I'm just fricken tired of all the passionate outrage machines…

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Now for something completely different, looking forward:

[_Robert_Participant]

Someone with a brain, hated by millions of course. According to the 2022 Personal Capital Wealth and Wellness Index, only 53% of Americans are in a position to handle an unforeseen $500 expense. We are not a people who are concerned with what might happen. Fires are a daily occurrence in every decent sized town. Pandemics used to be every 50/100 years, but with cheaper air travel and more people, that frequency has probably gone up.

I hope the plan gets implemented…..

[AutumnParticipant]

Sounds like a whole lot o’ socialism to me. ò_O

This is another one of those areas where psychological barriers are going to exceed funding and logistical barriers. I feel like there needs to be another tier on the cost breakdown just looking at education. I think there were several nations that at one point had pandemic preparations in place—albeit, nothing of sort mentioned in that presentation—, but then let it all fall by the wayside.

And the sad thing is, the more effective a program like this is, the less people will want to support it because it will create the impression that pandemics just aren’t a big deal. Even in the midst of this pandemic with numbers being what they were, how many people more than a year on were still characterizing it as a flu despite data showing it was far more severe?

That said, if such a program were to get off the ground, now would be the time. I feel like this is, politically, the point in time where such an idea will garner the most public support. In ten years we will all be looking back thinking, ‘Was it really that bad?’

[PopeBeanieModerator]

I just read about research on likely climate change effects on animal species migrations that will increase inter-species spread of diseases, especially in places like south-east Asia and tropical Africa. I didn’t know this has already been proposed for years. One technical term for intra-species spread of disease is “spillover”.

Southeast Asia will also be especially spillover-prone because it’s home to a wide range of bats. Flight gives bats flexibility, allowing them to react to changing climates more quickly than other mammals, and to carry their viruses farther. And bats in Southeast Asia are highly diverse, and tend to have small ranges that don’t overlap. “You shake that like a snowglobe and you get a lot of first encounters,” Carlson said.

The article was published today in The Atlantic:

How Climate Change Impacts Pandemics

Last sentence:

Today, their paper has been published, the world will know, and Carlson will testify before Congress about the need to prepare for spillovers. “And then,” he told me, “we’ll start the project of fixing it.”

It does also seem to me to be a Bill Gates kind of project that’s unlikely, especially in the coming more-Republican climate, unless he can put a lot more of his own money into it. In any case, I’d much rather pin my hopes on this than spend any more time or energy responding endlessly to the doom and gloom of rampant conspiracy theories, outrage machines and “just blame the other political tribe for screwing America up”.

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