_source=email
"...ventilation, special light, better PPE, better vaccines" won't and don't matter if the people won't comply. And at least so far, they won't.
The most disheartening aspect of the pandemic is watching people turn their nose up at a miraculous vaccine. Until now, science had never developed a vaccine for any coronavirus ever. And the efficacy of the vaccines is astounding, particularly given how quickly they were developed.
The USA's dysfunctional health system somehow managed to make this complex vaccine available everywhere, and for FREE.
But right now, 68% of adults are not up to date on their vaccinations. Masking compliance is poor. I remain skeptical that adoption of UV lights and "better ventilation" will happen even with local regulations, because compliance with existing regulations (not even pandemic ones!) is spotty and enforcement is generally poor.
There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that new viruses are more apt to evolve in what you would call factory farming. They might spread faster in such an environment but they are also easier to contain. On the contrary they are much safer than the alternative farming practices. If you want interspecies mixing of genetic material that results in new viruses or new strains then you have to have intimate contact among different species. Pigs and chickens, say, on the same farm. Just like the good old days.
What proof do I have of this assertion? Just facts of where these events occur, in wet markets and specifically China where monoculture is relatively rare and people have much more intimate contact with the food supply permitting crossover to humans.
The other idea that you support and which frankly frightens me is the idea that gain of function research should only be conducted by Evolution in the wild and bad actors trying to create biological weapons.
The fact that this post could be read and commented on avidly by large numbers of people now whereas had it been written in, say, 2018, it would have been greeted with a few sage nods and then people would move on should tell us something. And that something is the way presentism manipulates our attention.
Are future pandemics a threat? Sure. So are lots of things. If the New Madrid fault erupts again like it did in 1812, not only would the devastation be biblical but it would so direct our attention to earthquake-proofing infrastructure (too late!) as to make our heads spin. If one terrorist managed to bring down an airliner with a MANPADS, we would talk and act about nothing else.
We'll always have diseases new and old afflicting us, but the big ones like COVID and Spanish flu are likely to remain fairly rare, no matter what our presentism biases scream at us. The question is how do we take sensible steps to avert or mitigate threats while we pay requisite attention to all the other low-probability catastrophes that may hit us in the coming decades.
I quite agree. Hence my disdain for those who think we should not be looking for the next biological threat whether in the wild or through gain of function research. Imagine applying that logic to a low risk but potentially catastrophic event like an asteroid strike. No one says that if we stop looking for asteroids that might intercept Earth's orbit then it makes it less likely to happen.
I actually think that this post is a smidge misleading in focusing on bioterrorism. Studying pandemics and teaching public health has convinced me that the major threat most Americans fail to think about is the growth of megacities in sub/tropical waterfront zones in less wealthy countries. (If you are curious about my work, including the hilariously on-point museum exhibit I did in November 2019 on the historical experience of pandemics, check out my website.)
Regardless of whether you think Covid was a lab leak, its emergence in a Wuhan wet market perfectly fits this set of circumstances:
1) Wuhan is a "new" megacity (i.e. more than 10 million residents, explosive growth in the last 50 years), which means that many residents are first- or second-generation city dwellers with deep continuing ties to other places.
2) Like most of the newer megacities, it has a relatively less affluent population, which is one reason--though not the only one--why it has a huge wet market.
3) It is unusual for being inland, but it is still constructed in a historic wetland, on the Yangtze.
4) Wuhan is well-connected to the global market / production system.
I will not go long on the specifics, except to say that this is a more or less perfect set of circumstances for nurturing new infectious disease outbreaks. Some of the factors are probably obvious to everyone who reads this (density, population, etc.), but some you might not be thinking about. Just to name two, wetlands and warmer areas are more conducive to both pathogens and vectors (like mosquitoes), and cities with high percentages of first- and second-generation rural-to-urban migrants experience constant flows in and out because of internal travel (go back to the village to visit family), which means you basically have a much higher flow of humans across different immunological / disease zones.
