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If there was another possible pandemic in the future would the world react differently?

jelly

jelly

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
33,841
So considering what we are still living through unfortunately if another one looked like it was in the early stages somewhere, how do you think the world would react next time? Would the economy be more important, politics getting the way, ignorance, leaving things too late and history repeats?

Kinda curious what sort of safe guards they have in place after Covid for such scenarios, will they be monitoring things more closely, quick response actions.
 
fick

fick

Alt-Account
Banned
Nov 24, 2018
2,261
lol, you'll have dumb fucks saying, "They said the last one was bad but I didn't die"
 
LewieP

LewieP

Member
Oct 26, 2017
18,097
Just look at how much better the regions that went through SARS have handled this to get your answer, I reckon.
 
Wrexis

Wrexis

Member
Nov 4, 2017
21,247
Unless the death rate was something like 1 in 5 instead of 1 in 100 people would react the same way.
 
Mr Coopz

Mr Coopz

Member
Jul 21, 2019
494
Tbh I'm more concerned about how the world reacts when climate change truly hits the fan.
 
El Bombastico

El Bombastico

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
36,047
That depends entirely on:

1.) How far in the future it is

2.) Whether or not governments have regulated social media to keep them from allowing conspiracy/fake news spouting bullshit by then.
 
Redcrayon

Redcrayon

Patient hunter
On Break
Oct 27, 2017
12,713
UK
LewieP said:
Just look at how much better the regions that went through SARS have handled this to get your answer, I reckon.
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This. There's a big difference in the way governments during a future pandemic of the same scale will handle it (depending on the country), and how much health authorities have learned in terms of strategy, equipment and administration etc, even if plenty of individuals will still treat it with predictably irresponsible indifference.
 
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Kino

Kino

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,322
Possibly. It will help if the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth doesn't proudly and publicly dismiss the pandemic as a hoax.
 
Tochtli79

Tochtli79

Member
Jun 27, 2019
5,777
Mexico City
I don't think so. I don't have any faith in people after the stupidity on display for a year now. But I'll definitely be adding "how would this candidate act in a pandemic" to my list of criteria whenever I vote for the rest of my life. Which even then, tbh, isn't a guarantee they'll actually react how you'd expect them to. And climate change is the next big one so... not optimistic.
 
Prophet Steve

Prophet Steve

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,177
Judging by how the second wave went, no, not at all. Countries got their cases to a very low point and still were completely unable to control it.

EDIT: Okay that's a knee-jerk reaction. They would handle it a bit better. I would not have a lot of faith they would handle it well though,
 

charmeleon

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,380
Some countries will probably do even better like South Korea, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia etc. Unless the death rate is extremely high I bet most of the world will do worse though, due to political/economic considerations.
 

Deleted member 16516

User requested account closure
Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,427
Certain countries would. See the SARS epidemic and how the countries affected by that outbreak learned valuable lessons and put those into practice for this pandemic.
 
Crimson-Death

Crimson-Death

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,516
Purgatory
Nah, half the population are dirty imbeciles too stupid to follow the extremely simple directive of wearing a fucking face mask to a grocery store.
And some of them actually went to college and graduated and are professionals.
And they are delusional fuckwits who believe in the fantasy of conspiracy theories.
And they have the inhuman capacity for withstanding lethal cognitive dissonance as their hypocritical actions amplify the unholy harmony of their beliefs.
And they keep electing morons to governing positions in many countries, so surely politics will get in the way again.
 
Senator Toadstool

Senator Toadstool

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
16,651
I think we'll do better earlier especially since it'll have happened in our lifetime. the biggest failure is we've never had to deal with this in most peoples lifetime.

BasilZero said:
Hmmm I dont know.....maybe we should look into the past.....

1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus) | Pandemic Influenza (Flu) | CDC

Everything you need to know about the flu illness, including symptoms, treatment and prevention.
www.cdc.gov www.cdc.gov


Oh.

Humanity will never learn.
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We're doing a lot better than the 1918 pandemic
 
lenovox1

lenovox1

Member
Oct 26, 2017
8,995
jelly said:
So considering what we are still living through unfortunately if another one looked like it was in the early stages somewhere, how do you think the world would react next time? Would the economy be more important, politics getting the way, ignorance, leaving things too late and history repeats?

Kinda curious what sort of safe guards they have in place after Covid for such scenarios, will they be monitoring things more closely, quick response actions.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The way the entire globe handled the pandemic this time was due to one sigular, solitary global leader: Donald J. Trump.

If this had happened in any other time post 1960, this entire thing would have been handled extremely differently.
 
Motorcycle Dork

Motorcycle Dork

Member
Jun 24, 2019
6,373
LewieP said:
Just look at how much better the regions that went through SARS have handled this to get your answer, I reckon.
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More to do with political response than disease experience.

