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.
Scientists first reported the apparent disappearance of Yamagata viruses in 2021. 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.
Yup, basically. Everyone went inside, stayed inside, wore masks and got their vaccines. That was enough to kill a flu variant.
It would be wonderful if we could get staying home when you're sick, wearing a mask if you might be sick and getting your vaccines to become the norm.
We should do a winter lockdown every decade, just to keep it clean.
But won't someone think of the shareholders!?!?
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.
We cooperated!?
For like one month and then the politics set in.
To an extent, yeah. There was co-operation like we've never seen before. Even if only 40% of people wore masks and stated home, that's an enormous feat of cooperation. But there was so much controversy around it, and the results were so unclear, that I'm 100% sure it will never happen again.
Oh, we will.
There was much the same type of kurfuffle with the flu in the early 1900s, down to crazed anti mask people.
Why do you think that? We've seen that level of cooperation at several points in human history.
Do you have examples? The only other I can think is the race to fix the ozone hole.
Smallpox eradication comes to mind, same with the ongoing efforts to eradicate Polio (we very well may see it by the end of the decade)
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).
I think we been doing that a lot. I think the main point your saying is a quick reaction. For that to happen it seems the problem needs to be upfront you get to see the issue right away. Has an obvious solution with little to no downside. Needs to be global, multiple major countries affected especially the developed ones. It hurts every strata, the poor, the middle and the rich class most important. It just happened that COVID did just that. We manage to get a vaccine in 1 year that's pretty amazing. Yet that is also why Ebola still only has 1 vaccine which was only recently approved in 2022. Somewhat those people who were carriers of the virus who went out of country kinda made it possible for us to have this vaccines for COVID.
“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!
An extinction even we can be proud of!
Don't forget smallpox! (Polio still has pockets where it lives, but no longer a threat to general world population)
Don't forget smallpox!
And rinderpest in cows. Hope we can stamp out Polio and Guinea Worm soon!
One less, 120 to go.
Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.
Hail Fludra!
I wonder what other viruses we could eliminate if we had a seasonal quarantine.
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