Bottom line is that I worry a lot less about bioterrorism than about old-school novel infectious disease outbreaks, whether they are species jumpers, mutants of existing pathogens, or lab leaks. And I worry a lot about those. We have lived through a bunch of either actual or potential events already in just my lifetime--HIV, ebola, SARS, MERS, flu, Covid, zika, monkeypox, resurgent resistant strains of TB and gonorrhea--although most of them went unnoticed because they did not end up being a big deal or haven't become a big deal yet (i.e. the last flu pandemic was a relatively mild strain). But the truth is that we are getting hit on the regular. A Covid style event was just a matter of time, and the same is probably true of something worse.
I suspect that bioterrorism is harder than we suppose. Life forms are very complicated. You may think you have engineered the most awesome virus or bacteria in the lab but that doesn't guarantee that dumping it in the reservoir or spraying an aerosol in a crowded train station will lead to vast numbers of people dying.
Of course, even a very limited "success" would be very scary.
Do you have a link to your website?
It's at https://www.jeffreycwomack.com. The exhibit was called "Going Viral"; you can see our official poster, including the now-hilarious November 2019 launch date, on the aqua colored block on my work page. There is a link within that goes to the tattered remains of the exhibit, but it's not much to see at this point, which makes me sad. But you can also find some stuff from the early pandemic on my blog page.
The tragic story of the exhibit is that it was conceived as a counterpoint / closing piece to the museum's exhibit on the 1918 flu pandemic, which launched that same fall (maybe the same month?). That exhibit, "Spit Spreads Death," was really heavy on digital interaction, with a bunch of touch-screen computer displays that let you do cool stuff like zoom in on particular blocks of Philly to see who died in your home during the flu pandemic. My exhibit was therefore designed as a totally non-electronic display with a heavy physical interaction component, as kind of a counterpoint palate cleanser to all the screens.
It was a three-part setup that basically walked you through historical ideas about infection before winding up in the modern era, with germ theory, and it paired the theories with particular diseases and epidemic events. In each section, we had sensory experiences paired with the images and text to help the participant imagine themselves in an epidemic event, trying to understand that event with the prevalent theories of the time. My favorite was cholera, where we had set up this little area as a mock-up urban alleyway, with sewer covers and windows and the like with smelly sachet bags; the idea was that you could replicate that famous Puck image of the health inspectors and go looking for the miasmatic smells causing the outbreak.
The final section concluded with germ theory, starting with Lister (the museum has one of his carbolic acid sprayers) and going through measles, which as you may remember had caused some outbreaks in low-vax communities in the summer and fall of 2019, including most famously the Disneyland and New York episodes. We did a lot of stuff that I am proud to say held up really well in the pandemic. We had a great section helping patrons see the interesting parallels between the old Plague Doctor costume and the stuff worn by modern medical professionals in high-risk situations like outbreak response (the bunny suit) and in surgical theaters (mask, gloves, eye protection, etc.).
In keeping with my own work in public health, we also had some fun material on hand and respiratory hygiene and vaccination. We put in this great mini-mock-up of a SEPTA bench and a lenticular--one of those things where it shows a different image from different angles--where you could see first a cartoon image of people riding a subway car, then an image of the same scene, but with points of contamination / germ contact highlighted in green (i.e. the air in front of a coughing child). It was a great exhibit, and I think everything held up really well to the actual experience of a pandemic.
Then Covid hit, and when the museum reopened, well, you can guess how excited people were about an exhibit where you walk around imagining yourself in a pandemic and interacting with exhibits that you were supposed to touch and smell. Heavy sigh. It was supposed to run until 2022 or '23, but instead they quietly pulled the whole thing down shortly after the museum reopened. It was a real bummer; we had spent a year and a non-negligible budget on all those interactive displays (building stuff strong enough for patrons to interact without having it break is surprisingly expensive because it has to be really robust down to little details). They left a little website up, which is linked on my site, but it's mostly just a bunch of teaser text.