Initially, Government in China refused to believe there was a SARS-like outbreak and arrested the doctor that informed them.

Deaths: 4636~~

Taiwan. Politically stable, effective leadership, has an efficient healthcare system and promotes opensource movement.

Deaths: 7
 
BasilZero

BasilZero

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
36,343
Omni
Senator Toadstool said:
I think we'll do better earlier especially since it'll have happened in our lifetime. the biggest failure is we've never had to deal with this in most peoples lifetime.


We're doing a lot better than the 1918 pandemic
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We're doing better for sure but people are being stupid.

I've seen so many people wearing masks but not covering their mouths, noses or even both.

People saying oh its not that serious yet those same people caused an entire department of people to go into quarantine just the other day thus costing productivity just because they wanted to do a meeting of 50+ people.

I've seen one person at work literally cut holes for his mouth and nose...like you're a grown person and yet stupid enough to do something like that lol.
 

Deleted member 49482

User requested account closure
Banned
Nov 8, 2018
3,302
The "world," broadly speaking? I'd say yes, depending on how far into the future the pandemic is. Many people and governments have learned a lot regarding how to react to and mitigate against a future virus.

The U.S., specifically? I'm not so sure. With a competent federal government in place, I think they would react very differently. However, there was enough political fuckery, conspiracy theories, and pushback against science and reasonable responses, at state/local political levels and among large portions of the general populace, that I wonder if that would strongly offset any improvements in our federal government response.

It's scary to think bad things would have been if just a couple virus variables, namely the infection rate and/or the death rate, were tweaked for the worse this time around. Not that things haven't been bad, but just imagine a virus that is merely 1.5 times more infectious with a 2.5% death rate instead of the currently reported ~1.5%. We likely would've had 100% capacity at many hospitals under that scenario.
 

Telamon

Banned
May 25, 2020
394
Increased pandemic frequency is basically inevitable in the world we've built. And as the world's population increases and climate change displaces millions of us, along with animals with which we rarely used to come in contact, our world will only become more crowded and ripe for the next big one.

To be honest, I'm kind of expecting another in like 20 years time. I hope not, but I'm sure as fuck gonna enjoy the time between this one and the next as best I can.

As for how the world will do next time...better, if it's similar to Covid-19. If it's got Covid's ease of infection and asymptomatic period, but Ebola's death rate? Ermmm...
 
BizzyBum

BizzyBum

Member
Oct 26, 2017
9,151
New York
Mr Coopz said:
Tbh I'm more concerned about how the world reacts when climate change truly hits the fan.
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It's selfish thinking but I am going to be glad I'm dead before shit really hits the fan with that.

We're talking mass immigrations and inevitably wars fought over basic resources we take for granted currently. It's going to be a hellscape.
 
Redcrayon

Redcrayon

Patient hunter
On Break
Oct 27, 2017
12,713
UK
lenovox1 said:
The way the entire globe handled the pandemic this time was due to one sigular, solitary global leader: Donald J. Trump.

If this had happened in any other time post 1960, this entire thing would have been handled extremely differently.
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Eh, I can quite happily lay blame for poor strategy here at the feet of my country's own government without needing to assign it to Trump's ludicrous treatment of it as a conspiracy theory in the US. Trump doing fuck-all initially doesn't mean that other countries weren't attempting to do something (to varied levels of success) and that everyone just blindly followed the US lead, that just wasn't the case. Plenty of countries saw that as the madness that it was even as we fucked up a more-competent-but-still-deeply-flawed response.
 
lenovox1

lenovox1

Member
Oct 26, 2017
8,995
Redcrayon said:
Eh, I can quite happily lay blame for poor strategy here at the feet of my country's own government without needing to assign it to Trump's ludicrous treatment of it as a conspiracy theory in the US. Trump doing fuck-all initially doesn't mean that other countries weren't attempting to do something (to varied levels of success) and that everyone just blindly followed the US lead, that just wasn't the case. Plenty of countries saw that as the madness that it was even as we fucked up a more-competent-but-still-deeply-flawed response.
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There's an interconnectedness there when we're speaking about the global scale of the response. A stronger American response would have incorporated a stronger global response from America, and it would have included cooperation with WHO.
 
NotVeryFriendly

NotVeryFriendly

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,669
This depends entirely on the nature of the future disease.

One of the worst (if not the worst) epidemics in recent history is on-going to this day having killed 33 million people over the last 40 years, yet because of the nature of transmission and because of who was most vulnerable to the disease, it was, for over a decade, largely ignored by governments and failed to attract any serious global response with limited effort to control its initial spread.

While I could see a quicker and stricter/more-prolonged response in some countries to a future COVID-like disease (particularly with a higher mortality rate), I'm unconvinced that all pandemics would receive that response and even for a COVID-like disease suspect that, most likely, there would be little difference in the response.
 
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