This sounds amazing! Is there any chance you could persuade the museum to get it back up next year, maybe with an appendix about covid? Or are all the physical objects now gone?
I honestly don't know what happened to them. There was a great Plague Doctor mask mockup that someone walked away with, and I wish that someone had been me. It's probably just in storage.
But what was the population in those periods? Any idea? As far as I know, no city crossed the ten million mark (the modern definition of a "megacity") until the 20th century, and I'm pretty sure that Wuhan crossed it only in the post-WW2 period. But, hey, I'm happy to be wrong about that.
This is what I mean by "new," and it is specifically why I put quotation marks around the word. Wuhan is obviously not a new city, but it has a large population of residents who are relatively new, by which I mean one to two generations deep living in the city. That matters because, as I said, people in the first and second generation are much more likely to still be cycling back and forth to the countryside, because they still have family living out there or similar reasons to return. These internal movements are a significant source of pathogens moving into and out of cities that have experienced recent growth (and by "recent," I mean post-1950).
To give another example, I grew up in Houston, and I was the second generation born there; my dad's parents had moved from rural east Texas to Houston to work in the oil refineries. As a result, they still had family and some land in East Texas. Dad, as a kid, spent every weekend in a little town called Crockett. I, as a kid, spent much less time there, but we still went there 10-20 times a year, in part because Dad's dad spent an increasing amount of time there post-retirement. We did a lot of outdoors activity there. As a result, I was at much higher risk for, say, lyme disease exposure than you would expect for someone living in a white-collar upper-middle-class suburb of Houston. That is much less true of my son, who has been to Crockett maybe three times in his whole life. When he visits his grandparents, he goes to a suburb of Houston, rather than to the property in Crockett.
Does that make sense? It's not the newness of the city. It's the newness of the residents, as described by population growth patterns.
I mean, yes. That's the point. It could definitely have just as easily happened in those megacities or in many of the other, non-China megacities that have grown up in the last 50 years.
What I wrote is that modern megacities are particularly problematic centers for the outbreak of epidemic disease because of common qualities that differentiate them from the smaller cities with which most Americans are accustomed. What, precisely, are you arguing with me about? I get the you misunderstood my usage of the word "new"; is that what is bothering you? I don't think you actually disagree with me that Wuhan did not have ten million residents a hundred years ago. I think you agree that is a relatively novel development because...it is.
Like, precisely what statement from my comment that you think is wrong, and why did you go off on bats, a thing that I did not mention, almost as though...I knew better than that? I'm genuinely curious, because if I'm screwing up something in the public health literature that I teach, I should fix that misunderstanding. But right now I can't figure out what you are getting at, which leads me to believe that there's a misunderstanding.
I mean, honestly I was confused about the whole thing. It's the end of the quarter and I'm pulling some late nights right now on account of working three jobs this summer (long story, bad choice, will endeavor not to repeat), so I'm probably just being brain-fogged. It's why I wrote that last paragraph.
I think the chuds have killed public health for the foreseeable future
No worries says the “EA” community. It won’t kill all of us :)
More people than need to be are weirdly obsessed with the lab leak hypothesis.
Here's the thing: both lab leaks and zoonotic stuff needs addressed urgently and that doesn't change based upon whether COVID came from a lab or not.
What I’m taking away from Covid and now monkeypox is that once something starts spreading, it’s too late: how far it goes is a question of transmissibility and luck. Learning about early US cases in February and March 2020, or situations like that cruise ship where everyone was infected and then just allowed to walk, it seemed incredibly clear that the horse was out of the barn and yet there was no real acknowledgment that what we could see was only the tip of the iceberg and the official response was hopelessly behind. That has been echoed since in policies that, for example, assume everyone will wear masks but ignore how many people in a given public space won’t have their noses covered. The speed with which the vaccine was developed is amazing and encouraging, but as far as the day to day disease management stuff, especially where public participation is necessary, we seem to be at the mercy of the virulence of whatever comes along.